The European Broadcasting Union has issued new guidelines on how to film women’s sporting events so that the athletes won’t appear sexually appealing.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Oh Klavan, you marvelous merchant of mirth, how is it possible your effervescent imagination keeps merrily spewing bubbles of laughter into the air until all of life seems a frothy elixir of hilarity? Who but you could dream up a scenario in which some Europeans have so little to occupy their lives, they actually found time to think of a way to discourage the six or seven people who watch women’s sports from watching women’s sports? Where but in the imagination of a living genius of joy could there blossom a fabrication so absurd that it could actually make the incipient takeover of Europe by radical Muslim rapists and murderers seem like kind of an improvement over the Europe we have now?
But no, so help me, I am not making this story up.
The European Broadcasting Union — whose members operate nearly 2,000 media outlets that reach audiences of more than a billion people across the continent — has drawn up a list of disrespectful camera angles to be avoided to ensure that televised women’s sports do not become sexualized or have any other reason to exist.
For instance, according to the document released by the EBU, camera operators should not use low angles during such events as the women’s pole vault, lest it provide male viewers with a momentary view between the jumper’s legs and afford them a glimpse of a gateway into a heaven of pleasure beyond their wildest imaginations.
Likewise, camera operators should avoid close-ups on a female athlete’s face during her moments of maximum effort lest it cause male viewers to speculate that such an expression might be similar to the one she has when she has been coaxed to a pinnacle of ecstasy by an expert lover’s masterful yet tender caresses.
Slow motion replays of the efforts of women runners should be avoided, especially if the runners are well-endowed, for fear it will remind the viewer of that time when he was thirteen and the new “Tomb Raider” game came out with a Lara Croft who could actually jiggle so that he sat in front of the TV pressing the jump button over and over until he developed carpal tunnel syndrome and had to tell his mother he had been typing a lot because he was writing a dissertation on the temptations of St. Anthony.
Also discouraged is any camera angle that falls below the waist of a female tennis player, thus revealing the way her adorable little skirt sometimes flies up in the air during her backhand so that the viewer’s eye can trace the mind-destroying curve of her silken legs from her sneaker-covered but doubtlessly suckable toes to the underwear so wonderfully filled by her soul-particlizing shapeliness.
The EBU’s British chairman Sir Nigel Skoolbottom says the new guidelines are meant to eliminate any glimpse of any part of any female athlete’s body that might sexually excite the male viewer. And since virtually every glimpse of every part of every female athlete’s body will likely sexually excite the male viewer, Sir Skoolbottom recommends that every potentially thrilling video of a woman during a sporting event should be instantly replaced by the image of a naked schoolboy being caned by a stern yet ruggedly handsome headmaster so that the viewer comes to understand just how very naughty he has been for thinking those dirty thoughts about someone of the same gender as Sir Skoolbottom’s beloved mum.
Now some critics have pointed out that men are more interested in looking at women’s bodies than they are in appreciating their athletic prowess or indeed their intellectual capabilities or career achievements or ideas or conversation, and that banning sexually stimulating camera angles might reduce the audience for women’s sports to three virtue-signaling lesbians who are only pretending to give a damn, thus making it almost impossible for women athletes to garner an audience and earn a living.
However, the European Broadcasting Union suggests that the problem could be addressed if the women athletes simply supplement their incomes by opening accounts with OnlyFans.