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ME TOO - I could comforable lose a stone or so and get told all the time that I am too thin....etc etc.
Folks have NO IDEA what a healthy body weight is any more.
My school PE lessons were kinda alright apart from hockey, swimming and football. I really enjoyed track and field, tennis, trampolining and gymnastics. The facilities were pretty crap and we didn't shower after sports, just went straight to our next class
Only properly got into sport at 17 when I met my then boyrfriend who played squash and wanted me to join in. Bloomin loved it and became seriously obsessessed! I still play now and compete in a local league.
Recently there's been an effort on the part of England Squash to get more women into the sport which we desperately need. So what did they come up with? "Drop a size with squash-ercise." Oh my effing god!! Yes, we need more women and girls to exercise and take part in competitive sport but really, is this what we need?! It seems so tacky and patronising to me. It's like saying "Hey girly wirlys, we know squash is really difficult and all you want to do is get skinny so why don't you come along to squash-ercise!" But then again, if it works, it works. Argh, I don't know!
I don't think it's missing the point at all. I think I understand what GymAddict was getting at. It's along the same lines as wearing a suit to a job interview, that's all. We could all probably agree than no, she shouldn't have to glam up, but if that's what's required for young females to NOT be instantly put off what she's saying, then what's the real harm.
Because teenagers are shallow! (sweeping generalisation I know).
If young girls think sport makes them less pretty then showing them a hard-core serious female athlete - looking pretty will make more of an impact than someone looking like they just wandered in after a run.
I am NOT saying she SHOULD be tarted up - goodness knows I am more like Chrissie than Cheryl Cole and in reality I tend to pour scorn on women who are insecure enough to tart up all the time. But I do wear a suit and masara to work because appearance does make a difference to how you are perceived in a heck of a lot of situations. I have learned this to my cost - yes it's shame that this is how the world works - but seriously - it's pretty naive to think otherwise.
Errrm. Am I alone in thinking that Chrissie DID have make-up on? Her hair done? She was hardly unwashed/sweaty/dirty/grubby?
And I think it is missing the point whatever Chrissie looked like. It's the fact that we are all discussing what she looked like that is the problem!
Personally I prefer people - male or female - who look healthy. We should go back to respecting people for skill and talent. For health and strength. For determination and achievement. Rather than getting botox and not eating for 5 years.
It's not just girls though - a lot of boys do nothing either and it appears to be fashionable to be as much of a lazy slob as possible, and the girls will do the same to try to 'impress' the boys. We're just a nation of couch potatos with a huge obesity epidemic on the way. People poke fun at America for being overweight, but next time you go to the cinema stand in the foyer for 10 minutes and look at the people who wander through, at how many are overweight and how much junk food they're carrying and you'll realise we aren't far behind America. There maybe aren't the same number of hugely overweight people, but the number of overweight is on a par, and I'd say even ahead where teenagers are concerned.
I hated sports at school. it had more to do with the teaching than anything else. i never classed 'dance' as sport. i would have chosen sport over dance any day. The only thing i hated more than sport was dance.
I liked hockey though, and running. I did neither as I was quite good at both and that went against the grain. I liked sport where I could run around alot. I would have enjoyed doing more gym, esp if we could have used outdoor gyms and assult course.
That would have got me interested. so long as all the PE teachers stayed at home.
Well, most of us here probably don't care what she looked like. It's more like we're discussing what the average teenage girl's perceptions of her would have been, based on her TV appearance.
I don't think there will be a huge percentage of teenage girls who see Chrissie as a role model - THAT is part of the problem.
She can be a role model to me (if I were younger) as I was that kind of teenager and I hope that my daughter will see it that way but I see a lot of the girls who are at school with my teenage son and they are covered in slap, only interested in the next 'Paul's Boutique' handbag or whatever and they absolutely and totally want nothing to do with sport. The whole point of the report was trying to find ways to engage young women in physical education. A lecture on what should or shouldn't be hardly gets you anywhere. You need to start with the reality (lots of young girls don't want to look sporty) and work from there.
Personally I think the best way is to start at home - get them involved from a young age in as many activities as possible so that you can find the type of thing they enjoy and can then develop further so that when they get to their teenage years they will have been exposed to a healthy lifestyle, the joy of sport and will be less susceptible to the peer pressure of 'appearance' that they get hit with at high school.
runs-with-dogs: I agree. But those teenage girls get the perception of her from us. And by 'us' I mean society as a whole (not us enlightened people on the forum!
). We condition are children to conform to gender sterotypes from such a young age.
Putting on my radical feminist unshaven hat, which I quite like, we need to change teenage girls perceptions. Not the sports women. But the perception society has of women. Full stop.
