I would like to share a letter I wrote to Amanda Beard when she appeared in Playboy magazine in July 2007. It reads as follows:I was so disappointed to see you pose in Playboy magazine. What surprises me most is that you are an accomplished Olympic athlete and yet you still choose to degrade yourself. Usually women who take this route aren't talented and have nothing else to offer the world except their bodies. Athletes at your level usually don't take "the easy way out." I would have hoped that instead of doing this, you would have been a better role model to young girls and women alike who should learn that women don't have to "sell" their bodies to get ahead in this world. If women are ever going to reach equal ground with men (who rarely subject themselves to this type of self-exploitation), these types of things have to stop. By posing in Playboy, you contribute to the degradation of not only yourself, but all women as you continue to promote the false belief that women are only good for one thing: sexual beings. Women have to take a stand and say, "I am better than this. I hold myself to a higher level." When sexuality is used to sell something and money is exchanged, it becomes degrading. And we all know, if money were not involved, you would most likely have not posed in Playboy. It is my belief that you ruin your reputation - the reputation that you have worked so hard to build as an accomplished athlete and lose the respect that so many people had for you both as an athlete and as a person when you engage in this type of activity.
