It’s a depressing but well-documented truth that women get a rough deal when it comes to sports.
At the top end of the sporting world, female athletes are paid less and routinely subject to sexism. At the amateur end, almost half of women drop out of any kind of sports after the age of thirteen, and 61% of women who have children reported feeling too guilty about taking the time out to exercise. All in all, a pretty depressing state of affairs.
Underwear brand Bluebella attempted to help with this problem this week, launching their #StrongIsBeautiful campaign, featuring three internationally acclaimed female rugby players, posing in lingerie while playing rugby. Describing the campaign, Bluebella says: ‘The idea that strength and femininity are mutually exclusive is problematic even beyond sports, we seek to demonstrate that they can go hand in hand.’
I know they meant well by this – truly I do. But my God, I looked at those images and wondered whether we were in 2024 or 2004. Are we really still holding the concept of physical beauty as some kind of apex of female achievement?
Historically, Bluebella has a really decent track record when it comes to corporate responsibility. They have a pretty size-inclusive range of lingerie and a history of really impressive, positive campaigns (like shooting with 71-year-old Marie Helvin to demonstrate that beautiful underwear is just as relevant in later life).
But even if this campaign was intended to be progressive, I’m afraid it’s ended up doing the exact opposite. It’s regressive in the extreme because it’s an attempt to incentivise something which is already inherently good – being strong – with something not especially important - being beautiful.
“We do not need to convince women that being athletic is a good thing by making it sound pretty.”
It’s true that lots of women have a complicated relationship with the athletic body. Plenty of young women grow up afraid to lift weights in case they get ‘bulky.’ Girls are dramatically less likely to stay in sports (a Woman In Sport survey from 2022 found that almost half of girls drop out of sports after the age of 13), and that is absolutely a problem.
But here’s the thing. We do not need to convince women that being athletic is a good thing by making it sound pretty. We should convince them that a fear of working out lest they become muscular is unfounded. Being strong is a good thing.
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Back when I was childfree and therefore spent my evenings having fun rather than doing seven loads of laundry, I was obsessed with a workout class called Barry’s Bootcamp. I went three times a week for the better part of a year and my God I was strong. I had muscles I didn’t know existed. I enjoyed a pleasant ache from the constant exercise.
Unsurprisingly, given that I was working out all the time and rewarding my body with nutrient-dense, nourishing food, I also happened to look good. My hair was growing, my nails were hard, my skin was clear. That physical change was nice, but it was nothing to the psychological one.
“Strong women can be conventionally, traditionally beautiful, but the two things do not have to go together.”
I walked around with the kind of glorious mega-confidence that came from trusting in my body to keep me safe. I remember moving house and being able to lift boxes and pieces of furniture, which some of the men helping us were struggling with, and I genuinely felt like a superwoman. Not because being strong is ‘beautiful’, but because it’s, well, strong.
So yes, strong women can be conventionally, traditionally beautiful, but the two things do not have to go together, and even if they don’t, that isn’t important. We don’t need to prettify strong and put lace and lipstick on it to make it appealing to women. When we do that, we send a message that beauty is the top trump, the most important thing in the world, the thing that we should all aspire to beyond anything else.
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Are we ever going to see a campaign full of male rugby players -–with broken noses and scars from games, hairy bodies, bald heads, all the imperfections we know to be normal, dressed up in their pants and photographed with a hashtag to empower men? Of course we’re not.
Male athletes are taken seriously on the quality of their sporting performance and there’s no further introspection required. They don’t need to be reassured that they’re still pretty when they’re bulky and powerful; they just get on with it.
The obsession with physical beauty is never more evident than when organisations try to be more inclusive by widening it as a description. Beauty pageants and modelling agencies fall over themselves to welcome plus-size women, trans women, and women from underrepresented ethnicities – as if expanding a very narrow definition of beauty is revolutionary and wonderful. But including a larger number of women in the remit of who gets a gold star for what their face and their body look like is not real progress.
The progress we actually need – rather than continually trying to shoehorn more demographics into the narrow definition of beauty – is to stop caring about beauty at all. Not everyone is conventionally beautiful, and that’s really okay. Rather than trying to force yourself to think of your ‘imperfections’ as beautiful, it would be far more empowering to not think about them at all.
A small number of genetically specific people fit the narrow definition of beauty. The rest of us have other equally valid and important attributes which do not need to be labelled as ‘beautiful.’ .
Every time we take a positive characteristic – like being strong – and try to incentivise it with the word ‘beautiful’, we are sending the message that in order to matter, you need to be visually appealing, and while it might be dressed up as more modern or more inclusive, that’s ultimately the same old story – focusing on what a woman looks like rather than what she can do.
Teaching women that they’re beautiful despite any alleged ‘flaws’ is a marketing campaign. Teaching women that what they look like is the least interesting thing about them is actual progress.
The Lioness pens an exclusive essay for GLAMOUR.
