by Reena Daruwalla, guest writer for Nancy Hayssen.com

Do you know that Playboy magazine has sold out only twice in history: Once back when Marilyn Monroe posed for the center fold and in 1998 when Katarina Witt Olympic double gold medalist figure skater posed for the magazine? Now what this tells us is that this magazine, clearly a men’s magazine, has been at its’ most popular when it has featured real women and real looking women: Monroe was wonderfully curvy and womanly, Witt is an athlete with a beautiful, well defined musculature which is also something that is extremely attractive.

Nancy has done posts about the BBW (Big Beautiful Women) List and also about the spectacularly proportioned Serena Williams posing in all her nude glory to illustrate the point that women are beautiful and sexy in any all sizes and shapes and I wanted to do a post about nude athletes to illustrate the same point.

Another example of athletes promoting a healthy ideal of beauty is former Canadian water polo player Waneek Horn-Miller, who appeared on the cover of Time Magazine eight years ago. She is reported as having said, “…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 is also quoted as having said “Here is a woman, a great athlete, 160 pounds, who can bench-press her own body weight and squat 180 pounds.” to show how a athletes’ fit body can also epitomize a womanly ideal of beauty.

One more, very recent example of athletes modeling nude and furthering a fit and healthy ideal of good looks is the recent adverts for Powerade. Triple jumper Phillips Idowu, cyclist Rebecca Romero and swimmer Gregor Tait have all been photographed taking part in their individual sports as naked and the day they were born, as part of an advertising campaign for the sports drink.

As has been rather aptly remarked, “It makes the ideal of beauty have so many more dimensions. It’s not just, ‘I’m skinny and I have fake boobs.’” What can I say except LOL and AMEN!