It’s around 2 p.m. on Saturday, and my friend – Freud, let’s call him – and I are sucking beer at my apartment before a 50-inch flatscreen, which glows grass-green with the broadcast’s courtened angle of Wimbledon Centre Court. Serena Williams, for her own part, is sucking wind before serving in the third set of the women’s singles final. She’s no longer sucking, at least, having dropped the second set 5-7 to Agnieszka Radwanska, as Freud explains. This is it, he says. Serena’s stroking it, bro. Look at her now. She’s hot, bro. She’s in heat, I almost say. Williams is wearing a one-piece white tennis dress, pointlessly short, a tailored hand towel. A centimeter of skirt, no more. This is all that rests on her ripply rear, flying in the face of the outfit’s bare-minimum purpose: to clothe. It’s a damned voyeuristic exhibition, this match, this spectacle. It’s an English Axe commercial, for all intents and purposes. Sex sells, and it’s sold here, certainly – but only hush-hush. Black-marketed. It’s not laissez-faire love. Not l’amour. But nevertheless, something’s in the air at Wimbledon – if not love, then pheromones, hormones and just plain moans. Williams serves, big, bad and boomy. Hers is a beefy, slow-roasted groan somewhere between an “ooh” and an “ugh,” somewhere between the agony and the ecstasy – an orgasmic labor pain, maybe. It’s a huge serve, a howitzer, notwithstanding, and her too-short skirt recoils over itself and onto her haunches. Beneath it flashes a raw-meat-magenta undergarment she’s either picked up at Dick’s Sporting Goods or Victoria’s Secret. “Did you see that?” Freud asks me of Williams’ ace, flabbergasted. “Did you hear that?” I answer. “She can taste it now,” the TV surround-sounds. Freud fidgets for a moment. “She’s held it in her hands four times previously – one more point will allow her to hold it for a fifth time.” Freud’s legs are stiffly crossed, I notice. As if to return a rising shot, so to speak. But I don’t say anything. There’s not a male gaze such a spectacle wouldn’t hold. And the man that holds otherwise – he’s a liar. Hell, it’s precisely for this reason that women’s tennis is so damned seductive. Scopophilia: the “love of looking.” “Serena rides huge serve to title” was the headline of ESPN reporter Greg Garber’s Wimbledon commentary, for instance – that’s an ace, by all accounts. Which makes the Women’s Tennis Association’s (WTA) “umbrella scenario” to muffle “excessive grunting” a fault, as it were. According to USA Today, the “sport-wide plan,” also endorsed by the International Tennis Federation, prescribes a device to “objectively measure on-court grunting levels,” a new rule to govern “acceptable noise levels” and education at “large tennis academies” and “national development programs.” “The sooner we can get them to alter the breathing technique the more success we can have,” Stacey Allister, WTA chairmen and chief executive, told USA Today – as if this “technique” were Lamaze. There’s underspin on this slice. Excessive grunting isn’t the deciding point. Nor that “some fans find it bothersome,” as the WTA judged in January. Rather, it’s female sexuality: the “nightmare of femaleness that can weaken and contaminate masculinity,” as a Freudian psychoanalyst once discerned. Howling through a ‘tween-the-legs hot dog shot, Williams epitomizes the sexualized female form – and “with that specter of nookie,” Slate’s Kathy Waldman wonderfully articulated, “comes empowerment and a possible inversion of gender norms.” Every man’s greatest fear: the emasculating 40-love approach shot of an attractive woman. At the bar, at the gym, at the store; each and every time; game – set – match. And my friend Freud’s leg-crossing, accordingly – castration anxiety. A threat averted by gag-ordering women’s voices silent. Quite literally, in this instance. That’s an unforced error, ultimately.
Phil Sweeney is a 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Phil Sweeney.
 
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