men are always men, but girls are sexy
CC image by JanJan de Paris via Wikimedia Commons
A recent Facebook post by a male friend-of-friend read: ‘girls dancing is sexy, girls walking is sexy and girls sitting is sexy.’ My reply, of course, was; ‘unless the act is intentionally sexy, it’s just walking, dancing and sitting,’ but I’m very much afraid that I was wrong.
Unfortunately and, as we all know, his is not an isolated opinion. Why is it that everything that women do is judged as sexy/not sexy, attractive/not attractive?
Women in sport fight this all the time. Just ask Marian Bertoli, and read the vitriolic twitter feed that suggested that her skill in tennis was unacceptable, and the real winner was the apparently more attractive runner up.
She’s a tennis player, not a porn star.
Playing tennis is just playing tennis.
And Roxy’s mystery surfer who failed to demonstrate surfing in their recent TV advertisement, yet amply demonstrated sexy? Surfing is just surfing, right?
And reading the news is just reading the news.
Yet while male news anchors carry on into their decrepitude, their female counterparts are replaced constantly with younger and younger versions of what could possibly be the same woman. Evidently reading the news also must be sexy.
Older women are not any kind of socially acceptable ‘sexy’ as they age. They don’t gain power or become the ‘wise women’ that the Wiccan crone represents; they simply disappear from public space.
When men grow older they develop a ‘power paunch’ become a ‘silver fox’ and their bald spot becomes a ‘solar panel for a sex machine’.
We awesome women, cease to exist.
As I grow older, I want to have pride in my sagging boobs, let’s call them ‘rockets’, my stretch marks will be my ‘tiger stripes’, and my future bingo wings will be my ‘sugar gliders’, which – if ever I fall from a tall building – will deploy with an audible pop and sail me gently to the ground like a drifting feather, to the genuine applause and amazement of all who see.
Young men will confuse my wisdom, power and epic achievements with sexual attraction and I will be beating them off with a paddle.
‘No boys, I couldn’t possibly…’
But this is all a fantasy, because the default of everything right now, is male. Sport is male; unless women play it then it must also be sexy. News reading is male, unless women wish to read it because then it must also be sexy.
It seems the ‘girls dancing /walking /sitting must be sexy’ guy has a point, and while this is the predominant view – which the media would have us believe; if you are not sexy you ain’t doing it right.
My daughter says this all the time. Thats why they have Women’s Rooms at uni – how sad is that – women shouldnt have to have a room where they dont have to be sexy.
I think a lot of this issue would/will go away if/when there are more gay/lesbian people in positions to decide on who get’s to read news etc.
So true. I did some research on the sexualisation of the female body when I did my exercise science degree. It’s ridiculous that as women we ‘don’t matter’ unless we fit the current societal ideal which constantly changes. And let’s not forget that any sports woman who is unattractive has to be a lesbian… clearly you can only be gay when you’re too ugly for men to love!
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