Why do women get the advantage of modesty and compression?
To be honest, I am dropping the "sexist bomb" just to be persnickety and illustrative on how poorly FINA thinks their decisions through.
From Voice of America:
Executive director Cornel Marculescu said Tuesday the FINA Bureau upheld last week's decision by the general congress to put new regulations in place by May of 2010. Male swimmers will be restricted to suits that go from the waist to the top of the knees, while women's suits cannot go past the shoulders or beyond the knees.
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FINA is the moral equivalent of the Red Queen in the Lewis Carrol book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. From Wikipedia:
Despite the frequency of death sentences, it would appear few people are actually beheaded. The King of Hearts quietly pardons many of his subjects when the Queen is not looking. ... and her soldiers humor her but do not carry out her orders. The Gryphon tells Alice that "It's all her fancy: they never executes nobody, you know." Nevertheless, all creatures in Wonderland fear the Queen. ..."
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In the illustration above, Alice represents the swimmers who truly run the show and both the Red and White Queen who are asleep and unaware of what is going on.
Ironically, speedsuits won't be abolished till Speedo starts winning in them. Trust me!
4 comments:
totally agreed that men and women should be able to cover the same areas of the body with their suits. i dont understand why the leggings, short john, and long john style suits should now be banned?
how does FINA come up with this stuff? im sure Bob would still allow MP to wear leggings!
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jDp5YJWIGqckWtzZLwJDTG0ZWtHA
Doesn't the stipulation that suits must not have zippers or fasteners remove the benefit of compression?
It'd be great if there was some way to set up a bet online. I'd be willing to put a few hundred down on Speedo not introducing a suit faster than the LZR.
It's actually a bit more complicated, methinks. Yes, different regulations for women and men do change the starting point, speedwise; however, the difference between women's and men's suits has everything to do with modesty and gender double standards. Remember the Sports Illustrated article from 1974 you posted, Tony? It was all about the tight suits for women and how "revealing" they were.
I say, if it's indecent for us to see swimmers' nipples, let's go back to shoulder-to-knee suits from the 1920s for EVERYONE and be done with that.
YEAH! 'Game-On'
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