EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

For women athletes, there is nothing wrong with being proud of your looks or your body, just as there is nothing wrong with being proud of your jump shot or your forehand.

As we celebrate “National Girls and Women in Sports Day,” it seems a good time to examine the furor some female athletes have caused by becoming famous for looking good or posing partially clothed.

For if you don’t resent tennis player Lindsay Davenport for her strong right arm and easy, powerful stroke, then don’t resent Anna Kournikova for her long, strong legs, her flat stomach, her blond hair. Life isn’t always fair. But it is getting fairer every day for women athletes.

Now that Title IX is part of our culture and women are accepted as athletes in nearly every sport, even football, controversy has come from the way some women athletes present themselves.

Kournikova made the cover of Sports Illustrated for being sultry and attractive. She has never won a tennis tournament. Olympic swimmer Jenny Thompson posed topless, her hands covering her breasts, also in SI. Brandi Chastain, the soccer player, did a sexually provocative photo shoot for a magazine called Gear.

This is awful, we heard. This is degrading and demeaning.

Phooey says Maybelle Blair.

Blair is “seventy-something,” she says. She played in the women’s baseball league made famous by the movie “A League of Their Own,” and she loves it when she sees Kournikova on SI’s cover.

That Kournikova has never won doesn’t bother Blair.

“She’s an attractive girl and a good athlete and if people want to pay her for her looks, more power to her,” Blair says.

Julie Foudy, a star of the 1999 U.S. women’s World Cup championship soccer team, finds it sad that Kournikova makes more money for looking good than Lindsay Davenport does for winning tournaments. Foudy finds it sadder that Thompson felt OK about posing half naked in Sports Illustrated.

“Each woman has a right to do whatever she chooses,” Foudy says. “But it’s sad, obviously, that we can’t just be female athletes. It’s sad that some people feel the need to be attractive and pose naked to garner attention. That’s not the image I want to be portraying to young kids. You know?”

Women play everything and some pose practically naked. Title IX seems to have brought us lots of women’s scholarships and plenty of skin shots.

Equal opportunity obviously means different things to different women.

DeLisha Milton, a player for the WNBA’s Sparks, would never play a game without her makeup on and her hair well styled.

“I think it is important to look your best,” she says.

Milton, though, would never pose partially naked for anybody.

“You can be proud of your body and still keep your clothes on,” she says. “But not everybody has the same beliefs. If you are comfortable doing something, and you have the chance, then do it.”

Kournikova sells tickets to tennis tournaments because she is perfectly comfortable wearing tube tops and short shorts. That’s fine says Milton.

Davenport wins tournaments because she hits a tennis ball, with easy strength, so hard it seems to explode off her racket. Davenport doesn’t sell so many tickets and doesn’t get on magazine covers because her hair is brown and short, because she slumps her shoulders, because she was once overweight and nobody seems to forget first impressions. But she still makes plenty of money.

“You tell that Lindsay Davenport to stand up straight and smile more,” Thelma Tiby Eisen says.

Eisen also played in the women’s baseball league 50 years ago. She thinks there is nothing wrong with women athletes looking good. It wasn’t wrong 50 years ago and it’s not wrong now.

“You should wear some makeup and try to make a good impression,” Eisen says. “Show yourself proudly.”

Some women see a double standard. But maybe we should see double benefits.

Women can be champions and rich. But they can also be gorgeous non-champions and rich.

Pam Shriver played tennis when Gabriela Sabatini played the part of Kournikova. At least Sabatini won, even the U.S. Open once. But Sabatini made millions of dollars more than Martina Navratilova because Sabatini was attractive and Navratilova was a jock.

“You know,” Shriver says, “it didn’t bother me then and it doesn’t bother me now. What women athletes have earned is the opportunity to have a lot of choices. If you are fit and attractive, you have lots of opportunities. But if you are a winner, you have lots of opportunities too.

“Lindsay Davenport might not make as much money as Anna Kournikova, even though Lindsay has won three Grand Slam tournaments. But if you ask Lindsay, she’ll tell you that she never imagined making this much money by playing tennis. And that’s what is great about this time. There is something for everybody.”

Reebok signed Venus Williams to a $40-million contract and then sent her to the Australian Open with a top that barely stayed on her chest. Bad planning or very good publicity?

“I don’t know,” Shriver says. “But Reebok sure got a lot of mileage out of that outfit.”

It is no surprise to Mariah Burton Nelson, an author of four books about female sexuality and athletics, that Williams, a young, fit female champion, showed up at the year’s first Grand Slam tournament wearing an outfit she nearly fell out of.

“Women will always be paid a lot of money to take off their clothes, I’m afraid,” Nelson says. “Some women will accept the offer, athletes included. I suspect, for example, that Reebok was hoping having a player the stature of Venus Williams getting all that attention for having a top which didn’t cover her was going to be a good marketing strategy.

“But women have never gained respect by taking off their clothes. To me, it’s unfortunate that the current young generation hasn’t learned from their mothers. It’s not morally wrong to pose like Jenny Thompson but it is misguided. We have to keep in mind that male athletes do not feel the need to do this.”

Some do. Remember Baltimore Oriole pitcher Jim Palmer and those Jockey underwear ads? Those ads were about sex, not sports.

Amy Alcott, who lives in Santa Monica, played on the LPGA Tour when Laura Baugh and Jan Stephenson were cover girl candidates and endorsement queens, more for their looks than for their golf.

“It was then, and is now, a very easy thing to market sex and good looks when it comes to female athletes,” Alcott says. “People don’t necessarily care who shoots a 64 that day. It is society. Society notices the female who looks good.

“Women’s sports is much more serious than it’s ever been and each generation will raise that another notch.”

Alcott remembers when she and Baugh and Stephenson would play tournaments in Japan, where Baugh and Stephenson would get substantially more guarantee money, even though Alcott had the better competitive record.

“Part of me was bothered by that,” Alcott says, “and part of me understood that that was how it was best to market women’s golf. In the long run you have to be at peace with yourself.”

Exactly says Nelson.

“Will Jenny Thompson be happy to show her children and grandchildren that picture in Sports Illustrated?” she asks. “That’s what every athlete should think about before doing something like that.”

Maybe Thompson’s future children will think the picture is cool. Maybe not. That’s how it is for women athletes. Anything goes.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.