Barbie & Women’s Tennis: How We Should Celebrate Diversity In Women’s Bodies

“I like tennis,” my friend muses. “Because it’s one of the only sports where elite women have different body shapes.”

She has a point. We’re watching Serena Williams in the Australian Open final as she prepares to unleash her howitzer serve and I can’t help admire her strong physique. When she thuds a forehand past her opponent, her toned arms whip into view. We’re both witnessing a woman at her awe-inspiring peak. And that has little to do with her body.

On the other side of the court is Angelique Kerber, a young upstart who shares a similar talent for tennis but looks approximately nothing like Serena. For a start, she’s a blonde German. She is also shorter, with a stocky build and broad shoulders, and scrappy as hell. Just watching her run makes me tired.

Both are competing at the pinnacle of their sport and are visions of fitness and dedication. Yet somehow both are more or less removed from our conventional standards of a “fit” woman. I’d challenge any instagram #fitspo model to outhit Serena or outrun Kerber. It’s a stereotype that has long hounded Serena especially. For years she’s had to endure pathetic body-shamers who can’t handle her peak physical condition.

Yet just days before Kerber secured her big win over Serena, another big win surfaced in the sphere of body image. Barbie released its first range of relatively normal, realistic dolls complete with a waist and thighs which actually touch. How breathtakingly progressive (see also: excruciatingly overdue).

Watching these two women compete in the Australian Open serves as a stark reminder of just how overdue these changes really are. For far too many years, Barbie has perpetuated a stereotype that women should look like a borderline anorexic blonde bombshell with hips approaching her neck and a thigh gap big enough to throw a basketball through.

Yet here in the Australian Open final are two fit, successful women who look very little like the tiny plastic models we shove into our kids’ faces. How does Serena Williams match up against Barbie? The same Serena Williams who is the most dominant female tennis player of all time, who collects Grand Slam trophies as if they were stamps.

The fact that little girls (and boys) would look to a small plastic Barbie for guidance on body image rather than our top women tennis players is a damn shame. A Barbie who can’t even stand on her maddeningly small feet, let alone sprint around a tennis court and rip forehand winners for days.

Much of this boils down to the fact that athletic strong women sadly don’t align with our rigid mould of conventional beauty. Somehow the mere presence of a muscle seems to offend some people’s very idea of femininity, perhaps because some men are threatened by the idea that these women could beat the shit out of them, as Lena Dunham more or less put it.

Serena’s not alone. Any conversation about Australia’s Samantha Stosur invariably ends with some critique of her exceptional physique, skipping over the small footnote that she’s a Grand Slam champion. I challenge you to tally the number of articles referencing her arms in a poorly worded pun.

The Women’s Tennis Association have excelled in scooping up this diversity and flaunting its beauty. Their “Strong Is Beautiful” campaign is breathtaking in both its concept and artistic direction, working to soften and massage this rigid mould of beauty to accommodate athletic women.

That’s not to say that there aren’t tennis players who resemble these amazonian visions of what society narrowly deems “perfection”, Maria Sharapova for example. The point is, though, there are a lot more that don’t. It’s not just physically strong women. Just like the new line of Barbie dolls, believe it or not, tennis players come in short, tall and curvy. Almost like they’re real humans.

Tennis continually reminds us that different body shapes aren’t a hindrance but an asset to be honed.

Encouragingly, these elite tennis players would look slightly more at home in the new gang of Barbies, which come in petite, tall and curvy (well, slightly less undernourished anyway). As many have already pointed out, the move by Barbie is not perfect and probably mostly motivated by financial gain considering they slipped by 20% in sales between 2012 and 2014. But it is an improvement nonetheless.

Women’s tennis (and reality) demonstrates that body diversity doesn’t just exist among “normal” people and it certainly isn’t something to begrudgingly accept — it’s something to be celebrated.

Thankfully, Barbie is catching up as well. As fast as those feet will allow her anyway.

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Originally published at The Vocal by Cameron Nicholls