Do you know what you have in common with an athlete who has just competed in the Paris Olympics? Unfortunately, it is not your wonderful skill set in high jumping. It is the fact that you both have been body-shamed in your life.
You are so thin, you need to eat more; did you gain weight lately? no boy will take you to the prom like this; you wear too much make-up, you should put on some makeup; look at your hair, no women over 40 shall have long hair; look at your hair, it is too short, why don’t you want to be a bit more feminine, for God’s sake; with a body like that you should maybe wear less revealing dresses, please put on a skirt/long pants, we are going to visit Grandma.
My bet is that every single one of us – regardless of the age we were brought up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our geographic location – have heard sentences like these. Some of these remarks were more frequent and more toxic and it stayed with us for our whole life. My bet was a safe one: according to a study 94% of Americans have experienced body-shaming in one way or another in their life. We have no reason to believe that the statistic is more favourable in Europe or in other parts of the world. This is unfortunately how we stand today.
The 33rd Summer Olympic Games in Paris have recently finished and so did the Paralympics. The Games was the first ever gender balanced one: 5250 female and 5250 male athletes were competing in stadiums, fields, swimming pools or even in the River Seine. It is indeed a long way from another Paris Olympics Games, in 1900, when out of 997 competitors only 22 were female.
The cofounder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Courbetin, did so much for popularising sport, which used to be considered as male domain back then. The world was not ready to see women’s calf as Monsieur Courbatin had phrased it. After 124 hundred years, is the world ready yet?
The highly televised sport event is about “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together” but it seems that unfortunately body-shaming hateful comments are also getting Faster, Higher and Stronger.
It has been always on, but the more televised and social media-ed the event became, the more the comment section got angrier. The Olympics had not even started when Ilona Maher, Team US rugby player, was criticised for being fat. She has 1.1 million followers in TikTok but her comments reached way more than that. She beautifully lectured the troll about BMI, how that is not applicable for professional athletes who are full of muscles and said at the end of her post: “Yes, my BMI is 30, but I am going to the Olympics, and you are not.”
Then came the 24-year-old, 188cm gold medallist Spanish water polo player, Paula Leiton, who plays centre forward and those who know the sport, know that every centre player must be tall and muscular otherwise they do not stand a chance of surviving, let alone winning the game. She defended herself in countless interviews by saying that the comments do not hurt her, she loves her body and after all she has just won a gold medal. But these comments hurt little girls, so, dear trolls, please refrain from your comments. Afterwards, a British football-player Fran Kirby admitted that all body-shaming remarks addressed to her hurt so much that she felt the need to cover up, Kate Shortman and Isabela Thorpe, British silver-medallist synchronised swimmers were called too muscular; Katheline Ohashi, former Team US gymnast, who broke her back was told by one of her coaches (!) that the reason why she still feels the pain during practices is because she weighs too much and the list of names goes on seemingly forever. Unfortunately, the Algerian boxer, Imane Khalif, had it the worst – if we can compare daily humiliations. She became a media sensation and called brutal names for competing with females.
Howard Schatz, American photographer, took photos of female athletes in the peak of their careers in 2002. The photos keep resurfacing in turbulent times and so they did resurface again during the recent games. It shows the variety of fit women. They and we come in all shapes, colours, and sizes. If a perfectly toned and fit woman's body becomes so heavily and harshly criticised what can ordinary creatures who also walk the surface of the world expect?
Was Monsieur Courbatin right? Isn't the world still not ready to see a woman's calf?
Ágnes Holtzer
Sources:
https://fitisafeministissue.com/2013/12/03/the-shape-of-an-athlete/
