Eat. Sweat. Play

by Anna Kessel

  So how do we fight this thing? For a start we need good PE teachers who are empowered to teach girls how to enjoy sport and exercise. Who aren’t treated as second-class citizens to boys’ PE teachers, and who are given enough time in the curriculum to get to know their students and work out what they like and don’t like. PE teachers who can teach. Who can encourage a girl – or boy – to enjoy and improve in a sport, irrespective of their natural athleticism. And if we can find these happy, motivated, communicative, encouraging PE teachers then we can get rid of those arsey, sarcastic ones I remember from my youth. The power-crazed, sadistic interrogators who loved to terrorize pubescent girls about their periods, gleefully doling out unwieldy-looking store-cupboard tampons. Because no one needs those kind of PE teachers. Not girls, and not boys. Not when I was growing up. And certainly not now. Because Zumba and yoga and cheerleading are all great, and I’m totally up for offering them to girls (and boys) in a bid to get them active, but not if the message is: we’re doing this because we don’t think you’re really going to like sport. Not if it’s some sort of apologetic last-ditch attempt to get girls active at any cost. Surely it’s our job to make sport attractive? To make being competitive a comfortable and fun experience, not a persecutory Darwinian exercise in weeding out the weak from the strong? Competition is a lifelong skill that we all need, and that I believe we all possess, just maybe not in the way it’s been packaged to us so far, as some kind of terrifying product of the uber-macho. Society has constructed sport to appear this way; our job is to reinvent that message, not reinforce it.

  To do so we need investment. In the same way that US sport has benefited from the 1972 introduction of Title IX, forcing all educational institutions to invest equally in boys’ and girls’ education across all subjects – including sports – the UK and other countries would do well to adopt a similar approach. And we need to show girls what a sporty woman looks like. We need to bust all the myths about how playing sport is unfeminine, and uncool, about the exact body shape you need to be sporty. We need to provide girls with role models – even if the media won’t. Drag all those inspirational female sports stars back to their schools and colleges to speak to the next generation. Show girls their own versions of Wayne Rooney, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, Alastair Cook, Lewis Hamilton and Amir Khan. And allow them to try out any sport they like, not just the supposedly ‘feminine’ ones.

  Sport and exercise in its most basic form shouldn’t be rocket science. It should just be fun, the fundamental movement of a person’s body from A to B, with a giggle and a breathless cackle at C. Because when a kid rolls down a hill they don’t complain, ‘Oh my Gawd, this is SUCH hard work, and my arse is still huuuuuge,’ they enjoy it. Their brains haven’t yet been indoctrinated to think that moving their bodies is a chore, or something they’re ‘just not that into’. How can anyone not be into moving their bodies? It’s an essential requirement of life, which has absolutely nothing to do with being male or female.

  That’s why we urgently need to stop the rot. We need to show our kids, and ourselves, that moving your body – beyond gyrating and cleaning – is for women and girls as much as it is for men and boys. We need to teach them that their bodies are their own, not merely vessels for saucy Snapchat pics, but useful, strong, powerful aids to being a successful woman in the modern world. We need to prove to them that being physically active is not scary, it’s just a natural part of life, as normal as picking your nose, or brushing your hair. We need to do this now. And empower the next generation to finally reclaim sport, and their bodies, for themselves.

  Sweating is so hot right now! Why our twenty-first-century obsession with exercise is all wrong

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a naked woman that wasn’t my mum. I was twelve, she was a grown-up and standing in the showers at Park Road swimming pool, North London, soaping her pubic hair into a lather. I don’t remember anything about her face, just her body: sinewy with some wobbly bits, and a big bush down below. Swimming pool changing rooms have always been instructive; one of the few places where you see naked women. Real ones, I mean, just going about their business, getting changed, or having a wash.

