The Olympics has Destroyed Womanhood

The source for this article was thethinkinghousewife, a random house wife’s (Laura Wood) blog.  If this wasn't a topic about women and opinions I don’t believe that she would be especially qualified to speak about any current events as much as a journalist would be.  The name of Wood’s blog grabbed my attention immediately because it seemed to me like she would be the kind of woman who ran her home but was still in your face about feminism. I thought that because the title of her blog was the thinking housewife as if housewives were normally not thinking.  Instead, I found that she adhered to the idea of women as homemakers with curves and a cookbook at hand.  The purpose of this article was to address the piece written by Yuksel Aytug, the Turkish journalist who said that the Olympics were destroying womanhood.  Wood felt that it was necessary to show some support for Aytug in the midst of a storm of angry responses to his article.  In the fallout of what most perceived to be an incredibly misogynistic statement Wood praised Aytug for finally saying what everyone was thinking back at home.  The intended audience was for people who agreed with Aytug that female Olympic athletes were ruining feminism or who she felt needed to be swayed into believing that Aytug was not, in fact, a misogynist.  I’m not exactly sure how well Wood achieved her purpose because she seemed to be winning and losing with each word she typed.  On one hand she established ethos really well, backing herself up with the opinions of other people who agreed and had pictures ready to show of androgynous women from the Olympics.  On the other hand, some of her language was far too strong and I found it off-putting. For example, when she said, “The Olympic Games are anti-woman. They require female athletes to ape men in grotesque ways. They compromise female fertility and modesty. They promote the idea that aggression and competitiveness in women are normal and healthy. They debase not just women athletes but womanhood throughout the world.”  To me it seemed like she made a huge claim that she doesn’t have any solid evidence to back it up and a sweeping generalization.  The claim she made was that the Olympics are anti-women.  That’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say, in my opinion, considering that if they were that anti-women then women wouldn’t be allowed to compete in them.  Women, unlike in a lot of other fields, are not treated much differently than the men in this competition and are given just as much praise for their achievements. The generalization she used was that that the Olympics “debase not just women athletes but womanhood throughout the world.”  Just to be sure I was getting the meaning correct I looked up the word debase which was defined as lowering the quality of something.  The Olympics literally put women on a pedestal and give them gold for being the very best at something around the world.  In what way does that debase them?  By using diction with negative connotations like grotesque and debase Wood, in my opinion, achieved the opposite of what she was hoping by making me offended instead of agree with her.