Student Blog: Women in Sports

I want to approach this with curiosity rather than judgment. Making individual women the problem distracts from the larger questions. Women have the right to enjoy being desired, to feel beautiful, and to make decisions about their own bodies without those choices becoming a test of empowerment. But respecting those choices does not mean refusing to question the culture that gives them meaning. What gets rewarded? What gets attention? What becomes profitable? And when visibility has value, which versions of women are most consistently rewarded with it?

The deepest things we learn about ourselves are often the things nobody ever has to teach us out loud. We collect the lessons like gold stars, noticing what gets complimented, what gets attention, which women the world seems to make room for most easily, and the difference between being recognized for what you can do and being celebrated for how beautifully you can do it.

When I look at the image in this article, I could look at my back and decide whether I like the way it looks, or wonder whether someone else finds it attractive, but that feels like the least interesting thing about what I am seeing because I know what lives underneath that single moment. There are years in that back, shaped by ballet barres, corrections, mirrors and determination, by days when my body felt incredible and days when nothing worked, by moments when I felt strong and others when I questioned whether I belonged in the room at all. There is discipline nobody looking at this image can see and a history held in muscles that somebody else might only see from the outside.

Athleticism was never something I stumbled into accidentally. I chose it, over and over again. My body grew up through movement, which meant strength arrived before I necessarily understood how to love all of the evidence of it. I loved the discipline of training and the tangible relationship between effort and growth.

In a lot of ways, athleticism gave me one of my earliest understandings of self trust. There is an intimacy that comes from spending years asking your body to do difficult things and discovering, again and again, that it absolutely can.

What became harder to understand was the contradiction. I had spent years asking more of my body, only to become conscious of the ways I was also expected to contain it. Years of training changed me in ways I was proud of, but they also revealed how narrow the definition of an acceptable female body can be. I was learning that achievement did not free me from those expectations.

It is deeply disorienting to be taught as a girl to work hard and embrace your power, only to discover that power can still come with aesthetic conditions. I had done exactly what I was encouraged to do, yet the evidence of that work suddenly felt like something I had to manage. That contradiction fascinates me now, because who taught me where that boundary was? I don't remember anyone sitting me down and telling me exactly what a woman's body was supposed to look like. Nobody handed me a rulebook explaining exactly how much muscle was feminine and when strength became “too much.” I learned it the way we learn so many things about being women: silently. Through images, comments, compliments, comparisons, what was celebrated and what wasn't.

Beauty is not the problem. I love femininity, and I love feeling beautiful. The question is why beauty so often becomes an expectation rather than one part of who a woman is. Women should be able to value beauty without having their value depend on it.

I am finally reaching a place where I understand that I would rather have a body marked by the life I have lived than spend that life trying to preserve a body untouched by it. I don't want to erase the evidence. That is why I don't think the antidote to objectification is modesty. Covering women isn't liberation any more than sexualizing them is. Either way, we are still centering the meaning of a woman's body on how it is perceived by others. I think part of moving beyond that is widening our attention beyond appearance and recognizing everything about a person that presence alone could never tell us. Objectification, at its core, takes a whole person and reduces them to only one part of who they are. The work, then, is not making women less visible. It is refusing to let visibility flatten them.

For women ourselves, it is learning to come home to our bodies from the inside. To become strong because strength gives us something. To let capability matter even when nobody is watching it, applauding it or finding it beautiful. To remember that a body can be valuable to the person living inside of it in ways that have nothing to do with its value as something to be seen.

I think about the little girls who are still learning how to understand their bodies, and I hope we give them more than confidence, because confidence can still depend on liking what you see in the mirror. I want them to have something deeper. I want them to have belonging. The kind that says: This is my body. I live here. It does not have to earn my tenderness by being beautiful today. I hope they learn that a body can disappoint you aesthetically on a Tuesday morning and still deserve breakfast, movement, rest, joy, patience and care. I hope their relationship with themselves becomes resilient enough to survive the ordinary fluctuations of not always loving what they see. Love asks us to hold two truths at once: women deserve complete ownership of their choices, and we can still question the culture that taught us what makes a woman valuable.

I spent years teaching my body to be strong. Growing up has meant learning that strength never needed to be beautiful to be worthy of my pride.