It’s interesting to see these attitudes go in cycles.
In the 70s this was seen as sexual freedom and it was conservative religious movements which were aghast at women flaunting their sexuality. And today women are adopting similar but not the same position as the conservatives of yore. Covering themselves to avoid the sexualization that those conservatives of yore warned about.
Now, to be sure, they are not coming from the same place, but they are arriving at similar expressions.
In any case I agree with them. Rate them on gymnastics rather than sexiness.
I think it's important to note that some of these sports organizations are _requiring_ specific uniforms for women that are far more revealing and sexualized than that for men.
This may be also driven by more people (in this case men) watching when women athletes wear more revealing stuff? It would be strange if event organizers did something that hurt their bottomline.
they should understand that all sports competition has an element of showmanship and display - after all, the viewers make the sport possible.
Sports competition isnt something with intrinsic value that can exist in a vacuum. If the audience desires certain types of show, they get it, or the competition makes no money and cannot continue.
> If the audience desires certain types of show, they get it, or the competition makes no money and cannot continue.
If the athletes don't turn up, the competition makes no money and cannot continue. This goes both ways. The "element of showmanship" taking precedence over the sport shouldn't be tolerated, and the pushback is well within their rights.
> Sports competition isnt something with intrinsic value that can exist in a vacuum. If the audience desires certain types of show, they get it, or the competition makes no money and cannot continue.
That's exactly what is wrong with capitalism: somehow money-making is at the forefront of the concerns of every human activity, to the point that athletes may not be able to choose their own clothing.
They can wear whatever they want....when they "compete" in their backyard, for no salary, with no one watching. But when businesses foot the bill for their activities, and for the expensive infrastructure required to produce and broadcast these events to a global audience, then they can wear what generates revenue, or get another job.
I'm sorry... you seem to be implying that the only thing generating revenue in womens' gymnastics is the sexualizing of the athletes. That's obviously not the case, so maybe you can clarify your argument?
Is it the only thing? No. Does sexualization have an outsized influence? I suspect so. If you have an alternative explanation, please put forth your hypothesis.
Notice that almost all of the women are figure skaters, gymnasts, or horseback riders (not a very sexualized sport, probably some interesting effects of family wealth needed to even train for it). Why are there no female power lifters raking in millions after winning a medal? I'm singling out power lifting as a sport where the women are conservatively dressed and the events are not particularly flattering to the female form.
Ideally we would have access to per-event viewership data going back decades as a proxy for Olympic event popularity, ticket revenue, and advertising revenue. I could only find this article with some good graphs of overall income by source: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-g...
The bulk of which is TV. What glues eyeballs to the TV screen?
We can compare viewership of 2 simple YouTube searches as a proxy:
"sexiest female pole vaulters": top5 vids alone are >50M views total
"sexiest female powerlifters": top10 vids are <10M views total
Interestingly, the #6 result for "sexiest female Olympic gymnasts" is titled: "28 Olympians on How to get laid in the Olympic village" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UD0w13IdQ
Even Cosmopolitan, that bastion of the misogynistic male gaze (sarc), knows what people wanna see about the Olympics.
For the Olympics, this impression is incorrect. It's at least as much a show as an athletics competition.
Billions of dollars are on the line in the Olympics, and that's what it's about, from countries competing with billion-dollar incentives, to news networks, to bribes.
Any capitalist enterprise is driven to make money.
which is a very important point. Modesty as an expression of personal choice is not the same as modesty enforced by a culture (created explicitly not by the people it covered up, and also expressing arguably a different thing, namely chastity).
Uh yeah, that's sort of a BIG DIFFERENCE to hand-wave away.
OP might as well have said "it's interesting how China's and UK's fertility rate is almost the same" while ignoring how each country got to that level...
There's a difference between having the option to wear something less covering (be it to show off, for its' functionalities or whatever) versus being forced wear something that is skimpy by design.
