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Women's World Cup squashes the beauty myth
By Lee Kucera
I was at a weekend conference the day the U.S. women's soccer team won the World Cup, so I missed the scoreless game and its heart-stopping, sudden-death finish. I returned in time to catch the national excitement over the event in front-page headlines and pervasive public commentary.
Some sports writers saw the victory of the women's team as validation of the 1972 Title IX statute, which mandated equal access and facilities for girls and boys in school sports. Others cited a resurgence of national pride and praised the U.S. women as role models for the thousands of little girls who now play weekend soccer throughout America. Most were gratified to see that women's sports can draw crowds as large as men's, with a diverse audience including old and young, male and female, dads with young daughters on their shoulders, and people who had previously been indifferent to public sports events.
I'm glad for all of these outcomes of the World Cup victory. But mainly I am just glad to see the way the women on the U.S. soccer team look in the news pictures: healthy, strong, suspended in ferociously animated motion with ponytails flying. They are the diametric opposite of the passive, pouting, waif-like images of women who permeate so much of America's print media, or the blown-dry, silicone-implanted female stars of screen and TV.
Our society's preoccupation with female physical appearance, and the damage it does to young American girls, is well documented, in books such as Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth," Dr. Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia," and appalling statistics on eating disorders, anorexia, and self-mutilation among teenage girls in this country. Unfortunately those realities have scarcely made a dent in the stereotyped portrayal of women in prime-time TV shows and women's magazines. A brief scan of the glossy covers of these magazines in the supermarket checkout line--30 years after the second wave of American feminism--reveals stories titled, "Find Mr. Right in One Month," "Juice Up Your Sexual Repertoire," "Grow Younger," "Melt Off 20 Pounds," "What's Your Lovemaking Personality?" "Obsessed With His Ex: One Woman's Confession" and "How to Make Him Want You."
The summer 1999 issue of MoXie Magazine--a women's publication which was launched as an antidote to the sex-clothes-and-makeup magazines--cited an experiment in which two fictitious personal ads were placed simultaneously in a big-city newspaper, one supposedly written by a self-confessed female drug addict and one by a woman who claimed to be 50 pounds overweight. The imaginary drug addict received four times more responses from men than the imaginary overweight woman. When a compulsory physical image of how women are supposed to look becomes foisted on our national consciousness to the extent that being fat is presumed to be worse than shooting heroin, we've clearly gone a little bit nuts.
But if respected authors and psychologists haven't been able to overcome this national delusion, the U.S. women's soccer team has. The young American women who won the World Cup are living proof that it's possible to be physically strong and sturdy, scrappy and self-confident, and still gloriously female and sexy. They wear no makeup--at least not on the soccer field--and they are vibrantly beautiful without it. It doesn't look as if they count every gram of fat, either: their lithe but solid athlete's bodies bespeak three square meals a day. In interviews they speak directly, without pretense or self-consciousness. My guess is that they don't have time to sit around taking their emotional temperatures all day long like Ally McBeal. (Is that TV character really supposed to be an attorney? She doesn't look, talk, think, or act like any lawyer I ever met.)
After the recent World Cup game in Pasadena, an anonymous male fan in the audience said, "I think this is the start of something important, something that goes beyond soccer." Perhaps that "something important" is not only Title IX coming to fruition, but along with it the decades of struggle for women to be perceived as autonomous, individual human beings rather than judged against an artificial physical image--and the hope that in the future our daughters will be influenced less by Vanna and Pamela Lee than Briana and Brandi and Mia.
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