Killer Bodies

On Valentine's Day, Oscar Pistorius, the famed legless runner, shot and killed his supermodel girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Controversy surrounds Pistorius' status as a killer.  Did he act in self defence?  Or murder out of rage?

In a country troubled by violent crime, Steenkamp's death has become trapped between homeowners' fears about violent robberies and the everyday reality of South African women, who live under threat of violence more severe than almost anywhere else in the world.

Does Pistorius body bear as much responsibility as his mind and emotions?

In his defence, lawyers claim he faced a greater threat as a legless man and thus needed to shoot multiple times through a closed door in order to protect himself.

Many athletes favor supermodel partners: Steenkamp poses for FHM.

Prosecutors stumbled over the discovery of potential stimulants or other body-enhancing products in Pistorius' apartment—could this have been a hormone-induced mania?

If one or both carries any weight, the truth that remains: Steenkamp died in a bloody puddle.

Athletes' violent relationships make regular appearances in the news.  OJ Simpson and Nicole Smith, to provoke a now distant memory, or Tiger Woods' infidelity and car-accident escape from his home.  Boxers, baseball players, football stars, hockey champions -- even mild-mannered runners it now appears.  Or cyclists: Lance Armstrong as delusional, egotistical perpetrator of unreality.

The list goes on and on and on.

Whether as part of the massive doping scandals unfolding before us, or on high school sports fields or elementary school play yards, we must take on the role of harmful, uncontrolled violence in competitive athletics.  

Sports should subsume our animalistic and inhuman rage in a controlled, rule-governed and reasonably safe arena of play.  Off the field, then, we can relax and enjoy one another's company as friends.

Tragically, much of men's off-the-field violence gets directed toward women.  They yell, they grab, they beat and strangle and kill.

Women often direct that violence against themselves (or occasionally, other women -- Tonya Harding?!?)  

Yesterday after leaving the gym, a female friend commented: they lined up for the scale.  Truly -- a line, waiting for the scale, to weigh themselves and stare and self-critically explore every aspect of their body.

Some men eventually devolve into the self-consuming depths of dementia, like hockey player Derek Boogaard, who killed himself in a haze of depression and addiction.  (The New York Time's feature story about his career and death serves as a model of investigative journalism.)  

Endless women live as anorexics or at least burdened by obsessive body image issues and incredibly restrictive eating habits.  For men, Alzheimer's may eventually act like a sort of physical anorexia, slowly eating away at their minds and bodies.

So with all these athletics and teams and workout routines, we learn to scorn those who end up fat and we truly do live with killer bodies.