I discovered yesterday, through a scathing comment article in The Guardian, that Golf magazine publishes an annual 'Most Beautiful Women in Golf' list.

It's a whole page of pictures and videos of not just female golfers but also, apparently, wives of golfers, celebrated for their beauty.

The Guardian comment article is by a former golf pro, Anya Alvarez, and she argues passionately against the objectification of women by the magazine. She makes the undeniable point that golf is a sport where women are a minority, and coverage - especially by a specialist title - should focus on their golfing skills rather than their looks.

Lists objectifying female athletes are common. Searching 'hottest female athletes' on Google gets me 2,690,000 results.

But lists objectifying male athletes are also common - in fact more common. A Google search for 'hottest male athletes' gets me 7,990,000 results.

So maybe the question is not "why are we objectifying female athletes?" but "why are we objectifying athletes for their bodies?"

Each year The Times does a big feature called 'My Sporting Body' in which it publishes a gallery of beautifully-shot photos of naked athletes, positioning cleverly hiding breasts and genitals and so on. American network ESPN does a very similar project, 'The Body', with US athletes.

The aim is to celebrate the diversity in body shape you get from different sports, and it does so with no regard to age, gender or discipline. The Times includes both Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Importantly neither feature is about identifying 'good-looking athletes', which in my view helps justify them.

Not all lists entitled 'hottest' are about, or at least entirely about, looks. For years the rowing world eagerly anticipated The List, otherwise known as the 20 Hottest Male Rowers, compiled by US Olympian Megan Kalmoe. Kalmoe did The List for several years in a row and it grew in popularity to the extent that she was getting sponsorship for it, gifts for the rowers on it, and so on.

Then in 2014 Kalmoe scrapped The List. In an eloquently-argued blog post she said:

In my mind, the List has always been a project that was meant to foster friendship and community with other rowers and athletes all over the world. And I think that most of the time, the List and its reception have been positive in that respect. However, the opportunities for criticizing it as an act of objectification or even sexism have always been there, and this year I am less comfortable with my role in navigating these murky waters than I have been in the past. This is something I have always taken seriously; though this year I felt that I was more sensitive to the ways that objectification and marginalization of athletes is continuing to happen all around me, and also how my actions may or may not be perpetuating it.

She described being on a podium surrounded by girls carrying medals in skimpy dresses, and how this was happening even in rowing - it's more prevalent and obvious in other sports, notably cycling. She felt that The List was contributing to that.

I was actually quite sad when Kalmoe stopped The List, because I liked the fact she included guys for their personalities as much as anything, and gave more information about their rowing exploits than their looks. Also I'm a rowing geek, and it felt like insider information. But I get where she was coming from on the objectification front.

Finding the right side of this line is difficult. On the one hand, athletes are fit. Their bodies are attractive to look at and humans like looking at beautiful people. It's how we're built. When many athletes compete, they wear tight lycra (because it's practical), showing off their muscles even more. Yet most people also accept that they should be lauded for their achievements and abilities, not their looks or personalities.

In some ways this comes back to the #CoverTheAthlete issue which I wrote about last year, and the enduring problem that we seem to be more likely to talk about female athletes' looks than we are about men's even immediately after their triumphs. It's also undeniable that the highest-earning female athletes are often picking up sponsorship because of their looks and a connection to a beauty or fashion brand - tennis player Maria Sharapova is a great example.

In an article for ESPN during the Rio Olympics, reporter Kavitha Davidson wrote:

Women's sports are devalued whenever they're not benefiting from the exaggerated connection to country, or the targeted marketing of a female athlete's sexuality, or, as we see in the Olympics, a combination of the two. That simply isn't the case with men's sports. I'll apologize for objectifying male athletes when their earning potential depends largely on their ability to cash in on their sex appeal -- when their sexuality offers the primary road to professional success simply because the athletic avenues have been blocked.

Which brings us full-circle back to golf. Golf is a male-dominated sport, where the female pros cannot hope to earn what the men can earn. The top female golfer of all time in terms of career earnings is Annika Sorenstam, who, now retired, earned $22.5m in her career. She won 89 tournaments in her career including 72 tournaments run by the Ladies Professional Golf Association (yes, they have a 'ladies' version of the official federation).

Tiger Woods is the top-earner on the men's side. He's picked up over $110m in his career from 79 PGA Tour wins, 40 European Tour wins and a handful of others.

That, to me, shows that the sport's media should be focusing more on elevating the profile of women for their golfing skills and pushing for more women to get involved than on what they look like. If someone's an outstanding athlete it really shouldn't matter if they look like a supermodel or not.

So yes, ultimately I think the Megan Kalmoes of this world have it right. End the features devoted to picking out the best-looking athletes. And find those picking out the most generous, the spokespeople, the ones fighting for equal treatment. They're the athletes we really need to celebrate.