Have you seen the 40-second video that will change the way you think about women’s sport, women’s bodies, just, you know, women? It’s been unavoidable on social media this week – brazen, unapologetic, dominating the algorithm like an AI kitten hacking a banana-bread recipe while lip-syncing to Cardi B. I for one have enjoyed it at least 50 times already.
It starts with some carefully curated passive-aggression – “Dear Sydney”, “Hey Sydney”, “Respectfully Sydney” – and follows up with clips of what, in its own words, “a woman in sport actually looks like”. It shows its subject pounding the treadmill or powering down the back straight, flooring a rival with a tackle or a roundhouse kick, lifting weights or throwing herself through the air. It is, inevitably, soundtracked by Dua Lipa.
Training Season is getting a serious bump this week. The almighty backlash to the Novig advert that everyone would rather not have talked about at all has generated more montages than we’ve seen since Rocky IV. My own feed is swamped with inspo-insta reels from grassroots and elite athletes alike.
Some might argue it’s the best thing to happen to women’s sport this week – unless, you know, they’re the European Solheim Cup team. Either way, a positively cartoonish piece of provocation lit the five-second fuse to the powder-keg stamped CULTURE WAR, and the resultant explosion has enveloped us all in its cloud of colourful outrage and content confetti. The noisy reaction to an actor posing almost naked with various items of sporting equipment demonstrates the power and importance of solidarity within women’s sport.
For decades, being a woman in an incorrigibly sexist sector left you one of two responses. Either you ignored uncomfortable and demeaning situations so you could just get on with the thing you wanted to be doing, or you spoke out, braving either devastating indifference or a cacophony of scorn. These days, we’re privileged to have a far louder voice, and for it to be taken seriously.
There is, however, a danger in taking every piece of deliberate provocation too seriously. And the danger is that it robs us of some of the delight of the thing we love in the first place. Instead of spending this week talking about Lottie Woad’s singles match in the Netherlands, or Chelsea’s 5-0 demolition of Manchester United in the WSL, we’ve surrendered billboards’ worth of brain space to an American celebrity who hasn’t even invested in a Premier League club yet.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
