Female and Sport

As a female, I'd like to think that I am able to empathize with strong female athletes. When women athletes are in the spotlight, I feel like they are never taken seriously. They are always viewed as less worthy than their male counterparts. Take Danica Patrick for example. She is the most famous woman in Nascar to date, and yet she is demoralized in the media with the photos that she takes.She's not the only one, there are documentaries that also recognize this phenomenon and they question why the athlete does this to herself?

 "Killing Us Softly" by Jean Kilbourne shows all the depictions of women and how those images fuel all the bad things in adolescents such as eating disorders. People see images all the time due to advertisements on the web, on billboards, and on television. And each and every image, women are demoralized and their image. I feel like this is all because of men. They control the mass majority of industries and therefore are allowed to put their opinions into play. Men are constantly judging women, their looks and body types. And this causes women to be even more critical of themselves and of other women because they want to make sure they are up to par with what the opposite sex wants.

Women who are famous in sport should be able to express themselves, but to be able to gain attention in the mass media they have to be sexually appealing and they model themselves that way. What does this do to our generation and those after us?
In discussion, Scott talked about Caster Semenya and how she had to undergo gender testing. Is this right? In my opinion I feel like it wasn't and I'm sure it psychologically affected her when she was told that people didn't believe she was a female. Just because she looks different compared to our views of what a women looks like doesn't mean she should be questioned publicly based on the fact that she runs a lot faster than other track athletes. Of course this is an ethics class and the decisions on these things are questionable, but how far are we going to go to make sure that Caster deserved to compete with female athletes. For Heaven's sake she was 17 years old and she had to be poked and prodded to make sure she could compete.  I just don't think that's right.