When on June 23, 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon proclaimed into law Title IX of the Education Amendments, as it was then called, probably no one could have envisioned one day linking it to what is now so common it is almost an unofficial Olympic activity — the penchant of female Olympians to pose nude or semi-nude.
But the legislation that put U.S. women's high school and college sports on an equal financial footing with men's saw a generation of young women grow up being able not only to join teams and win athletic scholarships, but also gain a rising sense of their own power — sexual and otherwise — even if it annoys the hell out of feminists, sports federations and, in a few cases, their fathers.
At the Beijing Games, no fewer than three current Olympians — multiple medal-winning U.S. swimmer Amanda Beard, Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice (who has already won gold in the 400-metre individual medley) and U.S. high jumper Amy Acuff — have posed for what the British affectionately call "lads' magazines," respectively in FHM (For Him Magazine) and Playboy; FHM; and FHM, Maxim and Playboy.
"Playboy, I wouldn't have been comfortable with," says former Canadian water polo player Waneek Horn-Miller, who appeared on the cover of Time Magazine eight years ago, naked as the day she was born but for an eagle feather in her hair and a ball in her hand. "But it's an individual choice. I'm happy I did it. I would do it again."
Ms. Horn-Miller, a Mohawk from Kahnawake, Que., who is in Beijing working as a commentator for the CBC while her husband Keith Morgan is a Canadian judoka, says she posed to raise her sport's profile (it made its Olympic debut in the 2000 Games), but mostly to counteract the usual images of women that are predominant in the media, even in publications ostensibly geared to fitness.
"Look," she told The Globe and Mail, "it's one chance every four years to get out an image of a healthy athletic woman instead of an underweight, underage model. Athletes' bodies are much healthier — and they're functional!"
She says after she did the Time cover, "People told me it was something they'd show to their daughters. I mean, I was obsessed like everyone else with fashion magazines when I was a teenager. It's natural to look for the body ideal."
But with a female athlete, she says, readers can see that "Here is a woman, a great athlete, 160 pounds, who can bench-press her own body weight and squat 180 pounds."
Ms. Horn-Miller, now 32, was part of a trend that may have started with Olympic double gold medalist figure skater Katarina Witt, who in 1998 posed for Playboy, only the second issue of the magazine to sell out, the first being the inaugural one which featured a Marilyn Monroe centrefold.
But things peaked in the run-up to the 2000 Games in Sydney, when in the same year the Australian women's soccer team, the famous Matildas, put out a nude calendar, and American soccer player Brandi Chastain posed naked in her soccer cleats in the now defunct men's magazine, Gear.
Despite that, the better-known picture of Ms. Chastain was taken after she scored the winning goal against China in the 1999 FIFA women's World Cup, pulled off her jersey to reveal a black sports bra in what she said later was "a moment of insanity," and fell to her knees.
"It was a trend back in 2000," Ms. Horn-Miller says, when suddenly the ordinary centrefold wasn't just "Juliana from Texas" but "smart women; why wouldn't they also want to be seen as sexual?
"Let's face it," she says, "as humans, we like the physically good-looking, the beautiful.
