This column originally ran in 2007, and is reprinted with the author's permission.

SEX SELLS, BUT WHAT ARE WE SELLING, EXACTLY?

by Alison Moran, YourSportsFan.com Women's Sports Director

On your newsstands now….Olympic swimmer and gold medallist Amanda Beard in the July 2007 edition of Playboy.

I have no business judging such an obviously personal choice, but I'll take a wild guess that Beard has opened herself up to double-entendre jokes for as long as she lives. I’ve heard at least two, and those were just from family members.

Who is Amanda Beard? At the tender age of 14, Beard made a name for herself at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta by becoming the second-youngest Olympic gold medal winner in history. Today, she is a seven-time Olympic medallist and a former world recordholder in the 200-meter breastroke. She is now in training for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Even the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) seems to applaud her self-promotion, noting on Beard’s bio that she “generated a tremendous amount of publicity prior to the Athens Olympic Games (in 2004) with photo shoots with FHM (appearing on the cover with Logan Tom), Men's Fitness, and elsewhere.” They have yet to mention her Playboy shoot. Semi-nudity, apparently, is okay with the USOC.  Which begs the question: if the Beijing Olympics is a success, does Playboy get credit?

Beard is hardly the first athlete to bare all for Playboy, or for calendars and posters promoting their sport, or for Sports Illustrated. As Rick Reilly pointed out in Sports Illustrated more than seven years ago, two-time Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt has posed without figure skates. And she was not alone. The Australian women's soccer team, soccer phenomenon Brandi Chastain and 12 women U.S. track and field athletes, including middle-distance runner Nnenna Lynch and high jumpers Amy Acuff and Tisha Waller, and volleyball phenomenon Gabrielle Reece have posed in the buff. They are not alone. Male athletes, including basketball genius/oddball Dennis Rodman, decathlete Dan O'Brien, cyclist Lance Armstrong and football enigma Ricky Williams, have also posed in the altogether.

If you're an athlete. is it right for you bare your healthy, well-toned, lats and 12-pack abs in a venue like Playboy? Playgirl? FHM? Maxim? Or for that matter, the U.S. Track and Field Association's annual calendar?  What does it do for young children eager to follow in those footsteps? What happens when a woman or man takes off their clothes for big bucks and, sorry, EXPOSURE? Does it really take away from the dignity and respectability of an individual?

I want to make one thing perfectly clear here. I am no Puritan, tsk-tsking the act of posing nude. I fully support everyone’s right to make decisions that best suit their individual needs and wants, that portray these individuals in a way that they’re comfortable, and that will help promote anything they truly believe in.  In Beard’s case, she says she doesn’t care what other people think, as long as her family supports her (they do). However, she is aware that she is a role model for young girls, and she told the Orange County Register that she hopes young girls will remember her seven Olympic medals, not her Playboy pictorial. Doubtful, especially if the girls in question have brothers.

The debate over athletes posing in the buff dates back at least seven years, to a pictorial in Sports Illustrated featuring the Olympics. In a 2000 "Life of Reilly" column in Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly opined. "Wow, Jenny Thompson has a nice pair, doesn't she? Massive. Firm. Perfectly shaped. Her thighs, I mean.  At least that's what blew me away when I saw the five-time Olympic gold-medalist swimmer topless, hands over her breasts, in Sports Illustrated . Killer thighs that could crush anvils. Calves sharp enough to slice tomato. Biceps that ought to be on a box of baking soda. ...."

Cold shower, anyone?

Of the women’s sports columnists of the time, Reilly whined that they went “all Aunt Bea” on him, including USA Today’s Christine Brennan, complaining that the Thompson picture "sends [girls] the insecure message that an old stereotype still lives and thrives. If you doubt this, look at the picture and notice where your eye goes first ... right to her chest."

Bad messages? Reilly said, “Here are women with real bodies, fit bodies, attainable bodies -- not bodies you can only get through the Lucky Gene Club or plastic surgery or throwing up your lunch every day.”

My question to Reilly is: Attainable, how? Most women cannot afford to spend eight hours in a gym trying to mold calves that could “slice tomatoes.”  Nor are they paid hefty sums by Nike and other companies to maintain bodies that way.

I do believe that pride in your body is important, whether you are famous or not. Appreciating your assets is a fine message to send to the world. However, the question remains, how far is too far?

REACTION: MIXED

The Professionals’ Reaction:

Professional sports leagues do not offer any guidance: Posing nude is not outlawed in any professional league, male or female. Athletes can’t lose their jobs for making that decision. However, it’s not something most leagues are comfortable with. In the WNBA, Margaret Stender, the former President and CEO of the Chicago Sky, said, “We care very much about the role model responsibility we have, so we would have to talk it over and think about it pretty extensively. I know (the players) are smart, confident, intelligent and capable women. I hope I won’t have to deal with that question.”