Sex sells. The Olympics is fundamentally about eyeballs.
Is it okay to have strip clubs? Is it okay to hire scantily-clad women for ads? In movies? Where are the lines?
I'm not sure where we want the lines, but:
* I don't like the lines drawn based on one-off issues going viral. I'd like a consistent set of lines.
* I feel like it's unreasonable to expect organizations to not follow the Smith's free hand of capitalism. "Good" organizations are out-competed by "bad" ones.
Is this a place where we might have a serious discussion about a new regulatory regime, or otherwise changing market forces and incentive structures?
I feel like that might be a slower, but more comprehensive, more equitable, and more sustainable way of landing on fair ground.
- More comprehensive: Reworking structures effects everyone, and not just Olympics. I'm at least as concerned about thousands of "Hooters girls" as about elite actresses and athletes.
- More equitable: Good businesses don't get punished. Bad ones don't get rewarded.
- More sustainable: Market forces should push for the behavior we want. Otherwise, it's like fighting the ocean.
Agreed. The similarity I see between these two (which is what I think at least partially mc32 was getting at) is freedom of choice. Both are/were fighting for their freedom to choose. For better or worse it is always better to let freedom of expression be allowed. I’m not watching the olympics this year (not sure why) but I appreciate the Norwegian team’s expression: focus on my merit not my body. By threatening disqualification and/or fining they are denying at least some potential olympians from expressing themselves at the olympics. In essence they are being denied the ultimate “freedom of expression” of the human body - to compete in the olympics.
> Now, to be sure, they are not coming from the same place
It is the same place. And years of ridiculing conservatives doesn't make it less true.
We are burning books and art, we are making sex a big deal again, computer games now affect real life, I even saw heterosexual conversion therapy the other day..
. actually it was conversion therapy on homosexuality to non binary
Own it. It's ok the conseratives were partially right. Religion didn't just pick things out at random. Or start to reevaluate the current woke.
This is true. The results we see are the same, but the forces and ideas behind them differ. It is quite interesting to see the reversal though.
Movies, TV, Videogames, Books and Music supposedly didn't influence behavior, but now supposedly they must given the pushback given certain genres of the above.
The sexual revolution was driven in large part by men and women are retrenching parts of it now that they have more independent political power. Yes it’s conservative in a sense and that’s fine. (I find conservatives opposing things like MeToo and lower bars for Title IX violations to be bizarre. Sex is dangerous and should be subject to social regulation and rituals to prevent abuse. That’s a fundamentally conservative notion.)
If the team likes the new outfits (which look good) and are more comfortable in them, that's great. Likewise I see some other athletes have specified a preference for leotards which is also fine. All good as long as the athletes have a choice. Not sure I agree with labelling bikini-cut leotards as 'sexualized' though.
Yes that is what saddens me. I haven't seen those pole vault videos and find it disappointing that people would go to the trouble of making them.
Anyway, the fact these athletes have the choice to wear a competition uniform they find comfortable in the olympics without being penalized is a good thing.
>>>Yes that is what saddens me. I haven't seen those pole vault videos and find it disappointing that people would go to the trouble of making them.
Men are attracted to beautiful women, even moreso when their beauty comes not from plastic surgery but natural physical fitness. I have near-zero interest in athletics/competitive sports. There's no way I would ever know who Fatima Diame is if I hadn't clicked on her butt on a YouTube thumbnail. Those "sexy athlete" vids get MILLIONS of views.
So this is largely a concern tied to the internet?
Man I don't know what to think about that making folks change how they dress. It's their call but just not sure how I feel about that.
I saw some celeb announce that they were tired of nasty internet comments about their size and they wouldn't appear in any revealing scenes for now.
I'm all for their choice... but I couldn't help but think that there's some extent that they're engaging with / dictating their own choices based on some assholes on the internet who aren't going to go away...
> So this is largely a concern tied to the internet?