  At the time the sight of women unapologetically displaying their bodies prompted giggles, embarrassment and the odd sneer of derision from me and my school-age friends. As a twelve-year-old I generally interpreted those women as 1970s exhibitionist feminist types making some kind of explosive political gender statement with the aid of shower gel and uninhibited pubes. Sadly, I’m not sure how many women (or men) ever grow out of that opinion. Certainly for pubescent girls, showing any part of your naked body is anathema – which made getting undressed in a public changing room challenging. It was an unspoken rule that you had to undress without anyone catching sight of your body. Welcome to the impossible world of teenage logic!

  Even today, getting dressed with minimal reveal is a process deeply etched on my unconscious. Here’s the drill: 1) Fasten bra under T-shirt by pulling both arms in. 2) Under cover of said T-shirt, drag bra around to the front of your body and hoist over boobs with minimum jiggling. 3) Reach out under T-shirt stretching out arms into new T-shirt you want to transfer into. 4) Discreetly whip first T-shirt off while simultaneously whipping new T-shirt on. This manoeuvre involves two challenging over-the-head moves in short succession and, if done wrong, can leave you trapped between two T-shirt neck-holes, arms flapping, belly and bra exposed to the world. 5) Finish off with a flourish of deodorant under each armpit. 6) Sit down and have a breather; you’ve earned it.

  The lengths we go to not to expose our bodies is extraordinary. The irony, of course, is that women’s bodies are constantly on display in the public sphere. And yet we remain so uncomfortable about revealing our bodies, even in a private setting. This, no doubt, perpetuates the recurring women’s magazine topic: how to work up the courage to undress in front of your partner with the lights on. That there are women who have been married for years still unable to show their bodies to their partners makes me desperately sad. The crazy thing is that in shunning this safe female space – specifically a female changing room – an important reality check is absent from our everyday lives. Namely, that boobs and bums really do tend to look like the wobbly things I first saw at the Park Road pool all those years ago, not the pneumatic weaponry depicted daily in the mainstream media. They also tend to be accompanied by a fascinating panoply of pubic hair which, if you are to believe the images we see every day, is an endangered species in the twenty-first century.

  Female body image, and its associated woes, is currently one of the biggest obstacles holding women back in the western world. It is also one of the biggest contributing factors preventing women from being physically active in the first place. A recent Sport England report found that 75 per cent of the women they surveyed wanted to take part in sport but were inhibited by fear of being judged on their appearance and ability. The study also highlighted that one in five men think sporty women are ‘not feminine’. Cruelly, our own messed-up ideas about body image are preventing us from doing the one thing that could liberate us all.

  Whenever I’ve asked men about this subject, though many confess to their own body insecurities, they seem much more relaxed. They talk about changing rooms after football practice, where teammates comfortably stroll around naked and occasionally spank each other with a towel for a laugh. They seem to know what each other’s bits look like, and are happy to stand next to each other peeing into urinals.

  But perhaps that’s because men’s bodies aren’t routinely sexualized in pretty much every context, from cars to cereal packets, news stories to celebrity appearances. And that point of difference matters, because we have reached a place where we are now so bombarded with this stuff that it seems normal. Take advertising: we consume between 400 and 600 ads in their various forms each day; women’s bodies feature so frequently it’s almost funny. Try googling ‘sexist ads’ and you will find everything from cleavage selling sliced
mushrooms in brine, to a US commercial in which food writer Padma Lakshmi locates an erogenous zone in a $6 burger. And it’s making us unhappy. In a Glamour magazine report, 97 per cent of women said they had one or more negative thoughts about their body every single day and that on average, women had a negative thought about their body every waking hour of the day.

