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Mar 16, 2009 10:20 AM
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The recent Candace Parker ESPN the mag cover story written by Allison Glock has become a hot topic for the ornery scribes at SportsJournalists.com due to the story's breast-heavy lede paragraph.
Here's the offending graph:
"Candace Parker is beautiful. Breathtaking, really, with flawless skin, endless legs and a C cup she is proud of but never flaunts. She is also the best at what she does, a record-setter, a rule-breaker, a redefiner. She is a woman who plays like a man, one of the boys, if the boys had C cups and flawless skin. She's nice, too. Sweet, even. Kind to animals and children, she is the sort of woman who worries about others more than about herself, a saint in high-tops."
Okay. A couple of mentions. The SJ crew loves getting self-righteous about stuff like this and this time it took a nine-page discussion on the forum to figure out the significance and appropriateness of Candace Parker's breast size.
•" How did her cup size even come up? Did the writer ask or did Parker just volunteer it? Either way, that's weird.
I covered women at in a BCS conference for years. I'd have never even considered ask about their physical attributes like that — and they certainly didn't bring it up."
• "Talking about size her bra is reduces a great women's basketball player to nothing but a sex object. It's ridiculous."
• "This is why I don't get this magazine at all, and every issue reinforces my confusion. They put this beautiful woman on the cover, elegant and pregnant and cool.....but they can't resist the gratuitous boob reference. If Parker 'never flaunts'' her breasts, why did Glock have to flaunt them for her?"
• "If she's such a great athlete, there's no need to talk about her cup size. This isn't Maxim or FHM. Talking about her flawless skin is fine - and spot-on. You can describe how beautiful she is without going into the discussion of bras."
• "It's a double-standard that a female writer can write about such personal attributes and get a pass for the most part. If a male writer made such a reference, he'd be called sexist and drilled by every feminist organization out there."
You get the idea. It seems most of the SJ people are either anti-boob reference or incensed that if a man wrote this opener, he'd be shredded for it (duh).
For a follow-up, maybe someone should figure out if Parker was a C-cup before or after the pregnancy. Because if she's a D-cup now, that's definitely probably worth three mentions in a lede paragraph.
How do you feel about Candace Parker's C-cup being referenced in the lede? [SportsJournalists.com]
Send an email to A.J. Daulerio, the author of this post, at ajd@deadspin.com.
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