Men's figure skating has changed

We've been watching a lot of Olympics at our house lately, and I have a question: at what point did male figure skaters stop pretending not to be gay? Or at least effeminate? Back in the day, the men's programs were pretty butch, with a lot of butch skating around the ice, some butch jumps, and butch costumes consisting of, you know, a shirt and pants. Yes, it was still men skating around the ice, but they made it as masculine as possible. Now it's all jazz hands, soulful facial expressions, and unitard costumes with puff sleeves/see-through midriff area/pink lace-up corseting detail.

You know what, though? Even though I'm not sure what exactly is going on with this change, I enjoy men's figure skating more now. It's as if some barrier has been breached, and the men are finally able to really express themselves on the ice in a way that was not allowed before. A perfect example of the kind of change that is at work here is Yevgeniy Plushenko's short skate program. I loved it. I almost couldn't stop watching it. It was so heartfelt and so expressive, almost more so than a woman's program might have been because the men are more powerful skaters.

I would give you links to some of the pertinent videos, but I can't figure out how, which brings me to my next Olympic-related observation. NBCOlympics.com is designed in such a way that makes me think they want to prevent me from viewing competition videos at all costs. I understand that it's free, and offered as a convenience, but come on. If you're going to offer video, offer it in a straightforward manner. As it is, it's like one giant video dump where nothing is titled relevantly and you have to sift through several slow-loading, cluttered pages to get at what you want. And once you do find it, sometimes it's "premium" video that requires a paid TV cable subscription, which, I don't know why those people are watching it online in the first place, and in the second place, you don't even need a paid TV cable subscription to get NBC.

Also, as long as I'm making demands of a convenient service provided to me at no charge, I wish NBC could put up some kind of a spoiler-free page. I didn't get around to watching the men's free skate program until the day after it was finished, which meant that the results were splashed all over the site's home page. No matter; I just squinted my eyes so as not to see the headlines and navigated over to the athletes' pages to get at the videos of their performances. I was doing fine until I tried to find Evan Lysacek's video and no amount of eye-squinting could obscure the fact that it was titled, "Evan Lysacek Wins Gold." Doh!

Are you watching the Olympics? Also, as my gift to you, please enjoy this blog post on a similar subject from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.