Female Athletes and Body Image

Be strong, but be petite, be aggressive and competitive, but be quiet and submissive, be athletic, but be sexy too.

Recently my teammate Victoria wrote an article about female athletes and body image. In her article she discusses the struggle of female athletes to love their “strong” body.

Being a female athlete it is a constant internal struggle of loving my body. In society I am constantly being told that I need to be skinny, petite, beautiful, and sexy. Being an athlete, this is not always achievable.

Coming into college most high school female athletes are not prepared for their bodies to change.

With the heavy lifting and practice schedules, female athletes are burning thousands of calories a day, and as a result eat twice as many calories that they used to, because they are burning more.

Your body is no longer the same; it soon becomes to feel like you are turning into the Hulk.

It is for sure one of the biggest shocks that I had to endure, my freshman year I gained over 20 pounds, of muscle and… a little bit of fat. Haha

My teammate was spot on when she said in her article that she was prepared to learn and was excited to be apart of USC’s volleyball team, but she was not “prepared for the significant changes [her] body was about to endure,” (Garrick, How I Learned To Love My Body As A Female Athlete).

With the quick influx of weight, becoming comfortable in your “new” body is not easy. You have to basically learn to love yourself all over again, while also being told you are not society’s version of a “perfect woman.”

In my teammates article she tells the story of how on a day off she went shopping. She had picked out a bunch of clothes all in her size, or so she thought, and she soon came to find out nothing fit. From trying on a pair of jeans, and them not making it past her now bigger thighs, or trying on a long sleeve shirt, and having the long sleeves be too tight on her arms, or when she tried on a dress, the back wouldn’t zip up all the way. She started to wonder if the clothes were marked wrong, and soon came to realize they didn’t fit because her body was different. Her body had changed and she wasn’t prepared for it. Since none of the clothes fit, she sat in the changing room and silently cried for a few minutes.

Victoria for the next year tried everything from diets, to avoiding certain outfits, and she even began to resent our team lifts on workouts. She was obsessed with her body and being skinnier. She was eating less and as a result wasn’t giving her body the right fuel it needed to perform as an athlete.

It took her a long time, but she eventually came to understand what it meant to be a beautiful athletic woman. She was strong, her legs were strong, her arms were defined, and her stomach was flat. She did not look like the Victoria Secret model, the “ideal” woman, but she was an athlete not a model. She was beautiful in her own way.

Victoria is not the only female athlete that has gone through or is still going through the struggle of learning to love their strong body. It is a constant struggle for female athletes, and the media’s backlash at female athletic bodies does not help. For example, Serena Williams is the best female tennis player to ever enter the game and continuously throughout her career she has received crude comments by the media on what she looked like from her hair, to her strong muscles, to her thick build. The New York Times just a little over a year ago shamed William’s body, stating, “Williams… has large biceps and a mold-breaking muscular frame… Her rivals could try to emulate her physique, but most of them choose not to,” (Harris-Perry, NYT Slammed For Serena ‘Body Image’ Story). On Magazines covers, William’s body is altered to look more “attractive.” FUCK THAT SHIT! Serena is an example for many female athletes, and for The New York Times to openly body shamed her, it teaches young athletic women that their strong bodies are “wrong.” It’s a message stating to conform and make your body look like the “ideal” woman, or else you too will be shamed.

It is a struggle for all women not only athletes, but as you know I am writing my blogs on student-athletes, so bare with me people.

Beauty is not confined to the boundaries that media has set in place, rather beauty comes in many more shapes and sizes. Learning to love your body is a constant struggle, and it starts with understanding that media’s portrayal of the “ideal” body is not correct, and that all women are beautiful in their own way.

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!

Look out for my next blog post, on the body image of male collegiate athletes. Have a nice day :).