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Popular Culture Review
Nike designers engineering her gear for the Athens games, “Don’t make me
look like a man. I want to be feminine and powerful” (Ward). But what is wrong
with just “powerful”? Why is “feminine” a separate category from “power”?
In the modem Olympics, women have achieved near parity in tenns of
numbers, and yet true equality eludes them: when there is inequality in even a
few events, there really is inequality for all. Women athletes in some of the most
popular and heavily-covered events of the Games are trained and rewarded on a
whole other level than men are, for how they look and dress as much as how
they perform. At the most benign end of the scale, both women and men are
rewarded for their sexual as well as athletic appeal, and are able to make use of
this appeal to intimidate rivals and earn extra endorsements and media coverage:
a form of power, some would argue. At the most pernicious extreme, these
women, often really still girls, are required to display sexuality and femininity in
order to compete. They cannot simply be athletes: they are always required to
think of themselves from the outside, as spectacles, as symbols of “normal”
sexuality and gender which reassure viewers (and participants) that the
combination of “female” and “athlete” does not pose any threat to social order.
However, “when women’s sport is limited to aesthetically pleasing ‘feminine’
activities, it perpetuates the deceptive emphasis on femininity as beauty,
masking its ties to female subordination” (Cahn 224).
As long as women athletes are required to have this split focus and split
experience of their identities and abilities, they cannot pursue their sports with
the same concentration and potential for development that men can. Their sex
holds them back—not because they are weaker or less skilled, but because they
are always both overburdened, and incomplete. “Complete” would be
represented by the word “athlete,” rather than the words ""female athlete.” If
women competing at the elite level of the Olympics or other international events
have not been able to use their physical power and skill to overcome
expectations about gender, it does not bode well for the rest of us.
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Notes
Carol-Ann Farkas
' The ratification of Title IX in 1972 banned “gender-based discrimination in publicsupported educational settings” (Fields 5)
■ Since the production of this article, the 2006 Winter Olympics have taken place in
Torino Italy. There, as expected, figure skating was one of the main attractions for
spectators and media. The other women’s event that also garnered much attention was
snowboarding. In those competitions the women dress exactly like the men: in shapeless
snowsuits, helmets, and goggles their sexuality would not seem to be on display.
Nevertheless, we can attribute the popularity of the competition to two factors relevant to
this paper: 1) the U.S. women were in strong contention for gold medals; 2) while their
bodies weren’t on display, their femininity was still at issue by, in a way, not being an
issue. That is, snowboarding is not a sport that requires the same sort of obvious
aggression and grueling athletic training as events like figure skating, so the female
athletes are under no expectation to compensate by egregious displays of female