Posing for Playboy Hurt Female Athletics?

Recently, three-time U.S. Olympian Amanda Beard decided to pose nude for Playboy.
The question was, do female athletes posing for Playboy hurt female sports? You be the judge.

A blatant (and honest) statement was made in Fox sports that in order for female athletes to become famous, they must be attractive. If this is not an obvious example of living in a patriarchal society than I do not know what is. In other words, a female athlete is not good enough as she is, her skills means virtually nothing if she is not also considered attractive. Firstly, very few women fit the mould of what our society deems to be “ideally attractive”. This criteria unfairly eliminates many wonderful and very skilled athletes. Again women are being defined and valued for their external appearance as oppose to their talent and intelligence.

Fox sports even provided a survey which listed a number of other popular female athletes and asked “Who should make a similar fashion statement?”. This was simply a politically correct way of asking, “Who else would you like to see naked?”.

A comparison was made regarding how we view famous male athletes versus female athletes. Famous male athletes are viewed as “athletes”, but famous female athletes are simply seen as “famous”. People sometimes cannot even remember what sport they played! I would like to add to this, that this is the result of female athletes being objectified (like the rest of women) to the extent that primarily their attractiveness is remembered. What is of actual importance (the skill of their sport) is not. That does not matter.

FHM featured an issue with female athletes posing on the cover. While they did have the courtesy of actually naming these women, they still did not fail to place them in swimsuits. I am getting tired of us women having to take off our clothes to get recognition for what we do. Are women not talented or valued unless we are beautiful or half naked? If these women on the cover were wearing clothes that concealed themselves, or were not attractive, would men care to learn more about them then?

The article states that female athletes posing for Playboy is not hurting the sports they participate in, or female athletes in general. I would argue this point. The more female athletes pose for playboy, the more trivial it seems to make women participating in sports. It begins to set a standard for other female athletes to also pose nude and objectify themselves. Can these women not pride themselves enough in their sport, that they need to reveal their unclothed bodies for the world to see? When these men now watch these women compete in their sports, they are not watching a female athlete who happens to be attractive, they are watching an attractive female who happens to be an athlete.

I do believe there is something wrong with men primarily recognizing female athletes for their attractiveness as oppose to their skill. As a society, we have sexually objectified women so much that we cannot even let them play a sport and be good at it without looking at her like a piece of meat.