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Eat. Sweat. Play

Page 3

by Anna Kessel


  I sit back and take a breath. Melanie has blown me away with what she has to say. We were always told that ‘girl power’ was meant to be a movement, but it didn’t feel like it at the time; to my ears it always sounded a little infantilizing. Perhaps, as Melanie suggests, I was one of those who misunderstood what the intended meaning of that slogan really was. Or maybe I just wasn’t the target age for it. Or maybe the media was so obsessed with the Spice Girls’ bodies that they didn’t allow them enough room to talk about anything else. And yet here we are, almost two decades later, and Melanie is a convincing spokesperson for this issue. And she’s right, of course. Women have to be allowed to exist without being defined by their bodies, without constantly obsessing over them. And we have to cultivate a healthy relationship between our bodies and our minds; one that ain’t all about the ass.

  Maybe I underestimated the cultural impact of the Spice Girls. Maybe I took it for granted at the time. Melanie nods. ‘I look back now at what the Spice Girls achieved, what we represented, and I think, “Oh, my God.” We didn’t fully realize it at the time, we were just five young women living our dream. But all these years later and people are still telling me that we inspired them, we made them feel it was OK to be different, it was OK to be a tomboy, it was OK to be whatever you wanted to be. I don’t think we have that now for young girls.’

  By the end of the interview I love Melanie. She has reinvigorated my belief in the world. If even a multimillionairess cares about girls and PE at school, about body image, about mums riding shopper bikes at triathlons, then maybe there is some hope. Maybe, even with all that money and fame, people can still care about the issues that are shaping women today, and the women of tomorrow. And that’s important, because when I was a kid I don’t think many people truly believed that it mattered whether a girl liked sport or not.

  Melanie has put her finger on an important point: there is a revolution going on. Women are fed up of all this compartmentalizing nonsense where we are stuck into decorative, detached and sexualized roles. We want a stake in our own destinies! And whether it’s Lena, or Melanie or Serena, this is a movement that is happening across the globe, in every sphere. Crucially, sport is a major part of it.

  Take that Always viral #LikeAGirl – a short film questioning why doing anything ‘like a girl’ should ever, ever be seen as a lesser thing. It’s so powerful it moved me to tears. Seriously, watch the tiny girl in crocs and flouncy skirt sprint across the stage in demonstration and then speak so earnestly into the camera to say, ‘Run like a girl means . . . [dramatic pause] . . . run as fast as you can.’ Too right. I want her to run for president. Meanwhile the current actual US president has lit up my life with a single phrase. ‘Playing like a girl,’ said Barack Obama as he celebrated the US women’s football team World Cup win, ‘means you’re a badass.’

  But unless we get our girls and women playing sport, or being physically active, we risk not making badass, we risk celebrating a cool phrase but never truly experiencing it beyond the rhetoric. Because the inescapable truth is that, while there are pockets of change to be found, we still have a major inactivity epidemic in the UK. Around 40 per cent of sixteen-year-old girls in this country do no vigorous physical activity. That hardly surprises me. As a sixteen-year-old I did no vigorous physical activity, unless you count blagging my way into the Camden Palace on a Tuesday night and having a dance. There was no emphasis on exercise being important to keep you healthy. No one mentioned heart rates and bone density, core strength supporting your skeleton, varicose veins, osteoporosis or arthritis. No one mentioned ‘skinny fat’ and what’s really going on with your body inside. And there was no accountability. When I sat down in front of my PE teachers on parents’ evening, they looked at me, bemused: what was I doing there? Meanwhile my recent request to see statistics from Sport England regarding physical activity and young women in the 1990s lead to a dead end: the data that monitors these things only goes back to 2005. No wonder we have such a problem.

