Saturday 24 January 2015

Tennis Twirling and other Thoughts

I love reading the BBC's magazine on its website, especially I like the feature "Ten Things we didn't know last week".  I came across this gem - some old and hopefully obsolete laws in the USA.  Here's the link and it's well worth reading: Slater's look at obsolete US laws
My favourite has to be in Ohio it's "illegal to disrobe in front of a man's portrait."  I seem to remember that somewhere there's a law against hanging out men and women's underwear together on the line. 

We've come a long way since then.  We are now in the age of women having the same rights as men and no one turns a hair or raises a quizzical eyebrow.  Or have I got that wrong?
Yes, folks, we have Twirlgate - Eugenie Bouchard wore a stunning tennis outfit recently at the Australian  Open in Melbourne and was surprised when a reporter asked her to "twirl" to show it off.  She duly obliged amid a huge cheer from the crowd.  She said she didn't mind being asked but would prefer if people concentrated on her tennis.  Twirlgate upset a lot of feminists.  I must admit that I wasn't impressed either.  If you're on the red carpet for a movie award then fair enough but if you have put in all the training and hard work required to win a high level tennis match, then I think the focus should be on how you played and not on your outfit.

So how far have we come, exactly?  Has anyone asked Nadal or Federer to show off their tennis shorts or shoes or just give us a blast of those muscular legs?  Certainly the female tennis players are an attractive bunch as indeed are the males.  Should it make a difference, how you look?  Do you have to be super-sexy to get to the top of the corporation? I wouldn't like to take any bets on it.

But are women partly to blame?  In the UK there was a kerfuffle recently because one of the tabloids decided not to publish its Page 3 topless model pics.  Apparently a lot of male readers felt cheated.  And there was me, thinking people bought newspapers for the news they contain and not for a pin-up photo of a bare-breasted young woman lol.  A commentator on a French news channel said that "here in France you can see topless women on TV any time of the day and no one thinks anything of it."  One model said it was "just a job" and didn't know what the fuss was about.  Confusing, isn't it? 

Should we rely on our brains and professionalism instead of on our feminine abilities to wow the male sex?  Perhaps we're looking at this all wrong and we should be proud of flaunting our boobs and other attributes in order to get what we want.  Of course it's kind of hard for those of us who don't have much to flaunt.  And then there's that saying about the way to a man's heart being through his stomach.   Someone somewhere said if women thought this they were aiming too high.

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