No, it's a concern largely tied to the male gaze[0] as capitalism. Social media just happens to be the popular medium for expressing it. But the exploitation of female athletes as sex objects [1,2] goes back much further than social media.
It's sexualized, or not, depending on why the choice was made. If the bikini cut was chosen because the media wanted them to wear it because it was causing more men to watch, that's sexualized. If the team chose it because it gave them higher scores, then it's not (unless the judges are judging on sexiness rather than technique, which, while possible, would be highly unprofessional).
When it is put as "sexualization" it indeed becomes about him (and supposedly all men). Some conservatives say exactly the same about going out with clothes that are also "sexualized". We as a society currently somehow incentive people to go out almost naked, but some wants to fight back the sexualization of short clothes putting the blame on the same people saying that wear minimal clothes are not a form of protest and brings bad outcome.
The ability to choose and go back and forth on these kinds of thing at will is the perfect expression of freedom. Being forced into one or the other option no matter how they feel about it is the opposite of freedom. Now some sports might define rough regulations about the minimum and/or maximum to wear, and that is fair too, as long as it is open for change as well.
Maximizing freedom for the individual doesn’t necessarily maximize freedom for the group. If there is a concern for example that judges give higher scores to women wearing skimpier outfits, then a more restrictive rule could lead to an outcome that better comports with what the majority of the women find more comfortable. (It’s like the minimum wage. Yes in a sense not having one maximizes freedom. But that’s not the only way to look at it.)
Does appearing taller win more points for gymnastics?
I've always found it weird that some sports have women wearing scant clothing compared to the mens events. Volleyball for example is a big one where it's unclear how bikini bottoms help over shorts.
>>>I've always found it weird that some sports have women wearing scant clothing compared to the mens events. Volleyball for example is a big one where it's unclear how bikini bottoms help over shorts.
Athletics is just a convoluted exercise in product marketing. Sports attract eyeballs, sponsors pay for the sports so they can put advertisements in front of those eyeballs and hopefully generate additional revenue.
Sex sells. So female volleyball players have outfits that will attract additional male eyeballs. I'm sure the same goes for tennis, as another great example. Nobody was watching Anna Kournikova back in the day for her technical proficiency with a racket. They watched her bent over in a tiny white skirt.
Search on YouTube for "female long jumpers"...notice anything consistent about the thumbnails? Why do the cameramen at these sports events seem so adroit at focusing on the most callipygian of the ladies?
>Nobody was watching Anna Kournikova back in the day for her technical proficiency with a racket.
Speak for yourself only, please; I watched for the tennis aspect. When all female athletes are wearing the same kind of clothes, it was easy to overlook the sexualization of it, at least until HD TV in the 2000's.
This is not just a female issue, I can testify that in my early teens I left competitive swimming due to how uncomfortable I felt in Speedos. Decades later I still feel the insecurity that was put on me by foul mouthed older teen girls ogaling me.
I do not disagree with the fact that many women are unfairly sexualized in these sports and am against that but I feel sometimes misandrious women criticize while giving just as creepy females a pass for commenting on football players butts, swimmers bodies, basketball players shoe sizes and so on...
In my opinion, there is more than one side to the story, I apologize in advance for such a long comment.
When I was a teenager I used to play volleyball, I played until my 20s, I was a decent player, but not tall enough to go anywhere, so I moved to beach volley and started coaching.
It was before social networks and the sport was having a boom all over the planet after indoor champions like Karch Kiraly (FIVB Best Player of the 20th Century together with my fellow Italian citizen Lorenzo Bernardi) made it highly popular.
The sport was born in California, by "cool" people for "cool" people.
If you watch pictures of the time you'll see men wearing surf boardshorts, the ones with very long legs, and women tight bikinis. That's how the bikini became the "official" uniform for women in beach volleyball, they were "cool" and men and women playing beach volleyball wanted to look at their best.
Technique was for indoor sports.
