The Woman Athlete Revealed
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women must do the same while also concentrating on disguising or minimizing
any implication of real physical power. Men go out on the competition floor and
do gymnastics; women do gymnastics, plus theatrics, plus seduction. These
female athletes are always burdened with the obligation to expend extra mental
and physical energy on self-consciously performing the version of femininity
expected of them in a sport, and by extension, a culture that is still firmly
divided along gender lines.
It has been difficult, in the course of this research, to discover any
stated rationale for these separate expectations in gymnastics; there may not in
fact be any official policy on hair glitter. Ask gymnasts to explain and they will
say that it is just the way it has always been done—and that may be as good an
explanation as any. That is the way it has always been done, since the beginning
of the sport for women: in other words, women of the so-called post-feminist era
are competing or performing according to the values of a pre-feminist era. When
sports of the modern Olympics were chosen for men, the emphasis was on
celebrating the masculine body, its ability to be powerful, fast, aggressive,
warrior-like. When women were allowed to compete at the Olympics in the
early twentieth century, at first it was on a very limited basis, in sports
considered appropriate for celebration of feminine ability—that which was fiot
masculine. The emphasis was on skill, to be sure, but also on qualities such as
grace, flex X