Let’s play a super-fun drinking game! Take a shot every time we find another thing that’s wrong with today’s article on Baylor basketball star Brittney Griner and “changing standards of beauty.”
The piece, in today’s Times, argues that beauty ideals have changed, thanks in large part to the increasing visibility of athletic women. Or, as the author puts it,
Feminine beauty ideals have shifted with amazing velocity over the last several decades, in no realm more starkly than sports. Muscular athleticism of a sort that once raised eyebrows is now commonplace. Partly this can be credited to the presence on the sports scene of Amazonian wonders like the Williams sisters, statuesque goddesses like Maria Sharapova, Misty May Treanor and Kerri Walsh, sinewy running machines like Paula Radcliffe or thick-thighed soccer dynamos like Mia Hamm.
And the poster child for our new acceptance of this “androgyny” is the 19-year old Griner. Because, as the author notes, “With her attenuated Gumby torso, coltish legs and tomboy features, the still growing Ms. Griner falls well outside familiar beauty standards.” The point here, as far as I can tell, is to get people to admit that they find Griner beautiful, and to recognize that they once might not have? Though the piece does acknowledge that most web chatter is devoted to speculating about whether or not the teen is a lesbian or, indeed, a man. How to work around this? With “beauty arbiters” giving half-hearted endorsements!
“I try never to work with just the type of person who’d be attractive to me,” said Katie Grand, the influential stylist and editor of Love magazine. “If you look at art through the ages,” Ms. Grand added, “some will always prefer a more straightforward beauty and others something untraditional.” A woman of Ms. Griner’s appearance might be, Ms. Grand said, “fantastic to work with, since I try to work always with people who are interesting on a lot of levels,” and not merely those with model-pretty looks…Before Googling Ms. Griner’s most recent spate of off-court pictures, said James Scully, a model casting agent whose clients have included Gucci and Stella McCartney, he knew her only as this “slightly gender-ambiguous athlete who reads either as a pretty hot boy or a trans-girl, and not particularly a person who falls into the realm of how people see beautiful.”
Adds another modeling scout, “I always love one-offs and amazing creatures…Maybe I should represent her? Why not? I can imagine a market for that.”