Banned, rebuffed, exploited, sexualized, stigmatized.
From its shy official appearance in the sporting landscape during the 1900 Paris Olympic Games (22 women among… 997 participants), to the surge of biceps and shapely silhouettes exposed today on Instagram, the athlete's body feminine has been physically and socially forged according to the prejudices and obstacles most often erected – is this a surprise?
– by the male yoke.
“This development is marked by a succession of obstacles to its emancipation through practice and is directly connected to feminist struggles,” explains Florys Castan-Vicente, socio-historian of sport and lecturer at Paris-Saclay University.
If the current dominant canon remains that of the thin and toned silhouette,
role models,
like the tennis player Serena Williams, and the emergence of the “CrossFit generation”, which does not apologize for its bulging muscles, have made it possible the exposure of a greater diversity of bodies.
To discover
Download the Le Figaro Cuisine app for tasty and authentic recipes
Also read “The image and body of an athlete have an influence on her career”: when beauty dictates weigh on women’s sport
“But many sportswomen are still confronted with this contradictory injunction of having to reach the highest possible level without developing what naturally results from intensive training, that is to say “gaining” arms, shoulders, thighs », continues the researcher.
Under penalty of being mocked by commentators and on the networks for what remains perceived as masculine attributes.
Or to be ousted from media and advertising imagery.
“Despite the prevailing discourse around body positivity
,
this sculpted body is scary,” says Christian Lartillot, a fashion and dance photographer for twenty-five years.
I have been asked many times to erase a part deemed too prominent.
And a calf that is too bulky is still an eliminatory criterion in certain dance schools.”
Long before painfully earning its right to muscle and its development, the female sporting body first had to gain the right to... simply exist!
Excluded from clubs and federations at the beginning of the 20th century, women were nevertheless accepted on pistol shooting ranges, hunting, or even horse riding, traditional activities reserved for the nobility and inherited from chivalry, as well as well as golf and tennis.
This body which bleeds every month is said to be permanently ill.
It is therefore necessary to protect it through inactivity and preserve it so that it is ready for motherhood, its destiny
Florys Castan-Vicente, socio-historian of sport and lecturer at Paris-Saclay University
“They are invited because matrimonial encounters are possible there, not at all as participants in a performance,” underlines Florys Castan-Vicente.
And even if it did, this would in any case be limited, if not impossible.
Indeed, while men's sports equipment becomes lighter and more sophisticated, the female body remains constricted in its corsets and heavy petticoats falling to the ankles.
“They should look as elegant as they would at a dinner party.
Nothing is done to facilitate their movements,” adds the academic.
The myth of the “eternally wounded”
The first woman to win a gold medal in an individual discipline, British tennis player Charlotte Cooper won at the 1900 Paris Games thanks to her skill in serving and her offensive temperament.
But nothing is known about his physical abilities.
Among the working classes, apart from the rebels who ride bicycles to the point of competing in professional competitions and whose existence has long been ignored, it is nothing.
“The role of the woman remains what it has always been: she is above all the companion of the man, the future mother of the family, and must be raised with a view to this immutable future”, wrote, in 1901, the yet progressive Pierre de Coubertin, the inventor of the modern Olympics.
An ideology reinforced by the medicine of the time, which presupposes the weakness of the female body.
“It’s the myth of the “eternally wounded,” notes Florys Castan-Vicente.
This body which bleeds every month is said to be permanently ill.
We must therefore protect it through inactivity and preserve it so that it is ready for motherhood, its destiny.”
Then, at the end of the First World War, science stipulated that women's sport was ultimately good, but because it constituted... preparation for childbirth.
An argument on which the doctor Marie Houdré and the sportswoman Alice Milliat, members of Fémina Sport, a club which forceps opens up disciplines prohibited to women while offering the first real methods of training and dedicated medical monitoring.
Tennis player Serena Williams' relationship with her motherhood and her career spoke to many women (above, Serena Williams in 2022.) SPORTS PRESS
A fight mocked by the reactionary pamphleteer Clément Vautel in
La Jeune Fille et le Sport
, a short story published in 1921 which nevertheless has the merit of summarizing the militant thought of the time: “They deny us the right to muscle because they want stay the strongest.
But whatever they do, our penis will have biceps and hamstrings – and that will be too bad for you, gentlemen tyrants.
The woman's muscle is on its way and nothing will stop it, I'm telling you."
In her silk dress cut at the armpits and stopping at the knees, the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen – champion of the 1920s trained by her father who chose men for her sparring partners – symbolizes this muscle which is freed and whose shapes finally see each other.
The S-shaped silhouette drawn by the corset and highlighting the hips and chest gives way to its opposite I-shaped silhouette. But this new ideal, welcomed by men provided that the woman remains "beautiful and a mother", will die out with the conservative push from the 1930s. Almost everything needs to be redone…
Suzanne Lenglen, the pioneer, above in 1925. Historical / Corbis via Getty Images
Propaganda and body-object
From the 1960s, the sportswoman's body, until then "protected in spite of itself", moved to another extreme, becoming a symbolic and even experimental object of the Cold War.
