If there’s one thing the media does well, it’s ogle. At these recent Olympic Games, I couldn’t help but notice just how much of that ogling seemed to focus on the sport of women’s beach volleyball.
Maybe it was just that the sport presents a dizzying display of skill and strength. But when you’re watching, there’s something else that’s hard to miss. The players’ uniforms.
While their male counterparts sport loose fitting jerseys and board shorts, female beach volleyball players wear spandex-tight, midriff-baring bikinis that leave little to the imagination as they jump and dive on the sandy court.
It’s no secret that the bodies of Olympic athletes, male and female, are highly scrutinized. After all, these are some of the strongest, fastest, most physically skilled human beings in the world.
But there is a difference between admiring the muscular frame that makes an athlete so capable and gratuitously putting the bodies of female athletes on display to ratchet up the number of television viewers.
Don’t get me wrong: I think we watch most female Olympians because they are fierce and powerful competitors, not for their sex appeal.
But the real sting of Olympic sexism is that despite the unsexualized view we get of the majority of female athletes, classically feminine competitors, especially those, like swimmer Amanda Beard or high-jumper Amy Acuff, who choose to bare it all for men’s magazines, grab a disproportionate share of the media’s attention no matter what their ranking in the competition.
The message is clear: it’s okay to care more about a female athlete’s looks than her abilities.
And it’s hard to miss the obvious differences in the way the media treats female athletes when Newsweek is calling the gold-medal winning Chinese women’s gymnastics team “adorable” and NBC commentator likens the last-minute injury of one female U.S. gymnast to “having a tear in your wedding dress right before you walk down the aisle.”
A few weeks ago the Times of London published a column complaining about the fact that Olympic swimsuits don’t show off the breasts of female swimmers.
Can you imagine the media telling Michael Phelps to change his uniform so he’d appeal more to female viewers? It simply doesn’t work like that.
For women, the road to the Olympic games has never been easy. Female athletes have long contended with the myth that there are events that are simply “too strenuous” for their delicate bodies.
There was no race longer than 200 meters for women until 1960, and no women’s marathon until 1984.
As recently as 1996, only a third of Olympians were women. In fact, today there are still a handful of Muslim nations that refuse to let women compete at all, a fact that has provoked a flurry of outrage in the west and led some to call for countries without female Olympians to be barred from the games altogether. To be sure, that’s a worthy sentiment.
A country that refused to allow athletes of a certain race or religion to compete would surely provoke international outrage, so why the allowance for all-male teams?
At the same time, where’s our outrage over the fact that the International Olympic Committee, the multinational organization that governs the games, has only 15 women on its 135 member board?
It doesn’t hurt to remember that women are being slighted by the Olympics at every level, not just in the qualifying tournaments of a few theocratic states.
I am 19. I was raised to believe that I could do or become anything I wanted. For much of my adolescence, feminism seemed almost antiquated in its demands, a piece of history more than a living, breathing thing.
Yet in the course of these Olympic games I’ve been reminded time and time again just what it was the women of my mother and grandmother’s generations fought against.
The gender bias in my world may not be as obvious as it was in theirs thirty years ago, but it still exists. And it will keep on existing just as long as women have to prove there’s nothing “cute” about going for gold.
Ryan Brown grew up in Colorado and currently is a sophomore at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where she is a features writer for the student newspaper and co-editor of the undergraduate literary magazine.
