Redefining sex appeal.

Diana Nyad writes--with approval--in today's NYT about the Olympians posing in Playboy. She likes that they are redefining female beauty:

The definition of sex appeal seems to have gone under the knife, and it is athletes — not just plastic surgeons — who are carving out the new look. Back in the 1960's, when I was a swimmer in high school with sizable shoulders and triceps, wearing a sleeveless blouse inspired unconcealed shock and dismay. Today, the running-back physique of Serena Williams may be setting the standard for a new femininity.

Of course, this new standard of beauty is much harder to achieve than the old one! But at least it's a powerful model to aspire to and you'll get some exercise trying.

UPDATE: Best letter to the NYT on the subject, from Keith Emmer:

It would be fitting if this year's Olympic Games in Athens marked the end of an era of denigrating athletes who choose to pose nude. After all, in the original Olympic Games in Greece, the athletes competed nude.

Not to be a killjoy, but one of the reasons the ancient Greeks thought women could not compete was that they could not compete in the nude, and women were barred from even viewing the Olympics, with the nudity of the men cited as the reason. And then there's this--from the sfgate article just linked--making a point about the politics of nudity that makes an interesting contrast to the more familiar feminist point about "objectifying" women:

So embedded was competing in the nude that our word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnos for "naked," [UC Berkeley archaeologist Stephen] Miller notes in the book ["Ancient Greek Athletics"], an in-depth account of a culture that loved to watch the well-proportioned bodies of young men, their skin glistening with olive oil, compete not for medals but for a sprig of olive or bunch of wild celery.

On a deeper level, Miller said, nude competition helped foster one of ancient Greece's best-known contributions to posterity -- democracy. Nudity, he said, erases marks of rank and privilege.

"It came to me that the locker room is inherently one of the most democratic places in human experience," he said, "and that -- at the very least -- Greek athletics provided an environment in which democracy could, and did, prosper."

"We do not know the origins of competition in the nude," he writes in the book, but we do know the custom helped doom the Olympics to disfavor when Rome took over the Mediterranean world.

"Athletics were less successfully received in the West because the Romans were highly suspicious of nudity," writes Miller.

Mmmm .... celery.