  These days, of course, we have a much greater awareness of all these health issues. But a commitment to Nutribullet and a gym session might not be the catch-all solution it is so often billed as, because too much of our health rhetoric is still fixated around body image. You’ve only got to flick through Instagram’s fitspo hashtag to see that among the kale-eating, strength-promoting positive messages, there is also a worrying leaning towards yet another version of seeking perfection in women’s bodies, an aesthetic valued higher than the internal sense of well-being it often claims to be connected with. Ultimately we still need to change our attitude to sport and the place it occupies in our lives, and this needs to start right at the very beginning – at primary school.

  It was pushing my daughter on the swing the other day that crystallized things. Through the fence we watched primary-school-age boys take part in an after-school football coaching session. The more I watched, the more depressed I became. Not because there weren’t any girls taking part – although that in itself is pretty sad considering that the Football Association has now lifted the gender restrictions on kids playing football together – it was more than that. I focused on the coach. A young man with a clipboard and a whistle. The only thing this football coach ever said was, ‘Unlucky!’ or ‘Arghhhh!’ Around half the class didn’t receive any kind of comment, or grunt, at all.

  It was heartbreaking, watching the kids who ran up to kick the ball knowing full well they had already been written off as crap. Many were half-hearted in their efforts, and their teacher barely acknowledged their existence. It was all too familiar. From such a young age we brand kids as sporty or not sporty. Fall into the wrong category and you are persona non grata to the average PE teacher. This could not be allowed to happen in any other curriculum subject. A teacher is obliged to help you learn, to help you to improve, to give you advice, to tell you where you are going wrong. How is ‘Arghhh!’ an acceptable comment? What can any young footballer learn from ‘Unlucky’? No wonder England can’t win the World Cup.

  A few weeks later, by coincidence, we watched the same PE teacher instruct a mixed class of boys and girls. He was sensitive around the girls, a softer voice. But there was a resignation about his demeanour. He didn’t seem to believe that the girls were worth investing in. He gave them faint praise, when – quite frankly – they were terrible. They didn’t seem to believe him, either, because his comments led to no discernible change in their technique. What made me saddest of all was seeing the girls’ bodies over the ball, crumpled, hunched over, shying away from the task. There was no confidence in their frames.

  Our school sport system doesn’t seem to be working for anyone right now, girls or boys. Far too much coaching appears to be stuck in the 1980s, the same archaic attitudes that I encountered at school. I don’t want to shoot down PE teachers; I imagine their lives are already hard enough as it is. Their subject isn’t prioritized, isn’t taken seriously enough, isn’t allocated enough time in the curriculum. And from what I hear, female PE teachers in particular aren’t always supported in the PE environment, with girls’ PE all too often seen as secondary to boys’ PE. One friend, a teacher, tells me the story of when their head of PE handed in his notice. ‘As soon as he walked out the room, one of the male PE teachers turned to the head of boys’ PE and said, “Well, that’s good news for you, then.” “Yeah,” said the head of boys’ PE, “and you could take over my job.” All the while completely ignoring the fact that the head of girls’ PE was sitting with them. When she was privately asked if she would apply for the post she said she didn’t think there was any point: “I know I won’t get it.” When, finally, female colleagues within the department convinced her to go for the job, she was told that they wouldn’t be accepting job applications for the moment as the head of boys’ PE would automatically be interim head until the new school year. PE is such a boys’ club, it’s ridiculous. But that’s the kind of shit that happens in school. Women aren’t taken seriously for the senior roles. I’
ve heard other schools talk about the same issues. The male PE teachers go out for “boys’ drinks”, but they don’t invite the female PE teachers.’

  Such attitudes are damaging and leave a legacy that can carry over into adulthood. When I quiz my friends about their PE experiences, so many of them have incredibly vivid memories, even twenty-five years on. My friend Kate recalls the male PE teacher who told her that there was no point in teaching girls to throw because they are inherently bad at it (something to do with their breasts getting in the way, he reckoned). ‘It has stayed with me for life,’ she says. In Kate’s case I think it probably made her more determined to excel as a woman in the world, but she never did take up sport. And the wider point is that to tell young girls there are things they cannot be good at because of their biology sets up a terrible precedent for the rest of their lives. What else, those girls must wonder, am I not able to do because of my breasts?

