Gender Roles & Beauty: The Struggle to Become A Beautiful Female Athlete

In this video, Allure Magazine is asking Alicia Napoleon, a professional boxer, questions relating to how she feels in a male dominated sport, and whether her strength affects her perceptions of her own beauty. Her answers are remarkable. She described how growing up she was always involved in male dominated sports like wrestling and  baseball, and how she didn’t find them to be anything different than female dominated sports except for the talk of coaches and such telling her that girls didn’t belong. She speaks to how her male counterparts felt about her beating them and even how one boy during a wrestling match tried to pull down her sports bra. After this she talks about how she has always felt beautiful and that being muscular never had an effect of her self perception. And this was because the female body is beautiful and the female body meant to be strong.

This resonated with me because as a female athlete, I have a strange relationship with my strong body because as a kid I felt like having muscular shoulders meant that I wasn’t able to wear certain clothes and therefore I wasn’t beautiful.  So seeing this video and hearing how a professional athlete is confident and comfortable in her own skin got me thinking: how does doing gender relate to society’s perception of female beauty?

Society has a way of thinking that starkly contradicts that of Napoleon, in that the female body is often see as weaker than their male counterparts. This affects the perceptions of female beauty due to the gender roles that are ingrained in our society and the way women are expected to do gender. While a factor in masculinity is being strong and muscular, a factor of doing femininity is being thin. This is seen in ads and magazines everywhere. Below I have included Calvin Klein underwear ads as an example of the way that society shapes the relationship between doing femininity and being beautiful. As the male model is muscular, the female model isn’t. From these we can deduce that one way that women are expected to do femininity is to aspire to be this thin underwear model, and not be muscular like the male model.

                              

Now the way that this affects self perception of beauty is that as female athletes grow up, they are surrounded by ads just like these reminding them that this female underwear model is the goal. But as athletes, they cannot help but to looking closer to that of the male underwear model. So this creates a contradiction within the athlete because they cannot look like what is seen as feminine and beautiful within their society.Society accepts that this underwear model is beautiful, because she has submitted to what society projects as feminine. Also, being an athlete is something that is seen as masculine, as seen in C.J. Pascoe’s work Dude, You’re A Fag. In Pascoe’s work the female athletes like Rebeca were not seen as feminine, and therefore not seen as attractive the way that other females are until they submitted to further gender roles, by doing femininity as it relates to going to school dances by putting on a dress and makeup. In order to be widely accepted, the athletes had to submit more to masculine gender roles, and doing masculinity by being aggressive.

The way that some female athletes feel while struggling to accept their own bodies is a valid phenomena, under the circumstances and gender roles. However, the fact that such gender roles exist is somewhat ridiculous, and I feel that people should have the ability to be comfortable in their own body without having to wonder if they meet a certain unachievable standard. But the perpetuation of such standard, keep in power those who use gender norms for their own benefit, like underwear companies. Overall, the relationship between gender roles and female athlete’s self perception of their own beauty are more related than people realize.

Please check the origin video out!

http://www.allure.com/story/alicia-napoleon-boxer-dispelling-beauty-myths

Resources:

Ritts, Herb. Marky Mark. Digital image. Calvin Klein. N.p., 1992. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.