In 2002, CNN/Money’s Chris Isidore took up the question about long-term gains for short-term financial profit. Isidore spoke with Blair Fischer, Sports Editor for Playboy.com, about WUSA soccer star Heather Mitts and others refusing to doff their duds. "If we had gotten a soccer player to pose, I think privately the league would have said it was a great thing while publicly they would have said it was a bad thing," said Fischer. "The average person doesn't know who Heather Mitts is. If she poses, it makes news, and people are going to have interest in that person. I don't see how it can hurt."

WUSA President Lynn Morgan, indeed, told Isidore that she was pleased, but not surprised that none of her players agreed to pose. However, Ithe online magazine noted that Morgan worried that a soccer player posing naked would cause a backlash with parents and young female fans that make up a majority of ticket buyers, and wouldn't do anything to attract male fans to the games.

"If we market ourselves as anything other than what we truly are, we become a one-hit wonder with the fans we attract," Morgan said to CNN/Money.

Isidore concludes his article by quoting an unnamed women’s sports executive. “Jason Sehorn can be on a billboard in his underwear in Times Square and no one questions his athletic ability," said one women's sports executive, who didn't want her name used with these comments. "Can you imagine what people would say if Venus Williams or (WNBA Star) Sue Bird posed in her underwear? It's a double standard, but we're fairly schizophrenic when it comes to women sports and sex."  
Public Reaction

Reaction to Beard’s pictorial is predictable in that the public’s reaction is strong and divided along parenting and women-empowering issues:

“Denise”, writing on AOL Sports Blog, asks,  “Does taking off your clothes for men improve your image or your IQ? then women want to know why they are viewed as objects and dont get the respect they deserve! what kind of role model is she for young girls? Her Olympic accomplishment makes her a great role model....posing for Playboy makes her a bimbo.”

Another blogger, “GalenHorton,” said, “As a father of 2 young girls who are extremely active in soccer & swimming, I find this very disappointing; there continue to be fewer & fewer good examples of female athletes I can share with them. This is another example of an outstanding athlete with marvelous qualities up to this point who seems to be just cashing in on her looks & the notoriety that this kind of celebrity activity will bring. What a poor example of using your talents & gifts, & even worse, all the readers who think it's fantastic that she's doing this? Would you be as enthusiastic if it was your daughter?”

And yet another, “MSB,” spoke for most young males that the Playboy audience is directed “RIGHT ON.....LABIA RULES......RIGHT ON.” Uh-oh.

Michael Rosenberg of Fox Sports.com says: And maybe that is what this tells us: We see famous male athletes as athletes, but we see famous female athletes simply as famous people. Most sports fans know who Amanda Beard is, but I would bet that at least 95 percent have no idea what her best stroke is. Michael Phelps is famous for being a great swimmer; Amanda Beard is famous for being an attractive swimmer, even though she has won seven medals in three Olympics and is preparing for her fourth trip to the Summer Games. appeared in SI's swimsuit issue (and not in her competition Speedo). Beard is not exchanging her athletic fame for the fame of a model — her athletic fame is the fame of a model.

So why do some women have their girdles all in a wad? Why is the Women's Sports Foundation (WSF) so upset? Why did former WSF president Donna de Varona say of Thompson and other women athletes who have posed nude, "I want them to keep their clothes on!”  De Varona, who became the youngest gold medallist in Olympic history by winning two swimming gold medals in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, became a pioneer in sportscasting when, in 1965, she became the first female sportscaster in network television sports history when she signed a contract with ABC at the age of 18.  She served as host and correspondent for the Olympic games for the next three decades. In addition, she was a political activist on behalf of Title IX, and helped to establish the Women's Sports Foundation, where she served as their first president from 1976 to 1984 On a side note, De Varona herself is an attractive blond who could have traded in on her looks even in her 40’s and 50’s. I theorize that she, along with the “first wave” of female athletes, fought for Title IX to provide opportunities for other women   Earning respect was (and is) no easy task. It would have been out of the question for her generation to conduct themselves as anything but what the definition of “ladies” was at the time.

CONCLUSIONS:

Three years after this column first ran, I believe my original conclusions still stand: The ultimate answers remain in the legacies athletes wish to leave to the world. Athletes, if you don’t want the publicity, don’t put yourself in a position to receive it. Case in point: in 2007, YouTube was just gaining speed on the social media map. Today, any video can be downloaded and transmitted in a millisecond. Your private life is no longer your own, as long as a camera phone is near. You can Twitter photos, and post anything you want on Facebook or MySpace. But count the costs of these actions. The world WILL be watching. Make sure, in your hearts and minds, that what you do is what you want the world to see. Let that be your legacy.