Sports Illustrated\'s New Swimsuit Issue Rouses Ire Over \'Ethnic Props\'

BEIJING â€" Sports Illustrated magazine’s Swimsuit issue has drawn criticism from feminists and other women, and some men, for unnecessarily sexualizing women and exhibiting bad taste. Or good taste, depending on your point of view.

But in the new, 2013 issue, the use of non-westerners as “ethnic props” for the often white women in teeny-weeny bikinis is rousing new ire and raising the question: has the magazine gone too far Are the images racist, as well as sexually exploitative Take a closer look at the images, here on Yahoo’s Shine site.

Two of these photos were taken in China. One is of the blonde model Anne V. on a river raft somewhere near Guilin, in Yunnan province the southwest, with an aged, grey-bearded Chinese man who looks like he’s partially toothless and is wearing baggy gray clothes and black gum boots. Heâ€s pulling on an oar. (The image on our site shows a different model.)

This “chick on the raft” image is one of the “saddest/funniest” in the magazine, commented someone named Dora Breckinridge on Jezebel, a feminist blog that says it aims to be fun while handling women’s issues with intelligence and sensitivity.

In Jezebel, Dodai Stewart wrote: “A white person relaxing, a person of color working. Tale as old as time.”

Ms. Stewart continued: “This photo cements stereotypes, perpetuates an imbalance in the power dynamic, is reminiscent of centuries of colonialism (and indentured servitude) and serves as a good example of both creating a centrality of whiteness and using “exotic” people as fash! ion props.”

The other image picked out by Ms. Breckinridge is “the one with all the little girls in China,” apparently taken in southwestern Guangxi province. There, a model stands among a dozen young girls wearing elaborate ethnic dress. They’re far shorter than the model is. She isn’t looking at the children. The contrast between her near-nudity and their heavy-looking costumes is almost comical. As the Shanghaiist, a popular China-based blog, puts it: “In the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, Chinese people are exotic props.”

In Jezebel, Ms. Stewart wrote of the image:

“The model, Jessica Gomes, is Australian, but her father is from Portugal and her mother is from Singapore. Since she’s part Asian, it could be argued that this shot is not about what Gwen Sharp at Sociological Images calls the centrality of whiteness. Yet the model, in Western clothes (howevr skimpy that suit may be), is placed in the center as a contrast to the children in non-Western clothes. It renders them “exotic,” a spectacle. In addition, the model is not interacting with the kids. Classic case of othering. Also: People are not props.”

As the Shanghaiist notes: “For Sports Illustrated, China is poverty and ‘ethnic’ clothing, not the world’s second-largest economy where the majority of people live in cities rather than the countryside.”

Others agree.

“Brave, Sports Illustrated, for de-humanizing your fellow global citizens in the name boobs and bikins” (sic.) “I hope everybody got paid properly for their human prop services,” wrote Angry Asian Man in his blog.

(Here’s some self-description of the blogger with the ! slightly ! alarming name: “I’m not as angry as you think,” he writes on his site. “I’m not here sitting in front of the computer, hating “whitey” and plotting revolution. This is just a subject that has always interested me â€" pointing out racism.”)

Of course, there have been sighs of despair at the politically-correct nature of the debate, as there always are.

Here’s one, from someone called Pete, one of thousands on Yahoo’s Shine site: “They are not “minorities” when they are in their own country. What a bunch of pc dopes we have here in the US.”

Said John S: “Wow, some people need to lighten up. I see pictures of pretty girls in bathing suits. I give it about 1 second and no deeper thought. I spend no time analyzing the back ground scenery, people or not.”

Jamba went for a funny one, noting: “There are other people in the photos I guess my eyeswere fixated elsewhere.”

Mario Draghi Takes the E.C.B.\'s Message to Spain

MADRIDâ€"The European Central Bank and its president, Mario Draghi, want to ensure that their voices get heard beyond the financial district of Frankfurt.

But their efforts to travel around Europe and spread their message more directly to the citizens of Europe have ended up backfiring, at least when it comes to visiting Spain, one of the countries at the center of the euro debt crisis.

Last May, the E.C.B. held one of its regular meetings in Barcelona - under the kind of police surveillance worthy of a city at war and in a convention center on the outskirts of the city, in order to shield Mr. Draghi and his fellow central bankers from any anti-austerity street protests. About 7,500 police officers were deployed around Barcelona, with helicopters hovering above, while only a few hundred students gathered in central Barcelona to protest spending cuts by the Spanish goverment in areas like health and education.

