Big Girls

Shaker Spectrum Blue passed on this excellent article by ESPN columnist LZ Granderson about the best basketball player in the country that (comparatively) no one is talking about.

At 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds, you will not see Courtney Paris gracing too many magazine covers. Not because she's undeserving -- obviously she is -- but because she's not "cover girl material." Paris is pretty. But she's also big. Not just tall -- but big. And she's strong and athletic and confident, and she and others like her make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. Particularly men. Consequently magazines, including the one I write for, will always hesitate to put her on the cover even during the height of basketball season despite the fact she's the best college basketball player in the country.

This is March madness.

Actually, I take that back. I do have a better description for it. It's blatant discrimination.

It's a really interesting article, which touches on all sorts of issues we've discussed here before, from the correlation between women's sports and women's self-esteem to the arbitrariness of beauty standards. And underlying all of it is the notion that women's sports are both not as important as men's and that a woman's sport is valued by the beauty of its participants. (And not just beauty, but sexual orientation; the "dykier" a sport is perceived to be, the less valued it tends to be in the spectrum of women's sports.) Anyhow—read and discuss…