Jenny Thompson, MD

Winner of 12 Olympic medals ( 8 gold medals) in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 Summer Olympics, the most for any female swimmer in Olympic history. She was still winning medals while in medical school. She is now a pediatric anesthesiologist.

Exploitation?

Leave the toplessness in your swimsuit issue where the bimbos belong and put Jenny Thompson in the same place of respect that you put other top athletes.

• Kim Baer

After seeing the pose of Thompson, I turned every page of your magazine. Funny, the male athletes were fully clothed. Not one had his pants off with his hands covering this anatomy.

• Elizabeth Vidmar

Liberation?Bare in Mind Rick Reilly

Wow, Jenny Thompson has a nice pair, doesn't she? Massive. Firm. Perfectly shaped.

Her thighs, I mean.

At least that's what blew me away when I saw the five-time Olympic gold-medalist swimmer topless, hands over her breasts, in Sports Illustrated recently. Killer thighs that could crush anvils. Calves sharp enough to slice tomato. Biceps that ought to be on a box of baking soda.

Why did USA Today columnist Christine Brennan go all Aunt Bea, complaining that the Thompson picture "sends [girls] the insecure message that an old stereotype still lives and thrives. If you doubt this, look at the picture and notice where your eye goes first ... right to her chest."

What a load of hypocrites. When Dennis Rodman posed nude on a motorcycle, I don't recall Brennan complaining about where women's eyes went. Lance Armstrong, Dan O'Brien and Ricky Williams have all posed nude, and I don't remember de Varona rushing around trying to get them to put on a towel.

 "I don't get this," WSF executive director Donna Lopiano told The Orlando Sentinel. "When you've spent half your life looking down at the line at the bottom of the pool -- and you've given up everything -- it's incongruent to take that body you worked so hard to build and use it for sex."

 I agree, Ms. Lopiano. You don't get it. Thompson took her clothes off because she spent her whole life looking at the bottom of swimming pools. If she had to miss a lifetime of proms and parties and triple fudge cake, at least she should be able to show the world what she was building in the gym six hours a day. "I'm proud of my body," Thompson says, "and the work it's taken to get it where it is."

Bad messages? Here are women with real bodies, fit bodies, attainable bodies -- not bodies you can only get through the Lucky Gene Club or plastic surgery or throwing up your lunch every day. You want a bad message? Set up Elle Macpherson as the ideal feminine role model. Trying to be 5'11", 103 pounds with a 22-inch waist and a 38-inch bust sends a bad message.

 Thompson sends young girls a terrific message: Fit is sexy. Muscles are sexy. Sport is sexy. Give it a try sometime.

Sports Illustrated, September 4, 2000

Dorothea Lange, 1936

Dorothea Lange, 1939

Dorothea Lange, 1939

Young mother on camping trip left behindwhile father went for a hike.

Eighteen-year-old mother from Oklahoma,now a California migrant

Photos can be arguments that have designs on readers’ values, beliefs and actions.

 Textual analysis is attentive to features within the item under scrutiny. It ignores history and culture, and it assumes that the item “speaks for all time and to all people.”

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Visual metaphor

2003

2003

Cultural knowledge