  Sport is such an obvious natural combatant to all this sexy-fungi-and-burger-sauce-orgasming weirdness. Because when a person plays sport to the best of their ability they cannot possibly think about pouting for the camera. Or any other sexualized oddity. With sport you are simply, wonderfully, in the moment. Think about it: how often are women depicted actually doing something? How often do we see women being powerful, in a non-sexualized way, demonstrating purpose, strength and grit? In an experiment in 2014, No More Page 3 (a campaign group challenging the Sun newspaper’s forty-year-old practice of publishing daily photos of topless models on page 3) trawled six months of photographs in the Sun and found zero pictures of women actually playing sport. Meanwhile, beyond the sports pages, women were portrayed as some kind of sexualized still life, while men were typically shown being active. And this message about gender stereotypes and expectations is so hardwired into our brains that when we do come across images of women playing sport, they look quite – well – weird. Their faces are all messed up. Their brow is wrinkled. Their mouth is grimacing. Their hair is sweaty. Their arms are muscular. And what is incredible about the experience of viewing these images – what is so powerful, and makes me want to plaster them across every billboard in London – is that they tell a story about women that we have never really seen before. They tell a story that encapsulates everything I want my daughter to aspire to, all of the qualities I want her to have. They show women being inspirational, determined, focused, strong, unstoppable. They show women achieving, winning, celebrating, enjoying themselves, unburdened by social norms, unselfconscious.

  But if women who play sport are occupying this liberated space then we have to back them up. We have to make sure that when they step off the field of play they are not made to feel like unconventional weirdos. Unfortunately, as a society we are so used to the image-obsessed narrative that even sportswomen buy into it. Take thirteen-year-old baseball sensation Mo’ne Davis, the first-ever girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series. In the summer of 2014 Mo’ne became an overnight star – Michelle Obama was tweeting about her, she knocked Kobe Bryant off the front cover of Sports Illustrated (the first time a Little League player of either gender has made the front cover), and Spike Lee made a moving documentary about her. An ordinary African American girl from a low-income household in Philadelphia, with a phenomenal athletic talent, effortlessly beating the boys and redefining the old stereotype of throwing like a girl. Watching the film, you can’t help but cheer when Mo’ne says, ‘I throw 70mph, that’s throwing like a girl.’ Bam! Meanwhile a Philadelphia city councillor tells the anecdote of two young boys arguing over who can pretend to be Mo’ne when they throw balls at each other. Boys aspiring to be like a girl? That’s powerful.

  And yet, an exchange with Spike Lee when the film-maker asks her how she feels about the Sports Illustrated cover leaves a telling reminder of how we are teaching our young girls to see themselves. Holding up the historic cover – an action shot of Mo’ne, ball in hand – she says, ‘Just to, like, see my face on here is pretty cool, but not the face that I’m making—’

  Spike interrupts. ‘You don’t like your face on the cover?’ he asks, incredulous.

  ‘I mean I look like a blowfish,’ says Mo’ne, ‘but otherwise it’s pretty cool. You can see how much power I put into it.’

  And that’s the thing. Mo’ne’s first comment is about how her face doesn’t look good because she is puffing out her cheeks with the effort of her throw; her second comment is about how powerful her sporting talent is. Why are we teaching young girls to care first about how they look, and second about their talent? This girl made history, and she cares about how her face looks? That’s so wrong. I think we should feel outraged about that. I think we need to change the world so that girls like Mo’ne bask in their achievements, and don’t feel the need to critique their beauty. Because when Kobe Bryant is making the front cover of Sports Illustrated no one’s going, ‘Eww, you can see Kobe’s armpit hair while he’s hitting that slam dunk,’ or ‘Kobe might have just won the Championship, but he’s pulling kind of a weird expression right there.’ That’s because, as a man, Kobe’s talent is discussed first. The fact that he’s also a handsome man, making him even more marketable, is just a bonus.

