The Blowfish Blog

[Greta Christina] The Eroticism of the Olympics, and the Inherent Hotness of Variety

A couple weeks ago, I wrote here about the eroticism of exercise.

Today, I want to write about the eroticism of watching other people exercise.

I’m talking, of course, about the Olympics.

I’ve been getting very sucked into the Olympics this year. I’m finding it fascinating as a social phenomenon. And of course, I’m drawn in by the beauty and drama and ridiculous display of discipline and skill.

But I’ve also been watching it from the perspective of the erotic connoisseur/ drooling pervert.

And I’m finding it fascinating from that perspective as well.

I’m only occasionally finding the Olympics arousing to the point of being pornographic. I’m definitely enjoying the parade of beautiful athletic bodies in tight, skimpy outfits, and I will admit that I’ve been watching women’s wrestling with one hand on the remote and the other on a vibrator. (And can I just say: Actual, top-level female wrestling? So much hotter than the fake stuff in porno.) So far, though, women’s wrestling is the only Olympic event that I’ve been treating as actual porn.

But there’s a broader, more diffuse sort of erotic pleasure I’m getting from the Olympics.

And that’s this: In the parade of beautiful athletic bodies in tight, skimpy outfits, there is an astonishing variety: a variety of physical forms that the bodies take which I’m finding beautiful, and inspiring, and tremendously erotic.

It’s all too common in our culture to mistake athleticism for body fascism. “Physically fit” is too often used as a euphemism for “approaching a single ideal of perfection that all bodies are supposed to aspire to.” I’ve fallen into that trap myself: I’ve definitely felt lumpy and out of place at the gym as a chubby middle-aged lady in a weight room full of Venuses and Adonises. (It doesn’t help that I work out at a university gym, populated largely by grad students in their twenties.)

But watching the Olympics is a lovely, sexy reminder that even top-level physical fitness comes in a delightful variety of forms.

There’s the long lankiness of the runners. The cheery robustness of the volleyball players. The sleek curvaceousness of the female divers. The sleek compactness of the male divers. The agile wiriness of the fencers. The pure muscularity of the male gymnasts. The deceptive petiteness of the female gymnasts. The massive power of the weightlifters. The solid, almost stocky fireplug build of the female wrestlers.

All of them at the absolute top of their game.

I’ve always found variety, in and of itself, to be erotic. It’s always been at the heart of my big complaint about mainstream porn: the bodies of the performers, and the sexual acts themselves, fall into such small, confining, repetitive little boxes. I have nothing against the bodies and the acts themselves: I just get tired of seeing the same ones over and over again.

Variety, in and of itself, is erotic. And if you can tear yourself away from the big-ticket sports and spend some time with the quirky, lesser-known ones, the Olympics give you a parade of physical variety that is breathtakingly beautiful, and kind of ridiculously hot.

And best of all, it can give a huge boost to your own sexual self-esteem. If all I watched were the gymnasts and the runners, a night with the Olympics might make me feel pretty lumpy and unsexy. But with the time I’ve spent watching the dazzling variety of forms that physical fitness can take . . . well, the next time I step into the weight room, I’m definitely going to feel a whole lot less lumpy, and a whole lot more hot and beautiful.

Especially since, of all the athletes I’ve seen at the Olympics, the ones that my own body most closely resembles are the female wrestlers.

Greta Christina, copyright © 2008. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

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This entry was posted on Friday, 22 August 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.