I found the final paragraph of Sam Venable’s column about artist Jim Gray and Dolly Parton deeply disappointing.
Venable spends the column describing Gray as a serious and accomplished artist and explaining the painstaking process of creating his sculpture of Dolly. Then, in the final paragraph, the subject abruptly shifts from Gray’s artistry to Dolly’s breasts. The references to her “certain, uh, ‘aspects’” and to Gray’s friends wanting to “help” are presented as the punchline.
Why?
Dolly Parton’s body did not need to become the punchline of a column remembering her. Nor did it add anything meaningful to the story of Jim Gray’s artistic process.
What troubles me is not that someone privately made a crude joke about Dolly decades ago. What troubles me is that,
in 2026, a newspaper columnist writing a public remembrance of Dolly Parton chose to repeat that joke - and chose to end the column with it.
We have spent decades telling women that their accomplishments deserve to be taken seriously while simultaneously finding ways to put their bodies back at the center of the conversation. This is exactly that.
There was a perfectly good story here: an accomplished East Tennessee artist, the work he created, and his relationship to an extraordinary woman whose cultural legacy reaches far beyond her physical appearance. The breasts joke added nothing to that story.
Sometimes what gets dismissed as harmless old-fashioned humor is simply old-fashioned sexism that has survived long enough to become invisible to the people repeating it.
I would genuinely like to understand why you thought that was an appropriate way to end this particular column.Bailey Earith, Maryville, 37804
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Column about Dolly Parton's statue reverts to old-fashioned sexism | Letter