In the United States, university sport and the emergence of “health sport” are giving rise to ambitions among female athletes, whose progress is nevertheless controlled: they are authorized to run, but not beyond 800 meters.
“We thought that if a woman ran too long, her uterus would drop, her legs would grow, and hair would grow on her chest,” remembers Kathrine Switzer, the first runner to complete a marathon – in Boston, in 1966 – on her nose. and under the noses of the regulations and the organizers.
In the East and in European labor circles, the “red sportswoman” wants to be the equal of the man.
A populist display myth, since denounced by researchers.
In high-level sport, state doping (GDR, USSR, etc.) and military training methods mutilate the bodies of athletes on the verge of anorexia, but who are blindly applauded.
A “black legend” even says that some are voluntarily made pregnant then forced to abort, while this hormonal upheaval boosts their performance…
We reduce their bodies to an eroticized and hypersexualized image
Florys Castan-Vicente
Horrors tempered by the work of Sylvain Dufraisse, lecturer and sports specialist in the former Soviet Union, who rather points to “a counter-propaganda tool from the West” – which still demonstrates the challenge that the female sporting body then represents.
In the 1980s, which ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the advent of sports business would (re)turn everything upside down.
New era, new obstacles.
“Women's participation in sport is increasing significantly, but it is still men who run it and communicate it from their point of view, with a limited vision of women's possibilities.
We reduce their bodies to an eroticized and hypersexualized image,” explains researcher Florys Castan-Vicente.
Alica Schmidt, (above in 2023), champion and social media star.
dpa/picture alliance via Getty
On TV, Véronique and Davina encourage French women to sculpt their figures, before slipping into the shower, topless, during the credits of their
Gym Tonic
.
In the stadiums, the exaggerated musculature of the American sprinters, who counterbalance it with their manicures and their flashy hair, is considered
freak
(strange).
The sports press invents a – in retrospect – lackluster bestiary (the athlete Marie-José Pérec is “the gazelle”, the fencer Laura Flessel, “the wasp”), and displays their oiled bodies on a full page.
Like the American magazine
Sports Illustrated
, which photographs beach volleyball players, surfers or tennis stars (Anna Kournikova, Maria Sharapova, etc.) less for their records than for their curves.
In every sense of the word, the female athletic body is becoming a cliché.
So, since this evolution follows the curve of the women's cause, we could logically think that the wave of the post-MeToo years and the echo of neo-feminist words resonate today in the world of sport.
“This is progressing, in particular because voices are being raised and sportswomen are daring to state their demands,” explains Florys Castan-Vicente.
She cites the example of Norwegian hand-beach players, who are standing up against the obligation to wear a bikini rather than shorts, in 2021, even if they have been sanctioned.
“Today more than ever, women want more performance and efficiency to advance their bodies.
And not spend an entire match wondering if they should put their shorts back on!”
Nor fear remarks about their plasticity or their
sexyness
, those old macho overtones which reappear each time a new sport and therefore new bodies emerge.
Marie, 24, fashion journalist and football fan, fumes: “Look at Sakina Karchaoui (
PSG and French team player, Editor’s note
).
During matches, the commentators make at least once reference to the fact that she is cute and hunky.
It is heavy !
Have we ever heard “What a great goal from that handsome Antoine Griezmann”?
No !
»
Shake up beliefs
A glimmer of hope and a sign that the picture is not completely bleak, women athletes have, for around ten years, been trained and shaped according to the same precepts as men.
This is particularly the case for running, assiduously practiced by more than two million French women.
“The training plans and the main areas of physical preparation are the same, whatever the gender and even the level,” notes Olivier Gaillard, 41, federal trainer.
The new thing is that my generation of coaches is attentive to the “trainability” of the female body, to the complexes it can generate and to its natural metabolic particularities.
For example, pregnancy is scientifically no longer a barrier, so we propose solutions to continue the practice.
We also adapt the competition schedule and objectives according to the menstrual cycle, which can bother some girls.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better.”
Dafne Schippers, (above in 2017), is a specialist sprint athlete, but also a social media star.
Avalon / Icon Sport
It remains to shake up, again and again, old popular beliefs.
“Pregnant, my running partner was lectured by passers-by during a run, as if she was not free to take care of her own body,” hallucinates Olivier Gaillard.
It will also be necessary to reconsider “special cases”, such as the hyperandrogenism of the South African athlete Caster Semenya, double Olympic champion in the 800 meters in 2012 and 2016, currently ruled out by international authorities because “biologically male” (sic! ), and still pending a judicial decision regarding its future.
At the CrossFit gym or at the start of a 10k, no one looks askance at my deltoids.
But outside, I am often entitled to comments
Manon, 29 years old
And then to admit the existence of new silhouettes beyond the sporting circle.
“At the CrossFit gym or at the start of a 10 km, no one looks at my deltoids askance or criticizes my muscular buttocks,” says Manon, 29 years old.
But outside, I often receive comments.”
A global revolution which can only come from above according to researcher Florys Castan-Vicente, “with a profound renewal of gender, origin and social class within the governing bodies”, inexorably trusted by the white fifty-year-old dominant.
Like in 1900.