Sexiest Beach Women's Volleyball Photos from London 2012

The Hottest Women's Beach Volleyball Photos Have the Unsexiest Captions

Let's be honest: Women's Beach Volleyball is hot. This is a simple statement of fact. The women are not required to wear bikinis (uniforms include tights, shorts, and t-shirts as well), but they often choose to.... and sports photographers absolutely love it.

We noticed something interesting when gathering photos for the Women's Beach Volleyball Semifinals: when we filtered to "Iconic" in the image pool, only a handful out of 60 shots on Page 1weren't close-ups of women's bikini bottoms. The images we are showing below were chosen at random. "Iconic" is clearly code for "sexy" in this case, at least to whomever is in charge of such things.

Few of these beach volleyball photos (most from the 2012 Olympics, some from earlier in the year) even showed gameplay or action. Mind you, the action shots were awesome; there just were not very many of them. Also, we didn't specify for gender in the search, but no dudes appear until photo #139. It's not a pic of his butt, either.

Even stranger were the captions, which did everything possible to avoid sexualizing the image content. Our favorite is the lead image in the beach volleyball photo gallery below, which reads, "A detailed view of the match ball during the Women's Beach Volleyball Preliminary match between Brazil and Germany on Day 4 at Horse Guards Parade on July 31, 2012 in London, England."

No. It's a detailed view of a very toned woman's midriff. At least be honest about that. We're including some of the best images from the "Iconic" Women's Beach Volleyball photo pool: clicking on each will bring you to its rather pedestrian and unsexy caption.

Fit and athletic is sexy, and the Olympics gather the fittest and the most athletic: there's a reason Olympic Village runs out of condoms every year. However, the discrepancy in how photo coverage of male and female athletes differs is amazing. To ask viewers not to think sexy thoughts when watching athletes is silly, but come on: why aren't male beach volleyball players fetishized in this manner?

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Sexiest Women's Beach Volleyball Photos: Not a Photo of the Ball

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[This article is the editorial equivalent of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers: commenting on something while also doing it.]