Femininity & Sports-strong is new beautiful - or is it?

I believe society is slowly starting to break the normative femininity in which women are seen as long haired, blue eyed with thin body and the heaviest thing we should be lifting is a cast iron pan. My ex-CrossFit gym has a slogan on the wall which reads – ‘strong is new beautiful’ and while I believe this is true, I also think we still have a long way to go until standardised equality is seen in all sports.

I feel that CrossFit has always been seen as egalitarian in nature. Training happens in a very basic gym setting, workouts are the same including movements from different disciplines (such as rowing, gymnastics and weightlifting), competition between sexes are encouraged and prize money in competitions are the same. CrossFit boxes don’t have mirrors, which I feel minimises the emphasis on improving body composition and looking good when training, both which I feel that belong to the old way of the society looking at femininity in sports by characterising women as the more image obsessed gender.

I believe the reason why I like this genderless ‘atmosphere’ is largely due to my upbringing. Growing up in a family of 10 children (8 girls and 2 boys), my father often challenged myself and my sisters by saying that we were not strong enough, you can’t handle the pain, or this is a man’s job. Like my time in the army, CrossFit provided a place where I could challenge these traditional thoughts of gender differences and abilities in a competitive environment where I often saw results due to getting out of my comfort zone. This gave me extra confidence and feel-good factor to keep on pushing myself even harder. Study done by Podmore & Ogle (2018) on female CrossFit athletes reveal similar experiences when engaged with CrossFit group sessions. Participants of the study felt that traditional beliefs of femininity in which females are seen as weak and unable are challenged by providing female counterparts a safe place to give it a go whatever the male counterparts are doing. I remember often training with bloody hands and even using super glue to pin back skin that was coming off from my hands, I felt not only strong and physically capable but also empowered and equal to my male counterparts.

The ongoing Covid pandemic has yet again highlighted the gender inequalities with female athletes’ financial concerns (Velija, 2021), however I am certain that the gap between these historic gender differences in sports will be closed in the near future due to more empowered female leaders in sports.

#strongisnewbeautiful #femininityinsports #CrossFit #empoweredwomen #femaleleaders