The sexy pictures are part of a newly-launched campaign designed to appeal to both potential FSU basketball players and fans. The new website for the FSU team features many pictures like the one above. In the "meet the team" section, each player has her own profile page, which is overwhelmingly dominated by a shot of the athlete dressed in a satin dress, exiting a limo. Although some clutch basketballs - the only nod to the fact that these are basketball players, not debutantes - others are straight up glamor shots (the most obvious example is the image of Kayli Keough, guard/forward). The main page shows the entire team in a limo, perfectly coiffed and smiling at the camera. Yes, they look great. They fully live up to their claim of "Confidence. Strength. Beauty. We've got it all." But it is hard not to wonder, what does beauty have to do with anything?

This is the question posed by Jayda Evans. In her column for the Seattle Times, Evans examines the re-designed site for the No. 15 team, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the emphasis on femininity and beauty indicates an underlying fear of being viewed as anything other than straight. She mentions the documentary Training Rules, about former Penn State coach Rene Portland, who allegedly had just three rules for her players: No drinking, no drugs, and absolutely no lesbians. Portland may have been more explicit about her homophobia, but the FSU website reveals a certain desire to move away from the actual game - where players are sweaty, strong and accomplished, perhaps frighteningly so - towards a much more polished image of female athletes as celebrities first, players second. Evans points out that attempt to make female athletes appear "powerful, beautiful, strong and accomplished" is just another way to gloss over the fact that they are being overtly feminized. For Evans, "beautiful" is translated as "attractive to men," and implicitly, heterosexual.

In a press release for the newly launched website, FSU coach Sue Semrau explains their decision to depict their players en route to some fancy shindig: "We feel it is important to set ourselves apart as much as we can... We wanted to have a product that would stand out to the people we are trying to reach." The "product" being not only the game, but the individual players. At Carnal San Francisco, editor Tim McElreavy suggests that Semrau's attempt to "sell" the game reveals a disheartening focus on the bottom line: "While it would be naïve to believe that college sports isn't or shouldn't be concerned with the bottom line, such words, especially from a coach, really seem to instrumentalize the players' achievements. Add to this business rhetoric the stereotype of the pretty woman, and women's sports marketing moves further and further away from the actual sport," he writes.

And to drive home this point, take a look at the website for the FSU men's team, where the players are portrayed in a rather different light. There is no doubt that this is about the "actual sport." Their website features pictures of the players in action. Their faces are contorted into grimaces of concentration while sweat pours off their bodies. Okay, it's not unattractive, but it's also not purposefully sexy. The emphasis is on the game, not the dolled-up players. While FSU women have to be "sold" and "appeal" to the public, the men's team can safely coast on the knowledge that people watch them play for reasons other than their sex appeal.

Women's Hoops Media Guides And Web Sites Getting Sexier [Seattle Times]
Glam Photos Show The Ugly Side Of Women's Basketball [Carnal San Francisco]
Glammed Up B'Ball Stars Spark Uproar [Newser]
Florida State University Women's Basketball [Official Site]

It's that most of these paeans to Maddow's looks inevitably come back to the fact that she is a lesbian. Can you stand to say it again? Daphne Merkin thinks you can. Judy Berman at Salon thinks you can. Lesbian, lesbian, lesbian! It's like Rachel Maddow wouldn't be considered attractive or pretty or cute if she wasn't a lesbian. (Did someone mention she's a lesbian? Because she's a lesbian. She has a girlfriend and they have sex with each other and then go to the market together and they're lesbians. Look at her in all her cute dyke-y-ness!)

I mean, enough already. No profiles of Campbell Brown or Katie Couric dwell obsessively on their heterosexuality, and to do so about Maddow's sexuality serves only to emphasize her "otherness." I think it's great to have a non-plastic, non-blonde, short-haired, smart woman in a cable news chair, serving up important information in a way that is accessible to a variety of people and with a touch of humor. I think the admiration of her vaguely androgynous looks are, frankly, in keeping with a trend toward admiring androgyny generally rather than adulating hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine forms that were more in vogue when I was younger. She's a former Rhodes scholar, has a doctorate, worked on HIV/AIDS issues and prison reform and bummed around Massachusetts doing odd jobs to figure out what she wanted to do with her life when she was done with all that. Her partner is a respected artist, they live in a tiny town in Western Massachusetts rather than in Manhattan and she is really, really into old school cocktails to the point that she gets invited to teach Martha Stewart how to make them. The fact that she is a lesbian is probably the least interesting thing about her, and yet it seems to be quite a lot of what most people focus on.

