By Sheila Anderson 

Please don't tell me it's true.
Apparently, it is no longer enough to be a talented Olympic athlete. At least for women, that is.
Now, you need to be sexy, too.
Recently, Claude Bergeret, vice president of the International Table Tennis Federation, announced that women's table tennis players should wear sexier clothes to make the sport spectator-friendly. She suggested skirts and shirts with “curves.”
Maybe it sounds harmless -- until you really think about it. What it comes down to is exploiting women's bodies to attract viewers at the Olympics. At the hands of a woman, no less.  
I hoped women had enough value as Olympic athletes so we wouldn't have to focus on their sexuality. Or at least I thought they had.
If viewer ratings are the driving force behind everything we do, we're going to have awfully empty souls.
The Olympics bring together athletes from across the world to celebrate athleticism, perseverance, and sportsmanship. Not to glorify being an object.
Women have sacrificed a lot throughout history to be taken seriously and achieve equality. Think of the women tortured on the “Night of Terror” during the suffrage movement in the early 1900s. Were those struggles so we could let pop culture take over and turn the focus on sexuality, rather than athleticism at the Olympics? I hope not.
But maybe the value of female athletes changes at a rate inversely proportional to the amount of clothing they are wearing. Yes, the more clothing, the less valuable, the less clothing, well, you get it.
This could explain the vast hours of beach volleyball coverage, a game where one is certain that at any moment body parts may slip out from the minuscule bikini outfits players wear.
Accepting the objectification of women can only have grave effects on everything women have achieved. For our daughters it will ingrain the notion that women are not valued for their worth as human beings or their contributions to society. They'll end up being valued for the way they look in a bikini. And for the number of people who want to watch them in their bikini.
But maybe that's where we're headed anyway. That's what you get in a society where the trend in women's pants is two inch zippers and cleavage is a fact of daily life.
At least now I know why there was no prime-time major network coverage of the women's gold medal soccer match
Shin-guards cover too much.