Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard’s nude pictorial in the July issue of Playboy has raised all sorts of fuss — is the magazine celebrating the female athlete or exploiting her sexuality? (My main issue: How did she end up looking like this? With that makeup, hair and posing — that jawline! — from the neck up the poor woman looks like a drag queen, not a beautiful female athlete. I think it’s because instead of trying to make the most of her athletic features, they tried to spackle a "Girls Next Door" facade onto it. The body is amazing, but they manage to Frankenstein on a "butterface." Considering she can look like this, Playboy really messed up this cover.)Fox Sports columnist Michael Rosenberg talks all around the point without actually making one, even saying "Somehow — even when she poses for Playboy — her athletic feats give her innocence" that make it OK for readers to pick up the magazine.I’m reminded more of Mark Simpson, the writer who coined "metrosexual," and his more recent nomenclature: "sporno," the recent hypersexualization of sporting figures. In Out magazine he wrote: "Sportsmen, like porn stars, are by definition show-offs, but more particularly because it means more money, more power, more endorsements, more kudos. It acknowledges the consumerist, showbiz direction that sport is moving in and engorges and inflates their career portfolio to gargantuan proportions."He was talking mostly about how European soccer and rugby players have begun showing up in sexed-up ads for Calvin Klein underwear (Freddie Ljundberg), Dolce & Gabbana (Italian soccer stars) and the Dieux de Stade calendar (and its making-of video), but you can see its influence creeping into America when skier Jeremy Bloom poses for Equinox fitness like this and swimmer Michael Phelps ends up on French fashion magazine layouts wearing his Speedo. (And David Beckham … a category unto himself.) Poor Jim Palmer had no idea what he was starting back in the early ’80s…

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