On Sunday July 25 in Tokyo, the German gymnasts took up the torch. Not the Olympic torch, and not by accomplishing a feat, as the quartet failed to qualify for the all-around team final, but by performing in a full suit rather than the traditional leotard.
Their approach adds an episode to the mobilizations of sportswomen in favor of more comfortable and above all less indiscreet outfits – here, in a discipline recently marked by cases of sexual violence. “Every woman, every person, should decide what to wear”said Elisabeth Seitz who, with her teammates Sarah Voss and Kim Bui, had already opted for a similar outfit at the European Championships in April.
A few days before the Games, the Norwegian beach handball internationals, a non-Olympic discipline, played an official match wearing shorts, and not the “fitted and high cut” bikini imposed by the regulations. Their infringement being deliberate, they assumed the fine of 1,500 euros imposed by the European Handball Federation.
As the overwhelming comparison to the outfits of their male counterparts illustrates, the problem is that, to play the same sport, women often have to strip much more than men. For dubious purposes: a study on how to film beach volleyball at the 2004 Olympics assessed at 37% the share of centered plans on the chest or buttocks of the players …
“From ancient societies, the nudity of women is distinguished from that of men: when the sports exercises of palestres call for and enhance full nudity, naked women scandalize and Spartan women with short skirts revealing their thighs are mocked”, notes the lawyer Juliette Gaté in the article “Nudity” of The Critical Encyclopedia of Gender (The Discovery, 2016).
Assigned to seduction
In the modern era, their practice barely accepted, women still expose themselves to reprobation: “The sportswoman of the early twentiethe century derogates from assignments of femininity, especially since it often wears panties, bares part of its body and shows itself in the effort, the sweat … and “in hair” “, writes sociologist Catherine Louveau (What is the genre?, Payot, 2014).
The researcher quotes Pierre de Coubertin – “The exhibition is not suitable for women” – and a doctor who wrote, in 1922, in a manual of physical education, that they must “Favor grace and aesthetics”. Contradictory injunctions which place them durably under the gaze of men, both censors and voyeurs.
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