sigh Remember that bit Maoman had on his signature, regarding the fact that everyone is going through his/her own battles. This is mostly about beauty, but it can be sucess, money, it can be a man or a woman issue. It is a human issue.
A beautiful athlete killing herself to fit a mold:
[quote]It is hard to wrap your brain around because, really, how ugly can a woman who appeared in Playboy and Maxim, dominated Olympic games, and at one point was the most downloaded athlete on the internet ahead of Anna Kournikova, really believe herself to be?
Pretty damn ugly it turns out.
“I would look at pictures of me from photo shoots and things like that and that was not me in the morning and not how I looked,” Beard told me Wednesday. “It didn’t feel like when people complimented me like they were complimenting me on who I was.”
This is jarring in and of itself. What it is not is unique. Statistics and countless studies reveal many other girls and women — maybe your wife, your daughter, your sister — feel this way. The thing that makes Beard’s memoir so soul-crushing is you thought it might be different for her because of Playboy and Maxim and winning seven Olympic medals, the idea that girls could inoculate themselves from this kind of self-loathing if only they had the right body or were athletes.
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And we value one and not the other, so instead of being valued for what makes her exceptional, Griner is excoriated for not being somebody else’s ideal.
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You can not have it both ways, selling our looks and then being mad when people comment.
I asked Beard about this dichotomy as we talked about the book Wednesday. Does she have a right to be upset about people judging her looks while posing for Playboy — which at the time lost her sponsors and had many in USA Swimming furious — or are female athletes’ looks fair game?
“Obviously, when you put yourself out there in any shape or form, you get people saying positive things and a lot of people saying negative things,” Beard said. “You can’t live your life around what other people are going to say. You have to be able to live with it.
“I think we are put on a completely different scale. As a female, we don’t take those kind of comments nearly as well as men do. I don’t know how to explain it. They razz each other about things and are OK with little jabs. We are females and a little more emotional about things. When people talk about something like our appearance, it is a really low blow and rude and not OK to do.”
And by Beard posing in Playboy and Danica pimping GoDaddy, does that make Griner and really all female athletes looks fair game?
In a word: No. In two: Hell no.
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The message that Beard wanted to send by writing the memoir, which admittedly took her back to painful times and toxic relationships and self-loathing, was that we as individuals have the power to stop this.
Stop hating yourself.
Stop letting an anonymous comment, or a guy in your class, or a mean girl, dictate how you feel about yourself.
Stop pretending what you look like is who you are.
Stop comparing yourself to a magazine because that incredibly skinny woman whose body you would kill for is probably a lot like Beard was — starving and miserable, feeling fat and ugly.
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msn.foxsports.com/olympics/story … men-040512
And in related news:
[quote]“Their level of anger only underlines that no one in this world is more reviled than a pretty woman,” Brick wrote.
“If Brad Pitt were to say: ‘Yes, I’m a good-looking fella,’ then the world would nod sagely in agreement. But if Angelina Jolie uttered something along those lines, she’d be subject to the same foaming-at-the-mouth onslaught hurled at me yesterday.”
Brick confessed to crying repeatedly in reaction to people’s comments and described the past 24 hours as “among the most horrendous” in her life.
“But do I regret my article? Not at all,” Brick wrote. “I know I’m risking the wrath of the online community once more, but there is an irony to yesterday. While I was tearfully dealing with the emails and calls outside the supermarket, a young man approached me, offered to park my car and even get me a coffee. He could see I was having a tough time — and yes, my looks had helped me out again.”