“Close your knees, girl!”
–my Aunt Carolyn to me, age 6
“You’re such a monster!” “Yeah, Crane monster!” “Cranemonster!”
–kids when I played soccer/football hard during PE (my maiden name: Crane)
“Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common, first, that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second, that the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention. For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds them in imagination which we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space.”
–Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like A Girl
Megan Rapinoe striking a now-famous, and much critiqued, goal celebration pose in the USA vs. France game which she repeated in the Final against Netherlands. Within seconds, her team mates jumped on her from behind in shared joy and she bore their weight as they gathered around. IMAGE CREDIT: Getty Images.
Today, July 7 of 2019, the US Women’s National Team won the FIFA Women’s World Cup against a stellar Netherlands team whose goalie won the Golden Glove and whose many excellent players gave up only five goals in the entire Cup. Two of those were to the US in the final match, scored by Rose Lavelle and Megan Rapinoe. Rapinoe won the tournament’s Golden Boot for the most goals scored during the tournament and the Golden Ball for best player of the tournament. Over the course of the 2019 Women’s World Cup, Rapinoe’s goal celebrations have garnered much attention, critiqued for perceived arrogance and lauded for palpable joy.
Watching all of the women’s teams play, I am struck by how the style of women’s movement has evolved in athletics over the years. Women’s tennis has moved from a constrained style of play to the powerhouse muscular-but-precise styles exemplified by Serena and Venus Williams and a whole new generation of players. Women’s soccer/football, too, has shifted within my lifetime.
The frisson of liberation from Brandi Chastain’s shirt-removing celebration after kicking the winning penalty in the 1999 Women’s World Cup was in part a liberation from the constraints that Young described and which I felt keenly in my youth, a time when the effects of Title IX on women’s sport in the USA were only beginning to manifest. When I played during my year abroad at University of Aberdeen in the early 90’s, where there was no Title IX, most of the women on the Uni football team hadn’t played since they hit puberty: that was when the leagues dried up and their parents told them it was time to grow up and become young women. Who apparently were not supposed to play soccer. I played with those women and we loved every second of it. It was into that reality that this image of Chastain fell.
Brandi Chastain tears her shirt off in celebration after scoring the Cup-winning goal in the 1999 Women’s World Cup. This, too, was roundly critiqued by some for being unladlylike and yet also loved by others for its pure joy.
When my Aunt told me to make myself smaller, to hold myself in, to shut my knees, I knew that the way it was comfortable for me to sit was somehow wrong. And that my comfort in my own body was secondary to some other imperative. When the kids in my middle school PE class called me monstrous for playing sports hard, I knew that still other imperatives were at work. It would be years before I realized that the image of monstrousness was often used for people who exceeded their boundaries, especially women who exceeded the constraints of gender, whether it be due to insufficiently feminine behaviors or fatness or muscularity or race. Any woman who has ever gone to the gym and been told by strangers or acquaintances not to “lift heavy” or they will “get too big” knows this fear of becoming monstrous, “all muscular”, “gross.”
These aren’t simply arbitrary norms, though, these norms that kept my Scottish teammates from having universal access to soccer/football and which manifest in the lives of many women including those on the Chilean team. They’re powerful social norms in many societies with respect to how women’s bodies ought to reflect their status.
On Iris Marion Young’s account, norms of femininity require constraints on “comportment” and the way that women move their bodies. Sandra Barky took up this work, calling femininity a “disciplinary regime” that creates at least two “styles of the flesh”:
- Practices which aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration (diet; weightlifting; not too heavy/large for women and not too small/slight for men);
- Those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements (including small movements, incomplete extension of limbs, partial rotation)
These disciplinary practices create a highly constrained and time-consuming femininity that literally weakens women relative to how strong and effective they could be if they took up more space, lifted weights to get strong, and so forth. This dominant set of norms of femininity also literally makes women and feminine persons take up less space by urging them to make their bodies small, sit and even stand with knees crossed close together and elbows in, arms crossed over the body or held in close, and so forth. And they are not gone. Witness the results of a Google Search today for “woman standing.”
A screenshot of a Google Image search for stock photos of “woman standing.” Note the posture of limbs drawn in. Even the business woman with feet apart has her arms crossed and is relatively pulled in. Several women have one leg crossed behind the weight-bearing leg. The only woman with her arms spread wide has her legs tight together and her arms held out in a pose of confusion or bemusement, the gesture one would make to say “who knows?”
