A couple of days ago, British weightlifting Olympian Zoe Smith did an AMA on Reddit, which was pretty cool. Zoe is one of the 3 young women profiled in this BBC documentary.
One thing that kind of made me sad about the thing was this subthread, which asked Zoe to comment on the importance of being attractive as a weightlifter. The original commenter was I think trying to get her to trash the super heavyweights, which is not the direction Zoe took it, but instead the thread comments negatively on women who fit the "manly" stereotype that some people hold about female weightlifters. The example she gives of a woman where something "happened" pharmacologically looks quite similar to a childhood friend of mine, who I assume does not dope for her quiet life of being a perfectly normal everyday woman.
While I recognize that at an elite level in sports most of the women who look markedly masculine got that way through the use of exogenous androgens, it still makes me a bit sad that even in a strength sport there is so much enforcement of a feminine appearance ideal that frankly does not come naturally to all women. I'm well aware that my most feminine features -- my cute little nose, say, or my waist:hip ratio -- owe little or nothing to my deliberate choices. Is it so wrong for me to hope that a young girl who looks a bit different -- maybe a bit blocky, maybe fond of getting the same haircut as her brother -- would also feel welcomed in a weightlifting gym?
Ironically, Holley Mangold, the super heavyweight American lifter mentioned at the top of the comment thread, benefits from this bias (along, of course, with the reflected glamor of her NFL player brother). She is an amazing athlete, of course, but would she have gotten as much attention without the long blonde hair, pretty smile, and bubbly personality? Probably not so much.
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