Why Sasha Cohen fell.

Ice skating (like gymnastics) is such a pretty thing to watch. What exactly is the significance of female gracefulness? Gracefulness is significant, I have decided, because it encourages males to be more pure, i.e., more devoid of sordid thoughts. Females tend to be much better at this gracefulness than males are, probably because they have more to gain by being so. Mostly sordidness is a black-and-white phenomenon. Sodomy and sex are distinct phenomena, and either sodomy happens or it doesn't--there's no in between. But even in the purest cleanest males, there is likely to be at least a slight sordid sentiment that can be decreased by female gracefulness. In particular, it is known that the prostaglandin content of semen varies, which doubtless has effects on intraejaculate sperm selection when females are lustful enough to have encouraged the latter phenomenon.

Sasha Cohen's psychological shortcoming in so far as skating is concerned, I'd say, is that on some level she viewed her gracefulness as something to prevent sordid action, i.e., as an anti-sodomy defense. And anti-sodomy defenses either work perfectly or they fail completely, depending of course on whether sodomy happens or not. So once she began to sort of doubt whether she would be perfect, uh-oh, her artistic control gained a kind of insane fearful dreading aspect that led to her fall and to her not getting the gold :< What she needed to do to improve her chances of getting the gold medal was to think of gracefulness as a tool to improve the mental purity of a male or males that to her obviously never ever would have done sordid things to her. If she had just had some very clean male figure to hug before skating and could have imagined him appreciating her gracefulness for what it was, she would have done better, because gracefulness in so far as it influences the purity of male sentiment is not a black-and-white phenomena in its success, and so on some level she less would have viewed her skating success as black-and-white, which would have made her deal much better with the possibility of imperfections. Male thoughts can always be more pure or less so; there's no win or lose just there.

It is revealing to look at why the Japanese skater won. She was zen. The reason she was zen, I'm guessing, is that Japan is Zen, i.e., influenced heavily by Zen Buddhism. It's hard to get nervous when you have the Buddhist belief in the vanity of desire. But I didn't enjoy her skating as much as Sasha Cohen's skating, nor find it nearly so beautiful. No, part of Arakawa's coolness I suspect came from a kind of assumption in her that enthusiasm, striving, etc., have no place, whereas of course they do have a place in foiling depravity. Being graceful isn't like phenomena not tied up with affection. You can't really be truly graceful and artistic if you skate like you've managed (even if just temporarily) to convince yourself that depravity isn't a significant phenomenon. Gracefulness is mostly just a discouragement of depraved thoughts, and looking like you don't believe that depravity exists or that it is something to fear much isn't very discouraging of it, I daresay, notwithstanding that there was seemingly nothing the least bit unclean about Arakawa.

As for the Russian skater, Slutskaya, she seemed to have convinced herself that she was invincible. That seemed to have worked psychologically at first, but then in the artistry of it all, she rather was reminded that she like anybody is not actually perfect (when it comes to skating), which prevented her from believing in her invincibility, and so, like Cohen, her nerves I suspect got the better of her. Curiously, Cohen getting into the artristry of her routine in the long program seemed to get her back on track, perhaps making her forget her early mistakes, or maybe getting her into the state of mind that as I suggest she needed.

I liked Sasha Cohen's skating best and Meissner's a close second best, but of course the olympic medals can't just be given out subjectively by how pretty the skating is. Oh, and I'm not making those judgments because I'm pro American. E.g., Anna Pavlova (a Russian) was my favorite gymnast in the last summer games.