Selling sports or raunch culture?

In the sporting context, "raunch culture" is when women athletes buy into the idea that it's somehow empowering to display their naked bodies for men's magazines. These great athletes put themselves before the photographers' lens in positions both seductive and prone. They claim that they are not only promoting their sport, but also proving to the world that their attractiveness and (straight) sexuality is not to be questioned.

After posing for their country's edition of Playboy, five players were kicked off the German under-20 World Cup team. Player Kristina Gessat made plain her motivation, saying, "With these photos, we want to disprove the cliché that all female footballers are butch."

As the Huffington Post, which promotes raunch culture across their supposedly progressive site wrote, "Whether or not there's any backlash over these photos remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure: they definitely helped spread the word on the Women's World Cup." Maxim couldn't have written it any better. (Full disclosure: I used to write at the Huffington Post but no longer work on Arianna's farm.)

Then three members of the French team also posed topless under the headline: "Is this how we should show up before you come to our games?" They said they did it "to generate some discussion." This isn't "empowerment." It's commerce. Every scrap of academic research shows that conditioning viewers to see women athletes as sex symbols comes at the expense of interest in the games themselves. As Mary Jo Kane of the University of Minnesota's Tucker Center says, "For a female athlete, stripping down might sell magazines, but it won't sell your sport."

http://socialistworker.org/2011/07/21/selling-sports-or-raunch-culture
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with the olympics coming to us, this really bothers me. i lived my sport. was ---- that close to making the olympics. 4-5 hours of practice time a day, for years. the competiveness of the sport was so important in my life.

two olympics ago (i love watching athletes excel and enjoy watching most all competitions) i saw a huge, in your face shift. the young women began providing the olympic media sexualized shots of them when having their story told in the personal story time before competing. the olympics where no longer about a woman excelling in her sport and became a time for the athlete to strip down, pose and be declared hot.

wtf happened? this was an area where girls/women accomplished with what they DO. not how they look. over the last two olympics i have gotten so disgusted with taking this accomplishment away (yes the gals do it readily, their should be a grown up to say no) from our gals, i dont watch it anymore.