Fast forward almost 30 years, nobody wear the surfing shorts anymore, they impede your movements, unless you are a champion the like of Kiraly is, you are better off wearing regular shorts.
I've trained a few different female teams and all of them said the same thing: the bikini uniform is more comfortable because there are less places were the sand can end up.
My experience matches the words of many women players, as an example this is an article of few days ago, but I'm sure you will find many more researching the topic on Google
> It’s totally a personal choice. It wasn’t comfortable for me. Way too sweaty and too much sand. But, in certain situations leggings could be a good option — just not in the heat. There are also certain times of the month that wearing a bikini isn’t always such a comfortable option, especially when you’re on TV. So it’s important to have the freedom to choose what works best for you. Players should be able to wear what they want and what makes them perform the best — and for me it was a bikini.
I'm sure many men would wear speedos for the same reason, if they weren't considered "uncool" on a beach.
On the other hand: technical gear can give athletes an unfair advantage even if the arguments around wearing this or that kind of uniform appear to be reasonable.
For example: in 2008 Speedo (the brand) created a record breaking full body swimsuit, that were subsequently banned for professional swimmers because some fibers can reduce the drag to the point that it's like floating in the water with an outboard motor.
Same goes for beach volleyball, athletes are competing on the sand, directly under the Sun, if you cover up too much in some isolating fabric, you could be receiving an unfair advantage by not feeling the scorching sun on your skin. And even if there's a net between the teams, the teams should look the same, allowing two members of the same team to wear different uniforms could hypothetically translate to an unfair advantage.
Volleyball is also the sport that introduced tight uniforms because the loose uniforms of the late 90s were causing too many unwanted net invasions.
I'm not advocating for playing naked of course and I've never looked at sports in a sexual way, no matter how much naked skin was visible, but I think it's something to think about before deciding the rules for everybody.
There is another point: we are fully in the 21th century now, the image rights of popular people have an enormous value, especially for sponsors.
Imagine Nadia Comăneci, one of the greatest athletes ever, today, on Instagram.
How much would her image be worth?
We'll never know, but we know for sure that at her times her image was proper...
58 comments
[ 496 ms ] story [ 1854 ms ] threadIn the 70s this was seen as sexual freedom and it was conservative religious movements which were aghast at women flaunting their sexuality. And today women are adopting similar but not the same position as the conservatives of yore. Covering themselves to avoid the sexualization that those conservatives of yore warned about.
Now, to be sure, they are not coming from the same place, but they are arriving at similar expressions.
In any case I agree with them. Rate them on gymnastics rather than sexiness.
they should understand that all sports competition has an element of showmanship and display - after all, the viewers make the sport possible.
Sports competition isnt something with intrinsic value that can exist in a vacuum. If the audience desires certain types of show, they get it, or the competition makes no money and cannot continue.
If the athletes don't turn up, the competition makes no money and cannot continue. This goes both ways. The "element of showmanship" taking precedence over the sport shouldn't be tolerated, and the pushback is well within their rights.
The pushback doesn't have to be effective to be valid.
That's exactly what is wrong with capitalism: somehow money-making is at the forefront of the concerns of every human activity, to the point that athletes may not be able to choose their own clothing.
Would you agree that the net worth of individual athletes is substantially derived from advertising endorsements and sponsorships? https://www.sportsmanagementdegreehub.com/olympic-athletes-s...
Look at this list of wealthiest Olympians: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/list/top-50-olympians/
Notice that almost all of the women are figure skaters, gymnasts, or horseback riders (not a very sexualized sport, probably some interesting effects of family wealth needed to even train for it). Why are there no female power lifters raking in millions after winning a medal? I'm singling out power lifting as a sport where the women are conservatively dressed and the events are not particularly flattering to the female form.
Ideally we would have access to per-event viewership data going back decades as a proxy for Olympic event popularity, ticket revenue, and advertising revenue. I could only find this article with some good graphs of overall income by source: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-g... The bulk of which is TV. What glues eyeballs to the TV screen?
