To Those Of You Who Say Cal Girls Aren’t Hot…
We present to you Exhibit A. We’re not just talking about looks (and boy does she have them), because she also has far more. The girl in profile will tell you herself the remaining otherworldly characteristics she possesses.
Early this month, 18-year-old Allison Stokke walked into her high school track coach’s office and asked if he knew any reliable media consultants. Stokke had tired of constant phone calls, of relentless Internet attention, of interview requests from Boston to Brazil.
In her high school track and field career, Stokke had won a 2004 California state pole vaulting title, broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California, yet only track devotees had noticed. Then, in early May, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet in New York had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1,000 new messages on her MySpace page. A three-minute video of Stokke standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.
“I just want to find some way to get this all under control,” Stokke told her coach.
Three weeks later, Stokke has decided that control is essentially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of the attractive, athletic pole vaulter. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke’s picture and leered.
See, this is the fascinating thing about the Internet. There are several ways to get singled out as an individual. Either you can slowly grovel your way into the limelight, like us, by working hard with little to show for it. Or you can do something patently idiotic like this, and get your twenty-five seconds of fame. Or you can just be hot and talented. Then things will just work out for themselves. It doesn’t hurt for your family to get an interview with the Washington Post to help limit her exposure, you know?
We can’t help it that we think she’s a beautiful woman. But at least she has her priorities in place. And to be fair, we’re attracted to her for her all-around talents. But she’ll have to learn to deal with the fact that she’s in an unfair world where her attraction will get as much attention as her accomplishments.
(By the way, Exhibits B and C are still being searched for. We’ll let you know when we find the gorgeous gals.)
Teen Tests Internet’s Lewd Track Record [Washington Post]
Allison Stokke in the Washington Post [Our Sturdy Golden Bear] (Image from here as well)
(We have a video interview from CBS. We don’t think this video is suggestive at all. And boy this girl loves pole vaulting.)
Any thoughts on this matter? Leave in the comments.
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7 Responses to “To Those Of You Who Say Cal Girls Aren’t Hot…”
May 31st, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Stokke should be Exhibit B. How could you miss Exhibit A, Elizabeth Dindial?
http://figureskating.berkeley.edu/roster/edindial
http://thecaltvproject.com/v3/.....ue/health/
http://www.caltridelt.com/incl.....r_id=10682
See also: Playboy’s Women of Starbucks
May 31st, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Hollly crap. There’s a disadvantage to ignoring Cal TV after all.
May 31st, 2007 at 10:03 pm
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 photographerâ€, 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!â€
May 31st, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Welcome to the real world, where women are judged based not only on their looks and their talents. Ask any women who has interviewed for a high-ended job or date and you’ll know that the visual speaks just as much as the resume. It’s annoying that this double standard exists, but the fact is beautiful, talented girls will get more attention than talented ones or beautiful ones.
Guys especially have deeper reactions to the visual, so it’s up to her and her parents and peers to decide how much they let this attention bother them. A Washington Post feature will not help her cause for less attention though.
February 1st, 2008 at 8:19 pm
One more thing vis, Ms. Stokke. Look at what she’s wearing in that picture! Revealing is an understatement. Skin tight, bare midriff, skimpy shorts. You cannot tell me she does not want the attention of men. What astounds me about Ms. Somerville’s comments is that this is all about the loutish men, and that Stokke plays no part except that of innocent fawn. Ms. Stokke has of course invited all the attention she’s gotten. Am I’m quite sure she’ll continue to in the future.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:37 am
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