Female Danish Athletes Diminish Their Own Championship Victory By Taking Nude Photos

By Raphael Siniora

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?

Nude, All-Women Production Of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ Honors Free Expression

By Raphael Siniora

“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!”

Shakespeare’s plays express an affinity for expressive dress. In “The Taming of the Shrew,” the caddish Petruchio withholds food, sleep and beautiful attire from his new bride as punishment for her forwardness, hoping to change her ways. In “Twelfth Night” and “The Merchant of Venice,” women disguise themselves as men in order to achieve their goals.

If outfits are favorite motifs of the Bard, what should we make of a clothes-free production of one of his best-known plays, “The Tempest”? According to co-director Alice Mottola, who headed up such a production performed this week at Summit Rock in New York City’s Central Park, nudity graces the play with themes of free expression and equality across cultures. This interpretation makes sense; the play, for those unfamiliar, is about an aristocratic crew caught in a storm that brings them to an island rich with magic and isolated inhabitants.

The production company describes the aesthetic choice on its site as such:

This Tempest focuses on the contrast between the harsh restrictions of “civilization” — where political maneuvering costs thrones and lives — and the Edenic, magic-suffused tropical island on which the sorcerer Prospero and his daughter Miranda have lived in exile for twelve years. The contrast will be dramatized not only through performance and staging but also through inventive and integral use of costuming, with the harrowed, conspiring shipwreck victims initially forced to navigate the play’s island setting in constricting outfits suggestive of European aristocracy.

The play’s “selective use of nudity to dramatize ‘The Tempest’’s central themes of alienation and reconciliation,” the company continues, “builds on a long tradition of free expression in theatrical productions held in outdoor settings.”

Modern takes on Shakespeare’s plays aren’t uncommon. His stories are often adapted into contemporary novelizations, the most recent slate published by Hogarth, including a forthcoming rewrite of “The Tempest” by Margaret Atwood, confronting the threats posed by global warming.

Another recent political take on The Bard involved an all-women production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” one of the playwright’s “problem plays,” for its arguably oppressive themes. The director, Rebecca Patterson, told The Huffington Post, “I don’t think [casting women] changes the meaning. What it does is liberate the play from simplistic gender politics into its deeper universal humanity.”

Check out Mottola’s liberating, nude production — co-directed by Pitr Strait and co-produced with the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society — of “The Tempest” below.

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