Merkin is, of course, a case in point. Some highlights below (emphasis mine):

LESBIANISM has finally come into a glamour of its own, an appeal that goes beyond BUTCH and FEMME archetypes into a more universal seduction. Her name is Rachel Maddow, the polished-looking, self-declared GAY newscaster who stares out from the MSNBC studio every weekday night and MAKES LOVE to her audience. She may not be one of Hefner's Girls Next Door, exactly, but she is no bare-faced, unstylish DYKE either, however she chooses to characterize herself. Although she insists that she has no interest in the issue of physical appearance - her own or anyone else's - Maddow's ambition has allowed her to play the mediagenic game: to be carefully made up, her brown eyes given depth with flattering eye shadow, her short (but not too short) haircut artfully coiffed. With her Poindexter glasses, Jil Sander pantsuits and Converse sneakers, she's not trying to PASS, but she's willing to prettify her image sufficiently to endear her to male viewers.

I mean, come on! Maddow wears make-up on TV because everyone wears make-up on TV, including Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, but that doesn't mean they're bending gender lines by doing so. She's not doing it to appeal to men, or to try to subvert her sexual identity or be a more "passable" lesbian. She's doing it because, like the suits she wears on the air and eschews off the air, that's what you wear to work — a nurse isn't trying to be a "sexy nurse" by wearing a uniform any more than Maddow is trying to be sexy by dressing in the uniform of her profession.

And there's more:

Sally Hershberger, the celebrity hairstylist reputed to be the model for the Donna Juan character of Shane in ‘‘The L Word,'' believes that Maddow is ‘‘so charismatic that it doesn't really matter whether she's GAY.'' Well, yes and no. It would matter if Maddow were genuinely androgynous-looking, like a real-life version of the neutered Pat from ‘‘Saturday Night Live.'' Or if she were hard-edged in her style, acting combative instead of charming. But as it turns out, the only real giveaway is, in fact, her haircut. ‘‘Most women,'' Hershberger points out, ‘‘don't get their hair cut that short.'' (The exceptions, of course, present themselves the minute one makes this distinction, the extravagantly feminine women who wore their hair cropped boyishly short and looked all the more beautiful for it - Audrey Hepburn, Jean Seberg, Mia Farrow, Twiggy.) Hershberger deems Maddow's most recent haircut ‘‘too short,'' but that might just be the competition talking. In any case, hair grows in, and Maddow's star shows every sign of further ascending. Welcome to the brave new world of LESBIAN glamour.

I love that having short hair is a dead giveaway that a woman is a lesbian (someone should tell my mom), except when the woman is straight and attractive. I also think the connotation is that Maddow would look better with long hair but is only wearing it short to denote that she's GAY. I actually think Maddow's haircut suits her face because, like the other women listed, she has great bone structure. It's probably also way easier to take care of than my hair, which makes me slightly jealous but I don't have the face for short hair.

The real question is: why does being a lesbian make Maddow more attractive? Why is her sexual identity so much a part of how people perceive her physically? It seems to me that it plays to the stereotype that gay people in general are somehow more sexually available, and to the even worse stereotype that lesbians are secretly all a little bisexual. It makes what is attractive about Maddow her "otherness," it makes her sexuality something exotic rather than something she (like most everyone else) just takes for granted, and it marks her with a big pink "L." Either you think Rachel Maddow is attractive, or you don't, but it shouldn't be because of who she loves.

Butch Fatale [T Style]
Rachel Maddow, Reluctant Sex Symbol [Salon]

• Mischa Barton goes on record about that epic headband launch we mentioned! Quoth the actress formerly known as Marissa Cooper, "People want to see that you can deliver and do, like, a good job.” [WWD]