Any talk of 'glaming up' sport or providing Zumba classes does make me want to bang my head against a very hard object.
It was only a few months ago that not one single female was nominated for sports personality of the year. It's things like that that are the problem.
The thing with Zumba and the like (which I loathe incidentally) is that it could be a gateway for some girls and anything that gets them moving has to be a good thing. I have seen women move on from Zumba to running and swimming and other more strenuous activities but Zumba is what got them to the gym in the first place.
The sheer fact that CW was not even nominated for Sports personality is beyond ridiculous and says a lot about the sports culture in the UK. I read that she is hoping to spend this year raising the profile of the sport - I hope she succeeds.
I agree that glaming up sport isn't going to help matters - but if you are trying to sell something - you market it. A sports person looking to 'sell' sport needs to appreciate who their target market is.
Kaffeeg - I totally agree that it would be great if society's perception of women changed.... don't see it happening anytime soon. Last time I dipped my toes in the popular press/women's mag world - it looked to me like it is only getting worse.
at the expo a stand was selling two different versions of the running magazine.....a mans one and the womans one......when i asked the difference i was told that the ladies had articles on fashion items and that it had plans for 5k and 10k,s......i then asked if i could have a copy of the mans one and she refused and walked away from me
'Women's' magazines are almost universally complete sh*te!
I wouldn't even touch them with somebody else's bargepole!
I'm kind of with GymAddict on this. I an ideal world maybe Chrissie Wellington would be the Minister for Sport & Health (with or without make-up) and instigate a schools programme which lead to the eradication of female obesity within five years. But ideal worlds don't exist... I wonder if Victoria Pendleton has raised the profile of competitive cycling amongst girls in this country? (Or even further afield?) I'm pretty sure she has. I also wonder whether the influence would be as wide if she either (a) wasn't quite as pleasing to the eye, or (b) knowingly (and quite rightly IMO) used her looks to raise her own profile and that of cycling in general?
RWD - I KNOW - seriously what is up with folks that they buy that shite.
depressing. So general consenus is: yep, it's sexist and wrong, but you got to conform to the sexist crap to get your point across.
Come on people, where's the fighting talk? Where's the revolution? Let's occupy St Pauls! Reclaim the streets!
Ahhh, bugger it all. I'm off to burn my sports bra.
I don't know if it's inherently sexist that image is tied up into all of this. I mean, Gillette did ask David Beckham to sell their razors, and not Peter Beardsley. (Sorry Peter, no offence...)
Kaffeeg: Yes, sometimes you do got to conform to get your message across. Subtle change from within as opposed to frontal attack. What's the saying about catching more donkeys with carrots than with sticks? Or was it catching more bees with honey than with vinegar? Hmmm...
Anyhoo... Along the same lines as this discussion, I was looking to buy a new sports bra today. Being of a smaller bust, I was browsing the A cups and compression tops. Only to find that several manufacturers are now making them with padding. Quoted from one label: "to enhance shape and comfort.... A great bra for the less endowed."
I find it hard to articulate calmly just how many f***ing things are wrong with this! To me padded sports bras seem almost as wrong as padded bra tops for 7 year olds. I mean, I don't care I've got small boobs. Just makes running easier than having big ones. I also don't care if anyone else cares about them. And most of all, I don't want to be thrashing round a summer marathon in a heatwave with insulating foam padding strapped to my chest causing me to overheat just so some random onlooker might check me out and (wrongly) think "Whoo, nice t*ts!"! Jeez. I mean, really...
Wow - that is amazing. Less is more surely when you are running or whatever. What brand was it? (NOT that I would be looking for any extra - got too much as it is)
runswithdogs: i'm with you on the padding! Hopefully a woman didn't come up with that design feature. BUT....going along the lines of needing to conform, and glaming up, making sport 'sexy' - then surely padded sports bras for the 'less well endowed' is part and parcel of the same thing?
Teenage girls can Zumba proudly in padded sports bras.
Gosh. I'm even more depressed about the whole thing.
Phil - i disagree that it's not inherently sexiest. Beckham was being paid to model to sell a product. Girl doing sport are not branding themselves - they are just doing sport. I think it's slightly different.....
DT - do you actually read the posts before you figuratively spew your particular brand of vitriol - because it doesn't look like it.
I don't think she's squirming away from it. I don't even think it necessitated any squirming away. Most teenagers ARE , well, if not shallow, quite eager to conform, fit in, not do anything that would get them singled out and made a pariah. When I was at school almost nobody, girls OR boys would pick up a javelin. I called it the Fatima Whitbread effect...