The cautious progress narrative?
I started reading this column with a little hesitation. The end of the Kournikova era? Really? Are not female athletes, including the columnist's celebrated Alex Morgan, still stripping down to promote their bodies, um, er, their sport, um...? Yes, it's still happening. It's still problematic. What's different, as the columnist points out, is that in the Kournikova era there seemed to be no space to which to have a discussion of women's sports. We were polarized. We had to talk about the sexualization of female athletes (or if you were outside of the critical discourse you discussed their hotness factor) and it made it difficult to talk about actual women's sports. But why did the Kournikova era end? What was it about that historical moment that pushed this woman (then girl) to be the most googled, searched for, downloaded entity? What was the sexual tenor of the country (of the western world?) in those years? Or was it just Kournikova? Did she just happen ...