On Tuesday, Mr. Draghi was again in Spain, this time in Madrid to address lawmakers in Congress. The security was less fearsome, but the meeting was controversially held behind closed doors and without Parliament providing the usual transcript of such an official session. As a result, whatever was said inside, Mr. Draghi’s visit ended up generating more controversy because of its format than its content.

Afterward, Spain’s opposition lawmakers lambasted the president of the Spanish Parliament, Jesús Posada, for using frequency-scrambling technology to block any cellphone transmissions within the chamber during Mr. Draghi’s session, to thwart the plans of some parliamentarians who had promised that they would send Twitter messages and upload videos to keep people informed about what Mr. Draghi was saying.

Valeriano Gómez, the spokesman on the economy for lawmakers from the main opposition Socialist Party, said the restrictions surround! ing Mr. Draghi’s appearance had done “no favor to the E.C.B., nor to the prestige of our chamber.” Other left-wing lawmakers denounced the format of the event as a violation of parliamentary rules and an insult to democracy.

Mr. Draghi, meanwhile, later spoke to reporters to detail his views on Spain’s economy, while the E.C.B. also published the text of Mr. Draghi’s opening speech to Spanish lawmakers.

Asked about the lack of transparency, Mr. Draghi insisted that that he had not set the rules and would have had no problem speaking more openly before lawmakers if the Spanish Parliament had wanted. Given that videos of his session were eventually released in any case by some frustrated lawmakers, Mr. Draghi concluded that “I don’t believe anybody missed out on anything.”

Except perhaps Mr. Posada, the president of the Spanish Cngress, who may have hoped to see Mr. Draghi showing a bit more solidarity and helping justify his communications strategy.

Tired of the Duty-Free Shop Go Check Out Those Rodins

Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times

Steve and Kimberly Kulpanowski visited an art gallery at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport.

ROISSY, France â€" When Steve and Kimberly Kulpanowski arrived at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to fly home to Detroit, they could not believe their luck.

They had tried to take in as much of Paris as they could, including a Christmas dinner at the Eiffel Tower, but they had missed the sculptures of Auguste Rodin. After checking in and going through security, though, they found Rodin’s work in a most unexpected spot: in a small gallery tucked away between a Bulgari store and a cafe, on the way to their gate.

“We had missed it, that’s why we were so excited to find it here,” said Mr. Kulpanowski, 51. “I couldn’t even believe it.”

Officials at the airport inaugurated the museum space last December, hoping to improve the airport’s image and gain a competitive edge over other European hubs. And financially struggling artistic institutions are eager to promote their collections to the millions of passengers that come through annually. As for travelers, they finally have more than duty-free cigarettes and 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi to look forward to.

The 2,600-square-foot, T-shaped gallery opened in Satellite 4, a new international departures hall at the airport, which is 16 miles north of Paris.

The new terminal is slick and gleaming white, identical to many airport terminals, except perhaps for the smell of cheese wafting from a remarkably well-laden dairy section in the Buy Paris duty-free store.

The museum space, however, has the sober oak floors and polished black walls of a regular museum. Glass panes protect the sculptures, bronze and plaster torsos, expressive faces, winged figures. Only the luggage carts, shopping bags and passports hint at the gallery’s location.

“It’s a bit of a hidden treasure,” said Stephanie Giddings, a 33-year-old Australian flying back from Berlin, as two Japanese women took pictures of each other with their phones in front of a plaster cast of “The Thinker.”

The cone-shaped entrance of wood and glass panels that ushers visitors inside is easy to miss. Many travelers go by without a glance, and those who stop are surprised. There is no entrance fee. “They should advertise it more,” Mr. Kulpanowski said.

Aéroports de Paris, the public company that runs the airport, and Artcurial, an auction house, created an endowment fund to manage the space and negotiate the loan of works of art from institutions. Artcurial belongs to the Dassault Group, a major French civil and military aviation manufacturer.

Art has also arrived on the doorstep of Le Bourget, a smaller airport south of Roissy that is used for private jets. There, the art dealer Larry Gagosian recently opened a 17,760-square-foot private gallery designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. It is currently featuring works by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. The gallery is in a former hangar, not in the airport itself.

