I mean, Abby, didn’t it occur to you that no matter how you feel about the feminist and empowering aspects of such a photo spread, the magazine is constructed by media moguls who only care about a very slightly expanded spectrum of one kind of body - which is lithe, gorgeous, and glossy-haired? Aside from Paralympian rower Oksana Masters, whose lower legs were amputated when she was a child, the bodies represented in the magazine don’t represent different shapes and sizes. And my body is very different than most females’.” She continues to speak in feminist terms about beauty and empowerment - all of which I’m in 100% agreement.Įxcept. You don’t have to have the most cut up body to be a pro athlete. “Most importantly, I want the shot to represent what we all are trying to capture here, and that’s just powerful, strong, athletic …. “I’m very comfortable with my body anyway,” she explains. My sister sent me this great video in which Wambach talks about her decision to do so in the same matter-of-fact terms that my college swimmer roommates would have. At first I found the sight of their hard bodies disconcerting, but within a few days I joined in.Įven for me, a 19-yr-old used to walking around naked in high school sports-teams locker rooms, that transition in thinking about naked bodies in mixed-sex settings blew my mind, and changed me. So why do I feel so ambivalent about US soccer star Abby Wambach appearing in ESPN The Magazine‘s Body Issue, which features artistic naked shots of male and female Olympians? Far from being exhibitionists, they were simply used to being un-self-consciously naked around both men and women. When I was in college I briefly shared a house with a bunch of swimmers who walked around naked, or mostly naked, most of the time.
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