By comparison, men and masculine persons are encouraged to take up space, both in sitting and in moving, and are encouraged to lift weights to grow larger and more muscular. As Young describes it, women are not encouraged to reach full extension, to reach, to twist, even in sports.
You can see the stereotypes of throwing like a girl and running like a girl in this Always ad from 2014. I think you will recognize them. And recognize the mockery and weakness and physical incompetence of normative femininity that is embedded in them (note the boy who insists that he might be making fun of girls when he mimes an incompetent and disappointing throw, but says that making fun of girls is not making fun of his sister).
I confess that this video makes me verklempt. My chest hurts during the derogatory stereotypes. But it really kicks in when they ask “If I ask you to run like a girl now, would you do it differently?” and the young woman says “I would run like myself.” The result is a slow motion explosion of power uncoiling in unrestrained joy, as is the motion of many of the girls and young women profiled in the ad.
So what does this have to do with bioethics?
People who cannot unreservedly enjoy sport, who cannot fully deploy their strengths, who are told that mastery and power are unseemly, who are told they must do less than they might… these are people who cannot manifest themselves in all their richly embodied glory, who are prevented from accessing health. They can also be more prone to injury.
And they are less able to do what they might wish to do, not because their bodies have a different set of capabilities—there are many versions of a good life which include a wide range of bodies and capabilities—but because social norms burden them from freely exercising the capabilities their bodies have.
And of course they always must have in the back of their mind the notion of not only how they can play the game, but how they look while playing the game. They must discipline themselves not to reach their full richly embodied potential, but to constrain and shrink that potential in order to avoid social censorship.
On this note, we ought to carefully consider how notions of what sport ideally is not only keep out women who conform to classical norms of femininity but also keep out folks with bodies that have a different range of capability. By expanding sport to include a sense of joyful play and inter/personal excellence like that exhibited in Rapinoe’s celebrations, we can push ourselves to see how many people can access sport and joyful movement regardless of the range of body size or capability. It may seem odd that when I look at Rapinoe’s victory pose and Chastain’s unbridled celebration, I also see fat yoga practitioner Jessamyn Stanley or Paralympic athletes or amateur adaptive climbers like Chloe Crawford.
Jessamyn Stanley
But I do. I do see them. They are all taking up space and claiming the right to exist without being made small. When asked what she was thinking when she tore her shirt off in celebration in 1999, Brandi Chastain said “I wasn’t thinking about anything. I thought ‘My God, this is the greatest moment of my life on the soccer field.’” That stubborn rejection of the stereotypical requirements of others for one’s own body, and the re/discovery of joy in moving the body that one has, in purely being present and fully oneself, now… that is what I see when I look at Megan Rapinoe and when I looked at Brandi Chastain and when I look at Stanley and Crawford and others fully engaged in what they are doing.
What I’ve said so far could seem to endorse the idea that we need to break out of restrictive bodily norms in order to achieve health. I did, after all, say above that people who cannot access all their movement possibilities are cut off from health. Health is important, and bioethics is rightly concerned with it. But of course, health isn’t everything. That way lies the pernicious lure of healthism which places health above all other values.
But joy in one’s own body and what this actual body can do in this actual world? That’s well-being. That’s flourishing. And securing that for people is part of what ethics aims at.
That can be for us. We can have that. We can all have some version of it, if we can let each other have it and if we can help each other have it and if we can grasp it tight. Rapinoe isn’t the first to do it. Stanley wasn’t the first. Crawford wasn’t the first. Chastain wasn’t the first. But they’re doing it.
What if we support others in doing that same thing? Not in winning world championships—though that, too—but in movement unconstrained by, or despite, social constraint.
Joy in the bodies we have and what can be done with them.
