Women Olympians prove strong is good
When it comes to women’s bodies, the most visible specimens are remarkably similar: from magazines to movies, the female body is almost always svelte. She is lithe. Sylphlike. She is not strong or even particularly resilient-looking, but by God she can drape herself across a sofa like no one’s business. And that’s not all: she can drape herself across many other types of furnishings and even natural structures such as rock formations and sand dunes. This ideal model is so perfectly airbrushed that she’s gauzy — weightless, even. Does she have guts? Can she process food? Is it possible she defecates? Don’t be stupid — of course she doesn’t.
Thankfully, the Olympics’ stunning range of women’s bodies constitutes a kind of cultural smackdown of the svelte ideal. These Olympic bodies could lean fetchingly against a rock formation if they wanted to, but it’s far more likely that they’d free-climb it, guts out.
(Abrupt segue here, but bear with me — it should make sense in the end.)
As a teen, I was anorexic. Then I got better and was merely thin for a while. Then I was pregnant. Then thin. Then pregnant. Then thin. Then pregnant. Then thin. Then pregnant. Then thin. Then pregnant. Then thin. It was kind of my thing for about nine years. The contrast between my thin self and my massive belly was remarkable … I know this because it was so frequently remarked upon — things like, “You don’t even look pregnant from behind!” A woman approached me at the gym and said I was her hero; another woman did the same thing two years later.
I really struggled with this. What was heroic about getting pregnant, eating right, exercising three times a week and being born an ectomorph?
I’m sure these comments came from genuinely good intentions, and as a classic first-born, Type A personality, I appreciated this approval — hell, I basked in it. That’s right, I’m winning at Pregnant Body! I am totally killing it! A-plus for me! But at the same time, I learned that I was being watched: total strangers would ask, “Are you pregnant again?! How do you do it? You look amazing!” Upon being introduced to me, one woman joked, “Oh, I’ve known you for years already; you’re the one who works out at the Y until her due date and then comes back a week later looking like the baby never happened.” Women who look thin and pregnant at the same time, or morph quickly from one state to the other, are a jarring (ergo notable) juxtaposition of the shapes we’re taught to both revile and desire in the female body. Pregnant women who restrict the expansion of their bodies to the bare minimum, and hustle back into the thin ideal as soon as possible, are accorded heroic status. I mean really, what more important things are there for them to accomplish?
We’ve all (I’m guilty of it too) been trained to surveil the female body, as if it was there mainly to be looked at, monitored, compared …. Consider, for instance, all the tabloid pictures of Jennifer Aniston with a circle drawn around her stomach: “BABY BUMP?” the caption gleefully accuses. Even the slightest bulge (maybe it’s her internal organs! Maybe she had a sandwich!) is enough to draw media attention. The faster women get back to looking like the thin ideal, the more they are celebrated for their “post-baby body!” The message is clear: we’re being monitored by the culture at large for the ways (pregnancy is only one example) in which we remain within and step outside the narrow boundaries of the svelte ideal.
When we celebrate the women competing at the Olympics — from weightlifters to gymnasts — yes, we’re still watching women’s bodies, but we’re more interested in what they can do, rather than how well they fit into the thin ideal. In point of fact, we’re being shown all the ways in which they must step outside the boundaries of the thin female body, with their bulky biking thighs, or their broad expanse of swimming shoulders like a horizon over their paddle-like hands and feet. Their bodies are formed by their actions and vice versa; being thin isn’t an achievement — it impedes achievement.
In my late thirties, after 20 years of the Stairmaster, my feet and knees started hurting, so I switched to strength training to get my heart rate up. Before, I couldn’t do a single pushup, and now I can do 15-ish. I’m at the gym less, and I enjoy it more. I’ve gone up a size or two, but my body feels full of purpose: in the garden, I’m a digging machine. I move furniture without help. I lift up my kids for bone-crushing, full-body hugs. I’ve been thin, and I’ve been strong. Strong is better.