  The problem is that these sorts of attitudes about female ability, and equality, are still around in male-dominated PE departments. My teacher friend remembers a row over equal prize money in tennis, which shocked her to the core. ‘I remember watching Wimbledon the first year that the women were given equal prize money [in 2007]. I said to the men in the PE department, “Isn’t it brilliant? About bloody time! Can you believe it’s taken this long?” and they went really quiet. So I said, “But why has it taken this long?” And they told me it is because men work harder than women, because men play five sets and women only play three. I said, “Are you serious? Are you taking the piss? Come on, boys, let’s get a round, you lot are fucking jokers, ha ha.” Anyway, turns out they weren’t joking. They actually don’t believe that women should get equal prize money. I said, “Do you think women train less than men? Do they put in less time than the men? No? So why should they get less prize money?” And some of these men are really lovely, totally unstereotypical PE teachers, sensitive, thoughtful guys. I was like, shame on you! So I took the debate and shared it with all the other PE teachers across the whole borough when we gathered together to watch the final. I said to them, “Fucking hell, can you believe this about the PE staff at my school?” Anyway, turns out they all felt exactly the same way. All the male PE teachers, to a man, from across the borough, all thought women shouldn’t get equal prize money. I was on my own with it. Sorry, but what year are we in?’ Of course, female tennis players themselves are open to the idea of playing five sets to earn equal prize money – as the former Women’s Tennis Association CEO, Stacey Allaster, said in 2013, ‘All you have to do is ask us.’

  But the mood across my friend’s PE department isn’t an isolated one; PE seems dreadfully archaic at a time when the rest of society is moving pretty fast. The call for PE to reform is getting louder and louder, from greater flexibility over the kinds of sport covered, to demanding more time to be allocated to PE lessons full stop. Because while we’re asking adults to do 150 minutes of exercise a week, we’re not asking kids to do the same. Surely if we want to prepare them for a healthy lifestyle then we need to engender the habit before they grow up? The reality right now is that kids do two hours of PE a week. But once you’ve subtracted the time needed to get changed, listen to and follow instructions from the teacher, pack up again and get changed back into normal school clothes, you’re looking at a maximum of two sessions of half an hour each.

  Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain’s most decorated Paralympian turned peer, is concerned. ‘PE needs a revolution,’ she says in her typically refreshing, forthright way. ‘PE needs to be given the same status as literacy and numeracy. We don’t teach physical literacy. We teach phonics to teach people to read: the same should happen with physical literacy – jump, throw, catch, hop, skip.’ I love this idea – particularly for young children. A friend of mine sends her four-year-old daughter to a scheme called Playball Kids, aimed at two- to eight-year-olds. She discovered it after an attempt to get her daughter into football failed spectacularly – the football sessions were almost all boys, and her daughter said they were too noisy and aggressive. Playball Kids doesn’t focus on any one particular sport or gender, it’s just about children getting the general skills they need to be physically active, with the emphasis on enjoyment. As Tanni says: jump, throw, catch, hop, skip. But only parents who can afford schemes like that, or live in areas where they operate, will have access to them. For the rest of us it’s a lottery.

  Tanni hits the nail on the head, and echoes my own school experiences twenty-five years ago, when she says, ‘You might not like maths but you know you have to do it. You might not like PE but you can get out of it. If it were up to me I’d be more dictatorial about PE. I think we should be doing it every day in school – but delivered properly.’ At St Ninian’s primary school in Stirling there’s a brilliant version of Tanni’s utopia in action. Every day the whole school walks, runs, skips or jogs a mile-long circuit around the perimeter of the school, in addition to regular timetabled PE. It’s a cost-free response to a problem that sees two-thirds of primary school children lacking basic fitness, when obesity experts recommend children exercise for an hour a day to stay healthy.

