Skin, stalking, and Maria Sharapova

There have always been women tennis players whom many people found physically attractive: Chris Evert, Gabriela Sabatini, and Amanda Coetzer would all be considered easy on the eyes by many people. But none of these players had to deal with stalkers and near-stalkers, or at least not in the volume that some players must deal with them today.

Maria Sharapova, Gisela Dulko, and Daniela Hantuchova all have to contend with male fans who have no concept of decent boundaries. As I write this, Maria Sharapova's stalker has been banned from the Wimbledon tournament by Wimbledon officials.

What has changed is that the WTA players who are considered attractive are marketed like mad for their looks. Whether it is Hantuchova's posing for Italian Vogue, Tatiana Golovin's posing underwater, or one of Maria Sharapova's many modeling shoots, sex is being sold.

The Canon commercial featuring Sharapova is so clever and so well-done, I could almost like it, except for the fact that Maria behaves extremely seductively in it, and the ad would have been just as clever and artful had she not done so. Pulling a camera from her tight tennis shorts and doing a Marilyn Monroe turn with her shoulders gets the point across, and how.

Most of the girls and women on the WTA tour are very young, and the professional pressure they have is enough to give them considerable stress. Those who are considered attractive get more endorsements and more photographic opportunities, and they also become more vulnerable. Only a few decades ago, the women's movement would have put an abrupt end to some of the ads that we see today, but now sex sells as well as it ever did. In fact, when an interviewer asked Sharapova if the WTA was selling sex to market its tour, her answer was: "I don't care what they're selling."