It's a healthy new norm, especially for young girls, who, if Seventeen magazine's circulation is any hint, remain in sore need of new messages about their bodies. I'm always ranting and raving about how sports are a window to society. The Thompson incident is a classic example. Western civilization is now a couple of decades past the peak of the feminist movement and seemingly has a couple more to go before the mass media abandons anorexic advertising and the attempt to sell the idea of a body type of three percent of the population to all of it. Sports represent the fulcrum in this balance between how far women have come and how far they have to go in society.
Sports contain the potential to change society's thinking about what the norms are.
Before the new norms are cemented, though, we have to clean up the residue of the old ones. A good place to start would be for SI to lose its double standard of simultaneous sex-ploitation and attempted redefinition. Only then can the new messages of people like Thompson come through loud and clear.