The world of sports is flashy, wealthy, big, and masculine.
It is a constant battle between cities. A warzone an inch deep in spilled beer, of belligerent men in bars who wear jerseys with someone else’s name on the back. The world of sports is a boy’s locker room, waving towels and popping champagne. It is a billboard 70 feet high, with a six foot two, 220-pound linebacker that looks down on the tiny cars, smirking with his arms folded. The world of sports is overrun by male athletes, with a male face on the label for its male fans.
It is saturated in masculinity, which begs the question: where is a woman’s place is in this kind of a world? In magazines and the media, we see women athletes depicted in one of two ways: hyper-sexualized or hyper-masculinized with little in-between.
The media focuses on women as sexual objects even as they compete in sports as serious athletes by sticking them in photo-shoots in bathing suits. Though this is often blamed on American society’s need to over sexualize nearly everything, at the same time, there is little to no sexualization of male athletes. This only creates a contrast in male and female athletes that heightens the idea of females being nothing more than a sexy flare to a man’s game.
On the other side of the spectrum, if women athletes work too much on their bodies and become too muscular, they are stigmatized as too masculine. Stereotypes of the female athlete often imply manliness or homosexuality. However, these depictions of women in sports are rarely true.
I met Ellie in preschool where she recruited me to play on her little league soccer team that year. Even from a young age, Ellie was built to compete: she had muscular arms and defined abs by the time I had met her at age five. Mix this with her competitive nature and she was destined for athletic greatness.
Ellie soared when it came to soccer. “I started playing when I could walk,” she laughed as if it were a rhetorical question when I asked her when she first began playing. “It was just a natural movement.”
Watching her on the field, you can see just how natural the sport is to her. In suburban Philadelphia, I watched Ellie lead our middle and high school soccer teams to victory every fall season. She never thought twice when approaching the ball or another player: it was all one organic movement as she weaved and laced her way through each game.
As a sophomore, the school’s track coach approached her with the intention to build a stronger team after many losing seasons. It was no surprise when after only one year of competing, Ellie was voted captain and won medal after medal for our once-underdog team.
I asked her, “Do you think track worked out so well because your email address in third grade was speedygg98@hotmail.com?” It was a funny email address, but it exemplifies how Ellie felt even as a young girl about sports and how she was proud of her athletic abilities.
Ellie was recruited to Middlebury College, an academically and athletically competitive division three school, for both soccer and track. She goes to track preseason in the mornings, class during the day, soccer practice in the afternoons, and eats every meal with her teammates. Her closest friends are her teammates, they do everything together whether it’s sweating or studying.
Because she is a two-sport college athlete, Ellie focuses on staying in constant shape as do her teammates. She recognizes that there are expectations for how a woman athlete should look.
“Body images promoted by society plays a large role and female athletes are tricky. We are sensitive and competitive. This makes it really easy for coaches, teammates, or fans to get to us. There’s a lot of pressure.”
Pressure to be the best they can be when it comes to body image, talent, and performance. Because of this pressure to be the best, most female athletes aim to flee femininity. While competing to be champions, femininity seems to be a woman athlete’s only disadvantage because it makes them soft, emotional, weak.
Gymnast Shawn Johnson once described a usual woman’s hourglass shape as a vessel to sit on the shelf, be admired, and count down the seconds until time runs out. To be worthy of competition, many women athletes feel they must identify with men to be strong and to be champions.
However, body image affects women in two ways: Ellie also worries about some of her teammates who skip lifting workouts in fear of looking too manly. Many of them, while working to be the best, are also still focusing on what society expects of them; the over sexualized object that the media portrays in advertisements.
“It’s sad to see at such a high level, women are still sacrificing strength of their performance in an attempt to live up to what the media deems is attractive.”
There is a paradox in females of the sports industry. They are expected to perform at their best so women athletes must focus on gaining muscle and lean body mass, while at the same time still looking as sexy and girly as the woman on the cover of a Sport Illustrated swimsuit edition.
What is most shocking about females in the sports industry is that not all of these women identify as feminists. There is a huge amount of anti-feminism throughout women in the sports world despite evident gender inequalities such as the recent United State’s Women’s National Soccer Team lawsuit.
But why is this?
Just like every male athlete, every women athlete wants to win and be the best. The way to do this is by being tough and hard, which is associated as a masculine trait. When training to become unstoppable and unbreakable, women are essentially becoming masculine. At the same time, no woman wants to be called manly. No woman wants to feel self-conscious about what her muscular body looks like, especially in a society where women are expected to look softer than men.
Therefore, by claiming that they are not feminists, they are trying to fit in as “one of the guys”. By denouncing feminism, women are still becoming tough in their training or in their work while also feeling that they are feminine by not being so opinionated or “irritating men”.
In fear of being charged with lesbianism and manliness, some females in the sports industry turn their backs on phrases like feminism, invoking this post-feminist discourse in the world of athletics.
However, as women turn their backs on feminism, they only promote inequality.
“Most women in my tiny liberal arts school identify strongly as feminists,” Ellie told me reassuringly, “But I know there are girls out there who think boys won’t like them if they’re feminists.” Even in our all-girl’s high school, Ellie and I encountered girls who did not identify as feminists because they still wanted a boy to open the door for them or carry their bag.
Gender equality does not entail becoming a man yourself. Being a female athlete and a feminist does not make a woman manly, irritating, or a stand out, it only makes them an equal.
If we stop comparing our female athletes to men and super models, and focus on their athletic abilities and achievements, women will be more confident in their bodies and their talents.
We are not there yet; we are not living in a post-feminism world, we still need to fight. We still see women athletes in magazines ridiculed for their outfits and their bodies. Women athletes are plagued with stereotypes and are constantly harassed over their body shapes. Women have made great and important strides, but we are still not equal.