Addition by Subtraction

Yesterday, 19-year old Simona Halep breezed through her first-round match against Serbia’s Bojana Jovanovski at Wimbledon. Why is this an important thing to share with people on the Internet? For the reason you didn’t start reading this paragraph until you’d stared at the picture for five minutes. Simona got popular a couple of years ago on the reactionary part of the Internet that flips out (in both the good and bad ways, which are open to interpretation) about 17-year olds with humongous boobs, and her success this year is due to losing them; Halep got a massive breast reduction, and it seems to be making her awesome at tennis.

By way of The Daily Mail:

Halep was first noticed on her way to becoming junior champion at the French Open in 2008. In a bid to boost her game, she spent much of the following year recovering from the surgery, which took her cup size down from 34DD to a more modest 34C.

At the time she explained her decision to fans, saying: ‘It’s the weight that troubles me. My ability to react quickly, my breasts make me uncomfortable when I play.

‘I don’t like them in my everyday life, either. I would have gone for surgery even if I hadn’t been a sportswoman.’

I’m going to play the “women are people too” card and say I’m happy for her, even if the loss of such magnificent breasts is sh:tty to the awful, judgmental part of our brain that can only praise women for their beauty or condemn them for looking like steroid monsters. I think those are the only two reactions I’ve ever heard about women’s tennis outside of Ron Swanson: Player X is hot, or Player Y is on drugs and looks like a man and has a penis and could rip off yours. In this example, we’ll say Player X is Martina Hingis, and Player Y is any tennis player with her picture on Fark.

We wish Halep a successful Wimbledon, and now are heads can go back to looking back and forth instead of just straight ahead and slightly down.

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