We can compare viewership of 2 simple YouTube searches as a proxy:
"sexiest female pole vaulters": top5 vids alone are >50M views total
"sexiest female powerlifters": top10 vids are <10M views total
Interestingly, the #6 result for "sexiest female Olympic gymnasts" is titled: "28 Olympians on How to get laid in the Olympic village" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UD0w13IdQ Even Cosmopolitan, that bastion of the misogynistic male gaze (sarc), knows what people wanna see about the Olympics.
Billions of dollars are on the line in the Olympics, and that's what it's about, from countries competing with billion-dollar incentives, to news networks, to bribes.
Any capitalist enterprise is driven to make money.
which is a very important point. Modesty as an expression of personal choice is not the same as modesty enforced by a culture (created explicitly not by the people it covered up, and also expressing arguably a different thing, namely chastity).
OP might as well have said "it's interesting how China's and UK's fertility rate is almost the same" while ignoring how each country got to that level...
Is it okay to have strip clubs? Is it okay to hire scantily-clad women for ads? In movies? Where are the lines?
I'm not sure where we want the lines, but:
* I don't like the lines drawn based on one-off issues going viral. I'd like a consistent set of lines.
* I feel like it's unreasonable to expect organizations to not follow the Smith's free hand of capitalism. "Good" organizations are out-competed by "bad" ones.
Is this a place where we might have a serious discussion about a new regulatory regime, or otherwise changing market forces and incentive structures?
I feel like that might be a slower, but more comprehensive, more equitable, and more sustainable way of landing on fair ground.
- More comprehensive: Reworking structures effects everyone, and not just Olympics. I'm at least as concerned about thousands of "Hooters girls" as about elite actresses and athletes.
- More equitable: Good businesses don't get punished. Bad ones don't get rewarded.
- More sustainable: Market forces should push for the behavior we want. Otherwise, it's like fighting the ocean.
It is the same place. And years of ridiculing conservatives doesn't make it less true.
We are burning books and art, we are making sex a big deal again, computer games now affect real life, I even saw heterosexual conversion therapy the other day.. . actually it was conversion therapy on homosexuality to non binary
Own it. It's ok the conseratives were partially right. Religion didn't just pick things out at random. Or start to reevaluate the current woke.
Movies, TV, Videogames, Books and Music supposedly didn't influence behavior, but now supposedly they must given the pushback given certain genres of the above.
https://mobile.twitter.com/kwamurai/status/14107297497190481...
Anyway, the fact these athletes have the choice to wear a competition uniform they find comfortable in the olympics without being penalized is a good thing.
Men are attracted to beautiful women, even moreso when their beauty comes not from plastic surgery but natural physical fitness. I have near-zero interest in athletics/competitive sports. There's no way I would ever know who Fatima Diame is if I hadn't clicked on her butt on a YouTube thumbnail. Those "sexy athlete" vids get MILLIONS of views.
Man I don't know what to think about that making folks change how they dress. It's their call but just not sure how I feel about that.
I saw some celeb announce that they were tired of nasty internet comments about their size and they wouldn't appear in any revealing scenes for now.
I'm all for their choice... but I couldn't help but think that there's some extent that they're engaging with / dictating their own choices based on some assholes on the internet who aren't going to go away...
No, it's a concern largely tied to the male gaze[0] as capitalism. Social media just happens to be the popular medium for expressing it. But the exploitation of female athletes as sex objects [1,2] goes back much further than social media.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25658173
[2]https://www.cnn.com/style/article/edgar-degas-ballet-dancers...
By making this about your reactions and telling them to change (even jokingly) you are being part of the problem.
I've always found it weird that some sports have women wearing scant clothing compared to the mens events. Volleyball for example is a big one where it's unclear how bikini bottoms help over shorts.
