It’s not only Leslie Jones who’s having an emotional Olympics experience. While the Ghostbusters star has achieved a happy notoriety for her pro-Games enthusiasm – and fellow actor Samuel L. Jackson impressed for something best described as tweet-length joyous fury – the intensity of peak international sporting competition seems to provoke in the famous and unknown, supporters and detractors, a collective psychological thrall both of some mass and diversity.
— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) August 8, 2016Most MUTHAFUKKA OF A LEG by AquamanPhelps!!! Hella swim by All!! Go USA!!!!
The tender instrument of social media has exposed to me those spectators who tremor with an unexpected patriotism in moments of national victory. And that others are moved to Scrooge-sized humbug of the expense, the scale, the spectacle, the sponsorships. And yet others whose habitual stoicism crumbles amid the sporting narratives of personal triumph and disappointment.
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I write this as one among many surprised at the depth – and the type – of my own emotional reaction to the Games, for they’ve inspired in me a sudden, confusing contradiction in my feminist politics. Watching female athletes sweat and jostle, leap, thrust, charge and tear in sporting competition, I am, for the first tangible time in my adult life, consumed with female body envy.
I am short, bespectacled and – otherwise happily – a little plump. As a teenager I was never quite sincere in any expressed admiration for the willowy models, actors and popstars that contemporary pop culture encouraged me to ape.
It always struck me as odd – when it was, more than once, suggested to my face in change rooms – that to remedy a dress that didn’t stretch over my breasts I should cut myself to fit the garment rather than, you know, alter the material.
When the late-teenage realisation dawned that a little plumpness was no disincentive at all to the attentions of young gentlemen, I dispensed self doubt entirely, and helped myself to many pies.
But I gaze at today’s Olympian women, like the extraordinary Simone Bines, and I suddenly regret almost all my physical choices in life, longing to have worked out, toughened up, added muscle. Perhaps it is a combination of Bines, as well as the inclusion of women’s rugby this Olympiad, the harder competition demanded of those working to break records on the track or in the pool, the exposure given the brutality of women’s cycling, the singular physical adeptness of Caster Semanya or the refreshing recontextualisation given beach volleyball by the Egyptian women who took proudly to the sand to play their game well covered up, but this year like no other have I been attuned to the Olympics as a showcase of growing pride in female bodily strength.
It could just be me; I’m hitting my 40s, one of my knees is a little wobbly, and the demands of mid-life domestic duty has left me more than disappointed that I’m strained and out of breath. But it could be a silent zeitgeist of feminist realisation that one of the final great taboos restricting the agency of women – the social policing of femininity – is finally, finally starting to wither.
In the west, we inherit terrible, powerful messages that disassociate what it means to a woman from what it means to be physically strong. The New Testament’s insistence that women should be desired for being “weaker vessels” obliging men to dominate and steer them is an example of what’s created if we perform gender as one of only two cultural options, defined in opposition. As Australian gender theorist Jamila Rosdahl puts it: “that men should be strong, aggressive and in control and women should be weak, passive and powerless.”
It’s why the Victorians found erotic appeal in the corset for fetishising womanly “physical weakness and vulnerability … juxtaposed with man’s strength.” It’s why in the second world war, the American military purposely excluded “masculine” women from service in the belief that physically strong women performing in traditionally male roles would “produce lesbians” and destabilise the social order. Ooh, imagine.
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And it’s informed an outspoken sexism that persists in sport: like in 1999, when Martina Hingis described a teenage Amelie Mauresmo as “half a man”, or in 2012 when Dominika Cibulkova said playing Sam Stosur was “like playing a man”, or 2014, when a Russian tennis official referred to Serena and Venus as “the Williams brothers”. And that’s just in the sport of tennis where, by the way, Tomasz Wiktorowski, the coach of Agnieszka Radwanska, boasted – in 2015! – of a decision to keep his player “as the smallest player in the top 10.” Why? “Because, first of all she’s a woman, and she wants to be a woman.”
But maybe it’s the sport of tennis that’s also helped to de-lace the cultural corset of the old gender binary, because when I think of the woman I want to be, it’s Serena Williams’s example to which I aspire, not Agnieszka Radwanka’s.
Because while Williams may be leaving Rio after a shock upset to the Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina, the cultural victory is already hers. As one of the most decorated athletes, of either gender, in any sport, of all time, her example is proudly one amid the many women of this Olympic generation unafraid to define what it means to be a woman, free from the old traditions that oblige weakness – and entirely on her own terms. And that, more than any race, heat, triumph, loss or medal in this Olympics, is worth being excited about.
The female strength on display in Rio is worth getting excited about | Van Badham