  With sportswomen, damningly, it’s too often the other way around. Some of the biggest female earners in the sports world are paid more for their marketability than for their talent. Perennial tennis underachiever Anna Kournikova is the most famous example. But the Kournikova effect is not entirely unique. In 2014 the greatest active female tennis player Serena Williams (then with eighteen Grand Slam titles) earned half the amount in endorsements of Maria Sharapova (five Grand Slam titles) – $12m. to Sharapova’s $23m. In fact Sharapova’s endorsements alone are so high that they dwarf Williams’s total income of $20m. for the year. Money talks. And what this money is telling us is that women become rich and powerful when they conform to society’s narrow ideals of beauty. Talent comes second.

  In the summer of 2015, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Serena finally responded. ‘If they want to market someone who is white and blond, that’s their choice. I have a lot of partners who are very happy to work with me, I can’t sit here and say I should be higher on the list because I have won more. I’m happy for her [Sharapova], because she worked hard too. There is enough at the table for everyone. We have to be thankful, and we also have to be positive about it so the next black person can be No. 1 on that list. Maybe it was not meant to be me. Maybe it’s meant to be the next person to be amazing, and I’m just opening the door. Zina Garrison, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe and Venus [Williams] opened so many doors for me. I’m just opening the next door for the next person.’4 As someone who has been routinely portrayed as difficult, arrogant, rude and aggressive, her words are truly eye-opening. The generosity of what she says is enormous, almost beyond comprehension.

  But ‘Maybe it was not meant to be me’? Those words haunt me. So it was with joy that I came across a comment piece from the excellent US sports journalist Dave Zirin entitled ‘Serena Williams is Today’s Muhammad Ali’.5 Rather than defend Serena against the racist and sexist bullets routinely sent her way, he set out to celebrate her for being the incredible athlete she truly is:

  ‘. . . For years people have asked who would be, “the next Muhammad Ali.” If we dare to lift our heads, it will be clear that she is right in front of us . . .’

  At first, the assertion feels like sacrilege. Ali is Ali. But while Zirin concedes that many will find the comparison controversial, he pointedly dismantles every argument against why this should be so. And he’s right. Not only has Serena obliterated every major rival in her field over the last decade, she’s been politically active and vocal on issues as far-reaching as poverty, racism, sexism, equal pay, menstruation and police oppression. And she’s done it without the support of a nation.

  ‘. . . Not even Ali had to achieve in an atmosphere as inhospitable as Serena’s athletic setting. This is about the very particular intersectional oppression she has faced as a black woman. This iconic body she proudly inhabits – her shape, her curves, her musculature – has been the subject of scorn, regardless of the results. Even at his most denigrated, Ali’s loudest detractors conceded that his physical body was a work of athletic sculpture. As a man – a black man – he was objectified with a mix of admiration, longing, and envy, in the ways black male athletes have always been seen since the days of plantation sports. It was his mind and mouth that truly made him threatening. People wanted Ali to “shut up and box” for years before finally stripping him of his title. But as that phrase
implies, they still wanted him to box. Not Serena. Instead, she has had to face a tennis world that has made it clear in tones polite and vulgar that it would be so nice if she wasn’t there . . .’

  The way society has responded to the presence of Serena Williams is extraordinary, and outrageous. Commonly mocked as masculine and overly muscular, to the point where David Frum, editor of the Atlantic and a former advisor to George W. Bush, recently accused her on the basis of her appearance of using steroids, she’s been called a ‘gorilla’ and a variety of other racial slurs more times than anyone can count. Watching her play, seeing her pose for photos and appear in commercials, I just don’t get it. When I see Serena I see a goddess of a woman. In the Beats by Dre advert where she flexes the muscles in her arm, in her back, showing off the strength of her core, rippling, strong, sweaty curves – she’s beautiful. I don’t understand what other people are seeing when they say she looks like a man. I can only think that those opinions are born out of prejudice. For in Serena’s case, more than any other prominent female tennis player, she faces an additional, aggravated dimension: race. Serena’s body, her blackness, is treated as a freak show. But whereas the term ‘freak’ is used with reverence for the likes of Usain Bolt, when applied to a sportswoman, it takes on an altogether more disturbing meaning.