Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, the blamer-in-chief writes a bit about Alison Stokke, the high school pole vaulter who, thanks to a random sports blogger posting a picture of her on his site that he bought through the online archives of her local newspaper, has become a kind of unwitting pin-up girl. The blamer writes:
The other day WaPo reported that some knob sports blogger, an excrescence who by definition exalts the basest impulses of his species, had posted a photograph of an obscure record-breaking high school pole vaulter. The photo showed the woman at a meet, adjusting her ponytail. The knob sports blogger titled the blog entry “Pole vaulting is sexy, barely legal.” He is a dude, so naturally he felt inclined to add “Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds” to his jokey ‘analysis’ of her athleticism.
Because it is the prime directive of dudes to circlejerk all over the internet, downloading images of the pole vaulter soon became pretty much the only purpose to which they put their computers. Eighteen-year-old Allison Stokke, whose crime was pole vaulting while female, had achieved internet pornaliciousness.
There’s no doubt that a) the guy who posted the photo is a creep, and b) there’s something just generally creepy about the ways that men talk about women in situations like this. One of the sports blogger’s commenters, for instance, writes:
Iwould also liketo straighten out a few things about Allison Stokke:
- I’d hit it.
- I would like to hit it.
- I certainly would like to partake in some Stokkey Pokey (and turn myself around/THAT’S WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!)
- No, I mean it. I would break it off in that and never look back.
- What’s a pole vault?
What I’m interested in, however, is what is it about the anonymity of Stokke — the fact that we don’t know her, that she’s not famous, that her quasi-celebrity is accidental — that makes the picture so attractive to so many men, including me? She’s beautiful, obviously, and there’s a certain novelty to what she does (pole vaulting, as I learned during an ill-advised season as a high school pole vaulter, is an odd sport), and there’s a very obvious-to-the-point-of-absurdity phallic aspect to pole vaulting, but really, my sense is that without the anonymity, the candidness, the sense that she’s just a regular woman caught in a moment of repose, that the picture never would have attracted the attention it did.
I Blame the Patriarchy argues that there’s an element of retribution here, "that any woman who flouts paternalistic convention by appearing outside her home is a public toilet. That a public woman, such as a teenage athlete, has no right to the slightest dignity is commonly considered a settled point."
I don’t know, though. I don’t sense that I’m threatened by her power, her confidence, her flouting of paternalistic convention, but I am captivated by the picture.