Athletics is just a convoluted exercise in product marketing. Sports attract eyeballs, sponsors pay for the sports so they can put advertisements in front of those eyeballs and hopefully generate additional revenue.
Sex sells. So female volleyball players have outfits that will attract additional male eyeballs. I'm sure the same goes for tennis, as another great example. Nobody was watching Anna Kournikova back in the day for her technical proficiency with a racket. They watched her bent over in a tiny white skirt.
Search on YouTube for "female long jumpers"...notice anything consistent about the thumbnails? Why do the cameramen at these sports events seem so adroit at focusing on the most callipygian of the ladies?
Speak for yourself only, please; I watched for the tennis aspect. When all female athletes are wearing the same kind of clothes, it was easy to overlook the sexualization of it, at least until HD TV in the 2000's.
I love that there's a word for "well-shaped buttocks".
I do not disagree with the fact that many women are unfairly sexualized in these sports and am against that but I feel sometimes misandrious women criticize while giving just as creepy females a pass for commenting on football players butts, swimmers bodies, basketball players shoe sizes and so on...
When I was a teenager I used to play volleyball, I played until my 20s, I was a decent player, but not tall enough to go anywhere, so I moved to beach volley and started coaching.
It was before social networks and the sport was having a boom all over the planet after indoor champions like Karch Kiraly (FIVB Best Player of the 20th Century together with my fellow Italian citizen Lorenzo Bernardi) made it highly popular.
The sport was born in California, by "cool" people for "cool" people. If you watch pictures of the time you'll see men wearing surf boardshorts, the ones with very long legs, and women tight bikinis. That's how the bikini became the "official" uniform for women in beach volleyball, they were "cool" and men and women playing beach volleyball wanted to look at their best. Technique was for indoor sports.
Fast forward almost 30 years, nobody wear the surfing shorts anymore, they impede your movements, unless you are a champion the like of Kiraly is, you are better off wearing regular shorts.
I've trained a few different female teams and all of them said the same thing: the bikini uniform is more comfortable because there are less places were the sand can end up.
My experience matches the words of many women players, as an example this is an article of few days ago, but I'm sure you will find many more researching the topic on Google
https://www.today.com/news/why-do-women-s-beach-volleyball-p...
> Would shorts be worse than a bikini bottom?
> It’s totally a personal choice. It wasn’t comfortable for me. Way too sweaty and too much sand. But, in certain situations leggings could be a good option — just not in the heat. There are also certain times of the month that wearing a bikini isn’t always such a comfortable option, especially when you’re on TV. So it’s important to have the freedom to choose what works best for you. Players should be able to wear what they want and what makes them perform the best — and for me it was a bikini.
I'm sure many men would wear speedos for the same reason, if they weren't considered "uncool" on a beach.
On the other hand: technical gear can give athletes an unfair advantage even if the arguments around wearing this or that kind of uniform appear to be reasonable.
For example: in 2008 Speedo (the brand) created a record breaking full body swimsuit, that were subsequently banned for professional swimmers because some fibers can reduce the drag to the point that it's like floating in the water with an outboard motor.
Same goes for beach volleyball, athletes are competing on the sand, directly under the Sun, if you cover up too much in some isolating fabric, you could be receiving an unfair advantage by not feeling the scorching sun on your skin. And even if there's a net between the teams, the teams should look the same, allowing two members of the same team to wear different uniforms could hypothetically translate to an unfair advantage.
Volleyball is also the sport that introduced tight uniforms because the loose uniforms of the late 90s were causing too many unwanted net invasions.
I'm not advocating for playing naked of course and I've never looked at sports in a sexual way, no matter how much naked skin was visible, but I think it's something to think about before deciding the rules for everybody.
There is another point: we are fully in the 21th century now, the image rights of popular people have an enormous value, especially for sponsors.
Imagine Nadia Comăneci, one of the greatest athletes ever, today, on Instagram.
How much would her image be worth?
We'll never know, but we know for sure that at her times her image was proper...