London 2012 has already made history for being the first Games
in which all competing nations have allowed female athletes to
compete. We're also hosting the first Games in which women can
compete in every category of sport; Danny Boyle's opening ceremony
paid tribute to the campaign for women's suffrage; and Clare
Balding has been rated as by far the best presenter in an
often-questionable programme of BBC coverage. There's plenty to be
proud of in what has been achieved.
So why, faced with such an exhibition of female butt-kicking
power, would anybody feel the need to complain about sexism?
Because, as DIVA reported earlier this week, some female athletes
are still treated as second class Olympians and denied the same
recognition as male athletes in parallel events; because the Mayor
of the Olympic host city thinks it's OK to refer to female beach
volleyball players as "semi-naked women… glistening like wet
otters"; and because if we cast an eye over the most popular
events, the Olympics are more than ever about honouring the cult of
machismo.
On the first of these counts, equal rights activist Peter Tatchell
recently called to account President of the International Olympic
Committee Jacques Rogge, asking him to embrace gender equality by
not only presenting the gold medal to the winner of the men's
marathon, as is traditional, but also to the winner of the women's
marathon.
When it comes to the second reason for being cautious about
declaring London 2012 a roaring success for women in sport, I can't
have been the only one who has been feeling uneasy, borderline
nauseous, at the press's coverage of women's beach volleyball
which, if the photographic evidence is anything to go by, appears
to be a game for people with no heads. Not only did the Mayor of
London neglect to see anything offensive in his remark about the
female athletes in Horseguard's Parade, but the Prime Minister made
a similarly nauseating comment about being fortunate that his
bedroom in Number 10 overlooked the court.
London's free daily papers last week devoted an astonishing amount
of pictorial space to perving on the bikini-clad athletes. Of
course, when watching sport a certain amount of appreciation of an
athlete's physique is hard to avoid, but surely printing only shots
of an athlete's bum (as shown here) removes all of the illusion
that her talent and hard-work are being appreciated.
There was all but a national outcry at the announcement that the
female beach volleyball players might have to resort to more
conservative garments in the event of cold and wet weather. If it
draws in a crowd, the argument goes, then it can only be a good
thing, and yet acknowledging that female athletes depend even
partly on their power to titillate in order to gain respect does
nothing for the position of women in sport.
The third indication that inequality persists is less easy to, for
want of a better word, expose. The biggest event of the Olympics is
the men's 100m final, which is essentially half an hour of
strutting and swaggering followed by 10 seconds of running. Despite
the unbelievable sporting accomplishments of women that the world
has seen, sport is still burdened with the enduring belief that
strength and power are macho traits, what with women being the
'weaker' sex.
www.OutSports.com claims
that of the 12,000 athletes in London for the Games, only 20 are
out as lesbian or gay, an indication of how restrictive the sport
world can be, based purely on myths about homosexuality. And that's
before we even take into account that in many of the Olympic
nations it is illegal and punishable by imprisonment, torture, and
sometimes death to be openly lesbian or gay. The sport world isn't
going to change overnight.