• Belstaff is designing Harry Potter's latest wizard robe. But isn't that dictated by millennia of magical tradition? [WWD]
• We get the whole "haha 'lipstick lesbians'" thing, but still...L Word lipsticks? Anyhoo, choose between Bette, Kit, Alice, and Shane. [Bellasugar]
• A Brooklyn administrator claims the many grands she stole for a Victoria's Secret habit was for the benefit of the school's Fifth Graders. The judge deemed this one of a "rich array of implausible excuses" [New York Post]
• The Lanvin/Acne collaboration is as pricey as everyone feared. [Fashionista]
• This holiday shopping season is "the worst in memory." [WWD]
• Model and homeless-style enthusiast was burgled - while at home. The bold thieves marched in and lifted a bunch of designer tags. [New York Post]
• Azzaro launches an e-commerce site. Maybe for all those bashful richies practicing futive consumption? [WWD]
• The ElleUK staff's New Year's resolutions seem to involve a lot of expensive skincare products. [ElleUK]
• Celebs' Christmas lists: expensive stuff. [Fabsugar]
• Speaking of living it up: check out the "sweet room" at Asprey's Christmas bash, "filled with Christmas trees made from pink and green Ladurée macaroons, miniature cupcakes and chocolate fountains." [WWD]
• "There's nothing sexy about bread lines." So begins this kinda tasteless but still terrific ode to "depression-era" glam. [Style.com]
• Dutch artist Thomas Voorn makes "textile graffiti" that says stuff like "Cosmic Christian Ceremony." [Sassybella]
• Eilidh MacAskill, managing editor of InStyle, takes the helm as EIC of British InStyle. [FashionWeekDaily]
• Pret a Portea, London's "cult afternoon fashion tea" now has a Vespa that delivers to fashionistas' doors. [VogueUK]
• Blair Waldorf cover theft! [Fashionista]
• Here's a slideshow of celebrities in their own designs. They look as embarrassed as we feel. [Daily news]

• Posh adorns the January 2009 cover of Harper's Bazaar, and inside she talks about high heels, her trademark smirk/smile, wearing tracksuits around the house, and her relationship with the ever-present paparazzi. “I don’t complain about paparazzi because I’ve put myself in that position, and so has David. But I always say to the boys, someone is going to take your picture because you’re handsome or you’re smart or because you’re so good at soccer. But every now and again, Romeo might pick up one of David’s cameras and say, ‘Victoria, Victoria, over here!’ And his attitude is sort of angry… I tell you, the paparazzi would not be sitting outside if they realized I was the most boring person in Hollywood." [Just Jared]
• The $26,000 a month Manhattan apartment where Heath Ledger died has been taken off the market temporarily, as some have been speculating it was too "ghoulish" to sell. [TMZ]

• Unlike Posh, Johnny Depp is not okay with the paparazzi. "I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I don't think of myself as being a celebrity, it's too mortifying," the Depp says. [People]
• The Jolie-Pitts just had a mechanical bull delivered to their house in L.A. That is all. [TMZ]
• Do you love Jemaine and Britt? Well you're in luck, because here's the trailer for the second season of Flight of the Conchords which airs in January. [Stuff.Co.Nz]
• Longtime buddy Gabrielle Union says Beyoncé's more Southern belle than booty shakin' Sasha Fierce deep down. "Beyoncé is quiet and reserved, very Southern, sweet and polite. If someone told me that girl was gonna go on stage and do the kind of performances that she does, and be so fiery, and this quintessential and iconic entertainer, I'd be [in disbelief], like, 'Yeah, okay!" [People]
• The L Word is offing its most annoying character, two-timing writer girl Jenny, played by Mia Kirshner, during its 6th season premiere. "The episode, which airs January 18, begins with a splash as Jenny's body is discovered in a swimming pool. Accident, or murder - and whodunit? Viewers will have to wait for those answers." [AP]
• Rumors abound that professional jackass Steve- will be on Dancing with the Stars next season. He's even more bonkers than Cloris Leachman! [TMZ]
• Katy Perry believes she was "snubbed" because she did not get nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy. Katy Perry also believes that she has "talent." [Perez]
• All My Sons, the Broadway play co-starring Katie Holmes, is closing later this month. But don't blame Mrs. Cruise: all of Broadway is floundering in this recession. [Jossip]
• Britney flipped the light switch on the Christmas tree at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles while flanked by L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Adam Carolla. That's some eclectic company! [People]
• An Arizona judge has issued a warrant for DMX's arrest. The rapper was supposed to appear in court today, but his reps say that he is in rehab at an undisclosed location. He's facing drug, identity theft and animal cruelty charges in the Phoenix area. [TMZ]