Lauren Fleshman: ‘There is a betrayal of women’s bodies in the sports system’
“If males got boobs during puberty there would be a free sports bra in every locker and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation,” says Lauren Fleshman, laughing but not joking. “When teams issue uniforms a sports bra should be part of that uniform.”
Fleshman, a former professional runner and elite college athlete with multiple national titles during her time at Stanford University, is now running a race to highlight how the sports industry fail women.
The problem is that this race may never end, and also has many different lanes to run in at the same time. Pick a lane, any lane, and Fleshman can probably highlight where inequity exists.
“As soon as girls start developing breasts, any discussion in our culture is sexual,” Fleshman says. “We should be able to talk about breasts in the context of movement the same way we talk about elbows and knees. It’s part of our body and as our bodies are developing the physics of our movement changes. There is almost a cultural celebration of a girl getting her first regular bra and it is time we had a similar rite of passage for the sports bra. It can be normalized before it gets awkward.”
Puberty’s influence on young athletes is just one subject Fleshman explores in Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World. The book’s marketing material describes it as “part memoir, part manifesto” but it’s also an eye-opening account of life as a college athlete and a behind-the-scenes peek at the business of professional athletics in the United States, through a female lens.
“We have a fundamental institutional betrayal of women’s bodies happening in the sports system,” Fleshman says. “It is a problem that requires a pretty basic shift in thinking and if we can shift that thinking and raise that consciousness then other things fall into place: policy changes, the way we talk to girls.”
High on Fleshman’s list for change is dumping the idea that men and women should be treated the same, a concept that upends some central themes in equality debates.
“In the [physical] development years after adolescence female-bodied people in sport are having fundamentally different experiences with their bodies but we have been treating them like they should be like males because that is what ‘equality’ looks like,” she says.
“If basic female body experiences are taboo, erased, or minimized then you aren’t creating an environment that accurately reflects the people in it. You aren’t creating an empowered sports environment for those people and that is a group of people who are going to be victimized and easier prey for bad actors.
“We have to start being courageous to lean into the differences that we have and decide collectively that women deserve to thrive in sport and have sport built around them for their norms. We have to stop comparing them to a male standard, stop expecting them to progress like men do, stop erasing the parts of their body that are feminine. We’re scared of women’s bodies and scared of women’s power.”
Fleshman suggests 1960s and 70s Second Wave feminism addressed many issues that led to positive outcomes but in turn created unforeseen challenges for the 21st century that need revisiting – if not revising.
“The liberal feminist movement that peaked in the 70s led to a lot of fundamental changes in women’s lives – no-fault divorce, Title IX in athletics, and women getting their own credit cards,” Fleshman says. “The way we got those things was through appealing to men in power by saying we’re the same as you, so treat us the same. Talking about differences wasn’t a great strategy for feminists to get equal rights so we stopped talking about differences. But it’s been 50 years. To get to that last step in equality we have to lean into our differences and say, hey we need something different.”
With Good for a Girl, Fleshman, now 42, details her pathway from aspiring adolescent athlete to an elite adult runner chasing an opportunity to compete at the Olympics. She competes with boys – until the boys reach puberty and are suddenly faster – and then competes with her own body as she moves through puberty. Fleshman highlights that teenage girls leave sports in far higher numbers than teenage boys. Research suggests access, safety, and social stigma are major reasons for departure – but it rarely points to the (obvious to some) challenges of puberty. Fleshman also highlights how her college teammates and rivals faced eating disorders and physical and mental health issues as they strived for success.
“We make the assumptions that the best female athletes should mimic what the men are doing and mimic how the men look,” she says. “So we pressure them to erase the parts of their bodies that are distinctly female. The easiest and fastest way to do that is through weight loss – eliminate your curves and eliminate as much body fat as possible. We now know how harmful that is to the female body and we also know how silly that is for a [teenage] girl. Even a 28-year-old Olympian. The tools we have used to measure male bodies are just not applicable to females. They are damaging. You start pinching the skin of a 15-year-old girl and that is the last thing a girl needs when her body is going through these changes. She is becoming. She has not arrived. She needs the space to become.”
Included in Good for a Girl’s deconstruction of the sports system is Fleshman’s experience with the corporate behemoth of Nike, and the all-powerful and non-accountable NCAA, the main governing body of college sports in the US. Fleshman was contracted to Nike for much of her professional career. When she first turned pro, Fleshman says several agents suggested $30,000 a year was a realistic deal ceiling (male teammates, she recalls, were offered three-times that amount) but Nike eventually offered her $60,000 with clauses requiring she make national teams and achieve national and world rankings to maintain that salary. At her peak, following a revised contract with Nike, she was paid $125,000 a year for six years. But that deal came with financial penalties if she didn’t make Olympic teams. It’s not just Nike, though, says Fleshman. It’s the entire system.
“The Olympic movement runs on volunteer athlete talent and depends on a steady stream of dreamers willing to do it for free or live in poverty to do it,” she says. “We aren’t paid by the Olympics whereas Olympic officials get $750 per day stipends and limos and all that. We compete for free with the idea that we can leverage that to go and get endorsement deals. Nobody else is asked to work for free except for the athletes.
“In the US, Nike sponsors USA Track and Field and are exempt from antitrust law so it creates a non-competitive environment. Any athlete in the US is going to already be wearing Nike on the biggest stages of the world. So why does Nike have to pay an athlete very much for a contract? They will be wearing Nike at the Olympics so it doesn’t matter. Why would any other company pony up money for an athlete in that environment? It suppresses the entire economic market place.”