Where is her evidence that inappropriate comments about Allison Stokke are coming from 40 yo men in their mother's basement? (any pictures of Miss Sommervile would be poetic justice).
http://deadspin.com/xml/comments/264051
How To Detract Attention From Your Attractive Teenage Daughter
First of all, the most ogled Victor Sailer photo of Allison Stokke first appeared on dyestat.com, a high school running web site. That web site was founded by John Dye, a man in his mid-60's who has a particular fondness for putting photos of high school hotties on his site. Hot photos of minor-aged girls means page hits which means advertising dollars. Many of the hotties that DyeStat incessantly promotes during high school perform poorly in college because they are burned-out from being discussed in a sexual manner on the internet for so many years. John Dye sold DyeStat to Student Sports, a subsidiary of Nike, a few years ago but he still roams the sidelines every weekend as DyeStat's "chief photographer", looking for the next Allison Stokke presumably.
DyeStat to this day is particularly notorious for the bashing and objectification of female athletes. A cursory review of their message boards will prove it. The sad thing is DyeStat is a high school running web site run by adults. One would never know it.
The other person involved with blowing the Stokke photo completely out of proportion is Weldon Johnson, the co-founder of letsrun.com. He's a man in his early 30's. Johnson allows "hotness" threads on his message board, which does not require registration and has an "anything goes" attitude. Most of the inappropriate comments about Stokke seem to be written by older men on letsrun. Only extremely lurid comments are removed, and only infrequently. Anti-President Bush threads tend to disappear quickly on letsrun, but "hotness" threads tend to last forever--with thousands of posts.
The sad thing is, beside the sexual objectification of minor-aged female athletes in exchange for page hits and advertising dollars, is how humiliating this must be for the girls themselves. Any parent of an attractive teenage daughter would be crazy to have her participate in track and field at any level above intramurals. What strikes me as tragic is the fact that Allison Stokke and others of her ilk are national class athletes who have worked extremely hard for their success in the sport. The message board degradation is palpable.
The John Dyes, Weldon Johnsons and others in sports media need to take a look in their mirror and ask themselves whether they would appreciate forty-year-old men who live in their mother's basement analyzing their daughter's ass and boobs (while still in high school) on an internet web site. Or seventeen-year-old high school boys who have never been out on a date because they've never been able to log off the internet long enough to even talk to a girl. That is the demographic we're talking about here, and for any webmaster with a brain and a bit of a backbone, it would seem easy to say, "ENOUGH!"
Vanessa_Somerville_Marine_IL