Several airports in the United States regularly collaborate with artistic institutions, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has a permanent annex at Schiphol Airport. In France, airports in Nice and Toulouse have also displayed art, and a terminal at Orly Airport, south of Paris, features weekly jazz concerts.

But Roissy-Charles de Gaulle is the first to organize an exhibit of this caliber in the heart of a terminal, a six-month show called “The Wings of Glory” set up in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, which opened in 1919 after the sculptor’s death. Rotating shows displaying pieces from other French artistic institutions will follow.

For museums, the partnership with Europe’s second-busiest passenger airport offers maximal exposure at minimal costs, especially at a time when financing is hard to come by. “It’s six months of free advertising for us, and for an audience that is leaving but that often comes back,” said Catherine Chevillot, the director of the Musée Rodin.

Mrs. Chevillot estimated that while 730,000 people visit the museum every year, approximately 750,000 to 800,000 people would come through the airport gallery in the next six months.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 13, 2013, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Tired of the Duty-Free Shop Go Check Out Those Rodins.

Remember Ping-Pong Diplomacy What About Wrestling Diplomacy

Reuters Iran’s Sadegh Saeed Goudarzi and Jordan Ernest Burroughs of the U.S. on the medal podium at the London Olympics in 2012.

LONDON â€" The decision of the Olympic authorities to drop wrestling from the Summer Games beginning in 2020 has floored fans of the ancient sport worldwide, and nowhere more so than in Iran.

Among Iranians, wrestling is a national sporting cult, the product of a millenarian tradition and a focus for nationalist aspirations.

Iran’s Mehr News was quick to conclude that the move by the International Olympic Committe was politically motivated. And a senior Iranian wrestling official said Iran would be joining other top nations in taking action to reverse it.

Iran’s prowess at wrestling â€" it won six medals in the sport at the London 2012 Games, including three golds â€" stems from a tradition that dates back to pre-Islamic times and was developed in the quasi-mystical practices of the Zoorkhaneh, the House of Strength.

It is a tradition that has survived regime changes and shifts in ideology, and enthusiasm emerged undimmed from the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Millad Ejraee, an Iranian who posted on a Saving Olympic Wrestling Facebook page, commented on Wednesday: “It’s been our national sport since thousands [of] years ago, but those stupid guys have made a nation tru! ly upset since yesterday with their silly decision.”

An Iranian official who sits on the medical committee of FILA, the sport’s international governing committee, hinted that the crisis was serious enough to warrant support even from Iran’s ideological enemies.

Mohammad Tavakol told Iran’s national news agency that the United States was among countries, alongside Russia, Turkey, Japan and central Asian States, which would try to fight the removal of wrestling from the Summer Games calendar.

Sport is one area in which Iran has been able to maintain a tentative relationship with countries with which it is otherwise not on speaking terms.

In rare periods of détente since 1979, wrestling emerged as the focus of the kind of Ping-Pong diplomacy that broke the ice between theU.S. and China in the early 1970s.

In 1998, American wrestlers became the first of their country’s athletes to compete in Iran since the Tehran embassy hostage crisis, almost 20 years earlier.

John Marks, a conflict resolution expert, who helped arrange the fixture, said it was an example of how sports could serve as a tool in dealing with violent conflict.

He said the 13,000 Iranian fans cheered both teams. “The crowd clearly came out to see the Americans. Whenever a U.S. wrestler competed, the place became electric.”

Although wrestling failed to work the diplomatic magic that table tennis had done in the case of Beijing, athletes from the U.S. and Iran have continued to encounter each other, to the delight of Iranian fans.

When American wrestlers arrived in Iran in 2007 for the Persian Gu! lf Cup they were warmly greeted by young girls in traditional Iranian dress and handed bouquets of flowers.

If wrestling does end up being dropped from the Olympic Games, despite the best efforts of Iranian, American and other sporting nations, it will mean one less venue at which sport will have an opportunity to trump politics.

Iran will continue to compete in, and even to host, international sporting events. Its women skiers are competing this month at the Alpine World Championships in Austria.

It is debatable, however, whether women’s skiing can do for international relations what Ping-Pong did for the U.S. and China, or what wrestling might have done.

Whether you’re a wrestling fan or not, do you agree with the thesis that sport can be a tool in building bridges with political enemies And, if so, is the threatened loss of wrestling at the Olympics a blw to diplomacy as well as to the sport