If you liked this, you might also like the blogs Fit Is A Feminist Issue and Fat Girl Running, the website Disabled Sports USA, or these other related IJFAB Blog entries:
- Women, Sports, and Confidence: The Role of Roller Derby (2014) by Ula Klein
- Labor Without Respite: Tennis, Pregnancy, and other ‘unexpected feats’ (2017) by Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra and Verina Wild
- Women and Responsibility for Health: Food, Physical Activity, and Feminism (2014) by Alison Reiheld
- The Women’s World Cup: Victory On And Off the Field (2015) by Ula Klein
- “No Ifs, Ands, or Butts”: What does the objectification of male soccer players show us about difference in men’s and women’s athletics? (2014) by Ula Klein
- Eating as Shameful: Food, Gender, Daily Life, and Media Messages (2014) by Alison Reiheld
Great article Allison! I experienced the same girlhood body corrections as a child. I’m sure that many girls were shamed for not being more “ladylike.” Thank you for writing this!!
Very well written Allison. These kinds of societal pressures are things that I’ve tried to be aware of but still, being a white guy, am kind of sheltered about. When you write about it or post on Facebook, it helps me look at the issues with a better awareness. From my end, I hover more towards baseball than soccer but applying that line of thinking, I’ve seen that over the last few years there’s been a big tiff about how non-white baseball players express themselves with bat flips and fistpumping. Much of that criticism seems similar to what Rapinoe and women in general have faced for the way she expresses herself i.e. not conforming to what white men think women should look/act/say.
You make a good point and I have noticed that white baseball players and fans seems overly concerned with how players of color celebrate or “behave” on the field. I am a giants fan but I don’t care for the way Bumgarner reacts to Puig, for instance.
Thanks for that, Allison. You put into words so many of the the unstated restrictions imposed on me as I grew up. It helps to have the words for it.
Thank you for putting words to this issue. Very well done. I will share, hoping that parents and grandparents pick up on it. It makes me sad to think of how many women’s lives were shortened and diluted in the ways you describe.
Thank you for this thoughtful article! As a woman who had to play on the boys varsity soccer team to be able to play in high school at all, (I gave up my position as captain of the cheerleading squad when the new boys soccer coach let me know that I was welcome to play) this resounded with me. I relished every goal and celebration by the USWNT during this world cup. They are all outstanding role models for our young people today and anyone who thinks otherwise I feel bad for.
Thank you for articulating this issue. As a 70 year old woman, I experienced the constraints you talk about. One day, joyfully playing on gymnastic equipment or rafters, and the next after some comments, not able to find that same joy or looseness and the ability to Even do it. Even as a 10 year old, I knew I had lost something important and felt constrained.
I am happy for younger women and envious, too.
I am in my 70s now, and a hair over 6 feet tall; I was 5’11” by age 12. Heaven forbid a girl should be TALL (meaning more than 5′ 6″)! Not just issues with finding clothes, but mixed messages about how to hold myself, on one had, shrink in, shrink down, don’t be too tall “for a girl” and on the other, “don’t slump over” when walking beside someone else so they can hear you. I had what would now be called eating disorders. However, my late husband was much shorter than I and we became tango dancers, often to the disbelief and even laughter from others on the floor. But I have learned to take up my space consciously. Now that I have gained weight, only the clothes remain an issue.
Excellent points all round! I would add the additional concern, related to thinking about how one looks while exercising sport, of what clothes to wear as part of that enforced concern. What choices do people with bodies that do not conform to the gendered or healthism-inspired norm for the correct body in motion make in regards to what clothing is considered “acceptable” for those bodies. One of the things that I most respect Stanley for is that she is photographed not only doing the same poses that people with traditionally-celebrated small bodies do, but that she does those poses in the same attire that other yoga instructors don, so that her fully-extended body in motion is just as visible as any other body doing yoga would be.
Wonderful article. I started martial arts in 1974, and faced a lot of people who critiqued me for being strong, for learning to defend myself, and ultimately teach others how to do the same. I stopped training due to injuries (but not from martial arts). At that time, I held a 6th dan in juijitsu, a 5th dan in judo, and a 5th dan in Taekwondo. I love watching women come into their own in sports!
Agree wholeheartedly. Just one little issue that googling man standing gets you pretty much the same poses-
This is a great article except for the attempt to use the google search as some kind of data. It’s ridiculous to do this without doing the same search for men. When I did it, all of the exact same descriptors apply. None are manspreading. This takes away from the rest of the article. (https://www.google.com/search?q=man+standing&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS504US504&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjg7rml5qXjAhXxFzQIHUkTAVQQ_AUIECgB&biw=1920&bih=929)
Hi. Thanks for raising this. Those images from the Google search are illustrative, rather than evidentiary (it would be a pretty small sample size!).
