July Cover Story - Girls Being Girls

Heresy and Hair Ribbons

Women Athletes and the Pressure to be “Feminine”

Girls Being Girls thumbnail Last year, when South African track champion Caster Semenya was shipped home to await results of a noisy IAAF investigation into her gender, one of the first things that happened to her was being repackaged for the cover of South African tabloid magazine You. This tall brawny youngster with cornrows who had set new marks for running now set a record for makeover manipulation. Overnight, the world saw her in a poufy hair style, black cocktail dress, painted nails and miles of shiny bangles up her arms.

Semenya didn't look all that comfortable as she smiled for the camera. But she was quoted as saying: “I'd like to dress up more often and wear dresses but I never get the chance.” Those who’d been stunned by her 800-meter performance now cringed to see her performing as cover girl, wondering how much arm-twisting it took to get her into that dress.

Today, as I write this, Semenya’s connections are still furious at the bureaucratic delay on her return to competition – a planned press conference to announce her gender-test results was abruptly cancelled by the IAAF, along with her hoped-for return to competition. The fact is – the heat is on about women athletes being “feminine enough.” Controversy over whether an individual might be genetically and anatomically female is only part of the uproar. Visual variations like Semenya must be swept out of sight. With the world now so media-driven, with ultraconservative religion grabbing so much social control everywhere, the emphasis is ever more on the appearance of things – and on the screamingly dogmatic. Quick conformity to dogma is easy to get with clothing. It’s a case of heresy or hair ribbons.

How are women athletes sending messages about their “femininity?” In a few sports, like auto racing and equestrian, the required protective duds leave little room for social statements. But in many sports, dizzying emphasis can be put on the façade. At the moment, hair-ornaments are replacing the bits of 14-carat gold jewelry and painted nails that came in with the 1980s. Hair ribbons are now the symbol – almost the patriotic flag – of those who are worried about looking “feminine.” For the ornament to have the proper effect, hair has to be worn long.

Indeed, websites and stores that sell “feminine” sportswear have become big business. For instance, at Women’s Sports Link (www.womenssportslink.com/Stock-SpiritScrunch.shtml), it's all about “accessorizing.” They advertise, “Hair Ribbons, Hair Bows, Hair Scrunchies, Hair Bands, Hair Elastics, Hair Headbands & Ponytail Holders.” One of the Bible Belt teams that I watched during the recent NCAA softball championships was wall-to-wall in matching baby-blue hair-ribbons.
Continuing the emphasis on “feminine” hair, one sharp-eyed commenter asked on Yahoo Questions: “I just started watching women's softball. Why don't any of the pitchers wear baseball hats? Is there a rule against it? They all have prissy ribbons in their hair.”

A girl athlete gave this revealing answer: “A lot of summer teams and some high school and college teams choose to wear visors. Visors keep your hair out of your face and block the sun but are much easier to put on over a ponytail or braids or whatever you do with your hair.

Some girls wear ribbons as a way to assert their femininity. When I played summer ball, a lot of girls said that college coaches looked for girls wearing ribbons to make sure they weren't lesbians, but the fact is that some coaches don’t allow their girls to wear ribbons. Some girls don’t like to wear them because they can be a distraction. And any coach who makes decisions on who to recruit based on what they wear in their hair is focusing on the wrong things.”

In second place on the conformity list, come “skorts.” Recently in AfterEllen.com, commentator Heather Hogan raised her eyebrows as Women’s Professional Soccer did a runway show in which players modeled the new uniforms – including an item created by Puma that is neither skirt nor shorts. Hogan was not amused. She wrote, “It's not the skort that gets me; it's the prominence of fashion over skill. This would never be required for male athletes.” Down the list come other items – like shoelace charms. After all, it’s girls, not boys, who have ever been the devoted wearers of charm bracelets. Underneath the façade, even the sports bras – notably those of Lily of France – are “sexy” and “see-through” – nothing like those first butchy sports bras that I remember with nostalgia when I was running marathons in the 1970s.

The sharp struggle around “femininity” and “masculinity” in sports is nothing new. It first erupted during the Victorian era, as a dictum of “muscular Christianity.” This international 19th-century men’s movement took the position that Christianity had become “feminized” and “soft.” It aimed to make young white males “moral” and “manly” through rugged sports competition. In both England and the U.S., the church establishment had been horrified to notice that same-gender “immorality” was emerging powerfully at all levels of Victorian society – from lady authors who were flagrantly lesbian and bohemian to closeted members of royal families.

Church leaders never used the word “homosexual” – they preferred to sputter about “unnatural friendships.” In fact, they despised homosexuality, considering it the result of a catastrophic moral lack in a man – an attack on the male patriarchy so sacred to Victorian society. So the muscular movement aimed to force a rebirth of “manliness” – to protect young men from “immoral influences” and bring them to Jesus by hardening them with competition. Following this relentless religious logic – since sports could make a man masculine, then sports can also make a woman masculine. And “masculine” in women translated as “lesbian” for the Victorians.

