I'm going to put my cards straight on the table, my initial, visceral reaction to the pictures was one of dislike. This is because I'm a skater grrl, and for me it feels like they feed into the way women in board sports are sexualised and marketed to a predominantly male audience. However, when I went and looked at the body issue - well the pictures from it at least - I liked looking at the images, not in a titillating way, but just seeing myriad different ways a body could be athletic and powerful and beautiful. I realise beautiful is quite a loaded term, but there was something incredibly captivating about seeing all these different shapes of athletic body - especially when they were caught in sporting motion. Go and have a look and tell me I'm wrong. Clearly if I'm happy looking the naked bodies of female athletes in sports I don't care about, but I'm upset about Leticia Bufoni's pictures, there's something else going on.
I need to say that I've read comments pretty much slut shaming Letica Bufoni for doing this. This is not on. It's her body, her life and she can pose naked if she wants to... it's not even like it's massively out of context either, because that's the whole point of the bloody magazine. So stop with the slut shaming already because it ain't big or clever.
This is the point to start talking about objectification, and whether or not the Body Issue is guilty of this - and before someone dives in with "but the men are being objectified too", I'm well aware of that and don't particularly like it much either, however once a woman has been presented as a sexual object it can be hard to shake that off, whereas it doesn't seem to define men in quite the same way. Objectification is all about power and who has it - this comic explains it all very neatly. Now it gets messy and complicated when we're talking about professional athletes because part of your job as a sponsored pro is to rep the companies that sponsor you. I doubt that any of Letica's sponsors straight up told her that she "had" to do the body issue, because this is 2015 and ewwww - so she almost certainly had a choice and the ability to say no if she wanted to.
So far so good.
It gets complicated here because the Body Issue is a very high profile thing, it does drive advertising and that's kind of her job as a sponsored athlete. Do sponsored skaters have pressure to put out media, to compete, to win? Sure, being sponsored isn't a badge of merit, it's something you have to work hard to achieve and then put a lot of work into to keep. When that's how you make you're living, you're always going to consider how your actions affect your value and worth with a sponsor. Does that mean she was forced? No, but it does mean that the answer about how much of a choice she had is murky. Obviously this is purely speculative, I neither know Leticia nor am I a mind reader, and this is just based on stuff I've been told and experienced - Though my brief stint as a sponsored skater hardly set the world aflame.
Then we need to throw in the horrible truth that in the wider context of the world and society we live in, a naked women will be regarded as a sexual object and her public nudity will follow her and define her in a way it really doesn't for men, no matter how empowering the initial act was. This is because the world is a shitty place most of the time, and personally I can't wait till the thumb cats take over and we can get down to being ruled by our new feline overlings. They can't make as much of a hash of it as we have.
Jokes aside, public female nudity feeds male entitlement to women's bodies - and before someone dives in with #notallmen, I realise this, I'm using male as a label for a class of people who aren't women and not you personally - and I think this is going to follow her for the rest of her career. Whether it ends up being a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.
And it's still not her fault, so stop thinking it.
