No one cared about their victory until they took off their clothes
A female sports team has celebrated winning the Women’s European Handball Federation Cup by posing naked with their trophy. In a photograph that shows both the attention-seeking narcissism and self-objectification rampant amongst Western women today, members of the winning Danish squad, Tvis Holstebro, use different angles, their teammates’ bodies, their hands or even the trophy itself to conceal their breasts and genitals.
Once more, the self-objectification of female athletes raises important questions about the relative value of women’s sports. Men are routinely denigrated, attacked and witch-hunted for judging female athletes on their bodies, yet those in female sports, provided they have semi-decent figures (or even only scary ones), seem to take every opportunity to try to exploit and then commercialize their sexuality.
People like British “psychologist” Priscilla Choi have in the past complained that female athletes are evaluated more on their looks than their athletic ability. There are nonetheless at least two glaring holes in this kind of argument: 1) women are generally and markedly inferior to men in sports and 2) female athletes themselves directly participate and even want objectification if it is profitable for them.
As you would expect in these hypocritical times of ours, female athletes and their backers have demanded that they be taken as seriously as the men over recent years. Forgetting the fact that even boys’ teams are frequently superior to adult women’s teams, female athletes want “equality” for providing grossly inferior performances. They want their own gendered fields so as to not compete with the men, maintaining the very flimsy illusion that the women are just as good and worthy of similar or identical remuneration.
Is there an actual justification for taking female athletes like those in the Tvis Holstebro squad seriously, especially after the otherwise “sexist” behavior of arranging the nude photograph or the all-round self-objectification female athletes use? Why can’t their sporting prowess, including compared to men, do all the talking?
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