0406-all-out-01 Western society has wrestled with this issue ever since. From grassroots sports and school sports to the Olympics, forward-thinking women have had to fight that lesbian stigma – so that women of any sexual orientation could compete openly on the basis of ability alone. During the noisy liberal intermission of the Sixties and Seventies, many athletes of both genders wore pretty much what the hell they wanted. Indeed, a few brave spirits like Martina Navratilova went up the down staircase when it came to femininity. But by the Eighties, the country was on a reactionary swing, and it was time for women athletes to start toeing the line again. Track champion Florence Griffith “Flo-Jo” Joyner, who broke records at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, led the pack with her high-fashion track suits and painted fingernails. Pretty soon every grade-school age-grouper was wearing little gold earrings – with Christian girls sporting tiny crosses on gold chains to let the world know their status.

I asked well-known lesbian basketball coach Pat Griffin what she thought of the present controversy. She said, “I don’t think it is so much that women feel the need to prove their femininity as it is that women still feel pressure to prove their heterosexuality by adopting the trappings of femininity. We are still very mixed up about sexual orientation and gender expression. If a woman appears feminine, we assume she is heterosexual and vice versa.
“I think our progress on the issue of athleticism, femininity, and sexuality is mixed. On the one hand, being an athlete is now considered a social asset for girls and women. High school girls and college women aspire to be athletes. Becoming a professional athlete is more accepted. Participation levels for girls and women at all levels of sport are up. Parents are much more supportive of their athletic daughters. When you talk about ‘tomboys’ to younger generations of girls and women, the concept doesn’t make sense to them. I see this as progress.

“However, it is frustrating to see so many sexualized images of top level women athletes. If you google images of ‘women athletes’ you are more likely to find women athletes in sexy poses than you are to find photos of women actively playing their sport. Top level women athletes who are conventionally attractive seem more than willing to participate in photo shoots that portray them in soft porn-like, semi-nude poses designed to appeal to men (Danica Patrick, Lindsey Vonn, Maria Sharapova, Serena Williams, Amanda Beard, Jennie Finch, Lauren Jackson, and Hannah Teter, to name several). This feels like a step backwards to me.”
Griffin told me the following story: “I had an interesting conversation with a college softball player who got her hair cut – she went from the standard issue ponytail to short hair style because she was tired of dealing with long hair. When she showed up at practice for the first time with her new do, her teammates were very critical of her decision to cut her hair. They couldn’t understand why she would do such a thing. Clearly, it wasn’t just about a haircut. One even asked her if it meant she was now gay. So … maintaining a feminine appearance is still used as an inoculation by heterosexual women athletes against being perceived as a lesbian.”

Proof of this perception’s political explosiveness came when Elena Kagan was put forward as a possible U.S. Supreme Court Justice. No sooner was she announced than someone found an old photograph of Kagan playing softball as a student. The media ran wild with it, using it to extrapolate on what they alleged were Kagan’s possibly leftish/homosexualish views on national issues.

Indeed, a little overkill on the femmie accessories can help offset the “offensiveness” (to a brainwashed society) of a female body that is very muscular. As lesbian bodybuilder Lisa Bavington pointed out, “Female muscularity is thought to be particularly offensive to a number of mainstream publications as it contradicts notions of gender appropriateness. Muscular women and mainstream models both represent extreme levels of physical development, sharing a similar goal to drastically alter their body composition, but representing polar opposites in terms of acceptability and perception by society. If you think muscle on a woman is offensive, try looking at one without any.”

In short, the clothes are intended to make the woman. If you can compel women athletes to dress feminine – so the belief goes -- they will be feminine.
So today's scene gives us snapshots of women athletes going all different ways. We see the emergence of Baylor U’s star basketball player Brittney Griner, who stands a stately six-foot-eight. Writing about her, Stanford University humanities professor Terry Castle said, “Brittney Griner is … part of a slowly unfolding, civilized response in this country to the slightly androgynous female.”

At the other extreme, we see Americans who firmly believe that women shouldn’t do sports at all. A writer for Ladies Against Feminism (LAF) sermonizes: “The Bible talks about women developing a quiet and gentle spirit; I think sports fosters anything but that. They instead develop a competitive and contentious spirit that will cause them to have great difficulty in their marriages. The effort expended on sports will hinder the development of wifely duties around the home.”

With these trends pulling the country both ways, some observers try to find a middle ground – as did the authors of a piece in Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology. Stephen Royce, Janet Gebelt and Robert W. Duffwrite interviewed a cross- section of NCAA women athletes and concluded: “Although stereotypes of the femininity of female athletes persist, it seems that many female athletes are able to maintain strong identities as both athletic and feminine by psychologically separating these two aspects of self.” But having to “separate” anything in two pieces, inside of yourself, could be painful and dangerous.

The final question is: why do powerhouse competitors put on the hair ribbons? Do they do it because they want to? Or because they have to? That is a question that each woman or girl has to answer all alone, in that quiet circle of herself.

Copyright 2010 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.