osenberg on Jun 19, 2012 at 11:37 am
As someone who writes about popular culture, I have to shake my head and laugh rather than vigorously bashing it into my desk. Such is the case with Thomas Delatte’s “100 Hottest Olympians” post for Bleacher Report, a piece so sexist, so insulting, so foolishly written, and that reflects so poorly on the writer that it’s astonishing that someone thought it passed muster. The concept is simple: help heterosexual dudes spot attractive women at the Olympic games (God forbid women admire the bodies of any competitors), and remind them that the important thing isn’t that these women have trained their entire lives to prove that they’re preeminent in their fields, but they’re available to be ogled by viewers at home. Along the way, Delatte reveals that he doesn’t know much about a lot of Olympic sports, but that he’s a gold medal contender in the field of condescending grossness. What follows are the fifteen (out of one hundred profiles) most astonishingly awful things Delatte has to say about female Olympians from around the world, in no particular order:
1. “Maja Wloszczowska won a silver in the women’s cross-country back in 2008 and is back for gold. As long as she wears those sexy bike tights, I don’t mind her returning every four years.”: Because she’s there for you, not for her, or for her country or anything like that.
2. “It is an Olympic year and that means we get to meet all kinds of new hotties like Stacey.”: Wait, you mean this isn’t an international effort to promote peace and unity? It’s a Maxim fan convention? Thanks for clarifying it!
3. “If the soccer thing doesn’t work out—and we already know it will, but if it doesn’t—she can just become a WAG. She is dating Jrue Holiday.”: Here that, fellow working women? Marriage is the exact equivalent of obtaining your own professional goals!