But this gives us a chance to work out some body language analysis. Readers can pop open two browser windows side by side, minimized so you can see both. In one, search “woman standing” and in another search “man standing.” Select Images rather than News or All. Now. Are more women than men crossing their legs? Are men shown with their elbows out, even of hands are in pockets? If standing with weight on both legs, are women shown with a wide stable stance or a narrow more vulnerable one? How about men?
Now look also for “men sitting” vs. “women sitting.” Are men with one leg resting on the other taking up more space (making a triangle, with their ankle on the opposite knee)? Are women taking up less, with knee on top of knee, as linear as possible? Are women mostly leaning back from the viewer with erect posture, rarely shown leaning forwards, while men are sometimes leaning forward with their elbows resting on widespread knees?
My Google image searches showed these differences between what might at first glance appear to be similar descriptions.
This is such a powerful article, Alison! I sent it to my mother, who was always athletic, even at a time when this was very much frowned on. Recently we went through some family papers and I learned that my grandmother was a really talented field hockey player. We knew that she played field hockey, but had no idea how good she was and how recognized she was, even back then, for her talents. In reading this, I now have a much better appreciation for why my female relatives especially were so supportive of my own athletic efforts all through school. Your beautifully written piece gave me bittersweet tears of rage and sadness — you’ve captured something important here. Thank you for writing it.
Thanks for this thoughtful discussion, Alison! You made me think about a great fitness coach I had, when I was a total gym rat. I said that I needed a better workout routine and he just looked at me and asked, “What do you want to be able to do that you can’t do now?” I was playing lots of tennis at the time, so I said, “Be faster off the blocks” and he said, “Oh, OK, we can work on that!” I loved that he immediately made it about capabilities, not about body shape, size, etc. (I was very trim and fit then, but women tend not to appreciate our own bodies and coaches can often exacerbate this. I was lucky!)
It is that power, self confidence- willingness to see yourself as a powerful being that deserves space, confidence, opportunity- that was the basis of our conversations when a team of us was sent to Portland Maine in the early l970s to write the first drafts of the regulations to implement Title IX- I remember as a woman raised as a Catholic I had a hard time through all the discussions that Title IX wasn’t just about classes and pay, but it was a unique opportunity for women to begin to “own” their strengths and physicality- to realize that women would never be equal until they were comfortable and assertive, confident and expansive in their own perception of their physical bodies, strength and opportunity– the opportunity was not just about “equality’ with men it was more deeply about empowering women to own their own strengths- – this article expresses that well and thanks for reigniting the recognition of that transition for women and girls- we can not only make history they can change history!!!
An interesting and eye-opening article. Your author might want to look into the Tayla Harris photo controversy here in Australia – many of the same issues but with bonus sexual harassment of a footballer playing her sport
Before there is too much hate on manspreading, it is incredibly uncomfortable to keep junk squeezed in your legs. And yes, and sorry if this is TMI, it does end up between there for many of us guys when sitting. Yes, men do need to be more respectful and yes women should be able to take up space too without backlash. But as someone who is otherwise a very strong feminist, fighting for women’s right to choose, equal pay, against rape culture, etc., the hate against manspreading is a bit too much for me. Most guys aren’t doing it to be rude, but because putting our hand in our pants in public and pulling up enough that things aren’t getting so smashed, would probably be seen as more rude (and difficult depending on belts/etc). There was actually a video where a guy had women put on a simulation strap, and they all ended up agreeing (I first saw it on FB from a friend but the original site is more right-wing and I generally hate to share anything from it, but I appreciate that women could come to understand the reality of it.). I’ve worn heels for charity and have such great appreciation for how difficult that is; whether with that or a strap, it can be enlightening to walk a mile in each other’s shoes…. or pants, as it were.
This is such a powerful piece, Alison, and so beautifully written! I love the way you move from the photo of Rapinoe to women’s constrained bodies to the possibilities of full extension in all its meanings. Kudos!
Wow! .. really appreciate this article. Like others have said, you’ve put into words all that I (we) dealt with while growing up. I feel a whole part of me got put away many years ago (I’m 57): don’t be faster than the boys, don’t beat the boys at [fill in the sport], etc. Created a real mental struggle WRT what was ‘right’ .. not sure I ever really mastered it 🙂
Don’t worry about the ambiguous future, just work hard for the sake of clarity