  If able-bodied children are failing this target so miserably, how much worse does it get for disabled children? Tanni sighs. ‘Well, they’re still being excluded from PE at school and sent to the library,’ she says. ‘And if you’re the parent of a disabled child you’re probably fighting for education, benefits, healthcare, a wheelchair, childcare – so physical education is probably bottom of the list; by the time you’re fighting for PE you’ve probably given up. There’s a lot we could do to be more inclusive.’

  The thing is, if we can’t get PE right for young children, a captive audience obliged to take part, then how on earth can we ever expect to nail it for adults? If even at its very first hurdle sport is failing our children, how can we hope to truly effect cultural change? Sometimes it feels as though we’re searching for solutions when they already exist; we just don’t think to look in those places. Take the example of the Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation (MWSF). Most people would assume that their expertise is only relevant to Muslim women and girls, marginalized by mainstream society. But speaking to their chair, Rimla Akhtar, proves a revelation as she tells me about schemes run for her community that would translate brilliantly into any mainstream setting. It is a stark reminder of how we casually pigeonhole people.

  Minority communities undoubtedly have their own specific challenges to getting women and girls active; Rimla tells me, for example, that few faith schools have dedicated sports halls. Meanwhile the sports sector fails to reach out to communities and demonstrate that sport is a safe space for their daughters. But when Rimla describes the MWSF’s six-week coaching programme that sends dedicated sports coaches into schools to work specifically with groups of teenage girls, it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would work in any school. ‘That six-week coaching programme is enough to change a girl’s attitude to sport. It’s about knowing that someone’s coming in to focus on you and give you the attention you deserve. That’s all, as a human being, that you’d want anyway. To know you’re important in that frame of reference. You are wanted in the sports industry. It just takes the smallest intervention, for someone to say, “We do want you to be part of sport.” That can make such a major difference. Those girls didn’t want the six weeks to end.’ Rimla’s talking about sport here. Girls liking sport. I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are – in the main – conditioned against it. But shouldn’t we try to change that?

  It’s a subject that, as mother to a young daughter, I feel passionately about. And I’m not the only one. Even friends who aren’t greatly interested in sport have asked me what they can do for their young daughters to prevent history repeating itself when it comes to school sport. My friend, sports broadcaster Jacqui Oatley, is not leaving anything to chance. She is determined to ensure that her daughter has a better experien
ce of sport than our generation encountered. ‘I think about it every day,’ laughs Jacqui. ‘Poor little thing, she’s only four! But I plant little messages in her mind. I want sport to be normal for her, so I take her to early years classes where she can be physically active and she loves it. I think it’s really important that from a very early age sport is normal for girls to do.’

  For Jacqui, helping her daughter to be confident about sport and her body is about more than just being decent at PE. It’s about giving her the fundamental tools to be an empowered person, to make her own decisions, to find her own path. ‘I try to sow the seeds in her mind that she can do anything if she works hard for it, little tiny messages, bite-size ones that she can understand at her age, about needing to do things for herself and not waiting to be asked. And that even if her friends don’t want to do it, it doesn’t matter, if she wants to do it she can. The earlier you get those messages in their minds, hopefully the easier it will be for them growing up. Not just about sport, or football, but about everything.’ Jacqui is so right about this. I watch the little girls in my daughter’s nursery and, mostly, they are so confident. They express their opinions, they know what they want to play with, what they feel. Why does this confidence evaporate as they grow?

  I think I know. While the experts fanny about discussing whether we might entice teenage girls into PE if we supply them with enough hairdryers, or ‘feminized’ activities such as Zumba or cheerleading, I personally feel that one of the most central issues to this whole debate is being ignored. Because girls are not the problem. Twelve-year-olds are not inherently diva-esque madams who require the equivalent of a PE rider and an exercise entourage. The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media – so influential on impressionable young girls – that have been allowed, for millennia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women’s sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire. At the time of puberty, when society is telling girls to prioritize morphing into a sex siren ASAP, is it any wonder that girls aren’t buying into school sport?

 

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