From the New York Times opinion section:
Body Shaming Dressed Up as a Fitness Goal Is Still Body Shaming
Nov. 6, 2021
By Jane Coaston
Opinion Writer
Jane Coaston is the host of Opinion’s podcast, “The Argument.” Previously, she reported on conservative politics, the GOP, and the rise of the right. She also co-hosted the podcast “The Weeds.”
@janecoastonThe University of Oregon is known for its track and field program. … Six athletes had left the team citing fears that the program’s approach to their weight and body fat percentages put them at risk for eating disorders.
In women’s sports, discussions of weight is [sic] nothing new, and has led to life-threatening behavior….
But that is not to say that the body shaming and unrelenting pressure on women athletes to attain unnaturally thin physiques have disappeared. Far from it.
The demand has largely gone undercover. “Weight loss” is now “fat loss” or “getting lean.” Women are told that of course the point is not to become incredibly thin but to get “fit.” In practice, they are one and the same.
This appears to have been the case at Oregon, where the pressure on women to lose weight — or, rather, body fat — was cast as key to helping their performance.
When as we all know, more body fat is a big help in almost all sports, such as playing offensive lineman in the NFL, swimming the Bering Strait, and, uh, well … I’ll get back to you on this.
The body-shaming that allegedly took place at Oregon happened under a veil of science.
As reported by The Oregonian, the women who left the team told reporters that they had experienced shaming over their body fat metrics, with one athlete alleging that she was told to meet specific body fat percentage requirements or risk losing opportunities to compete. Those body fat percentages were based on the athletes’ DEXA scans, a form of body composition imaging that calculates bone density, body fat and muscle mass. One athlete said that the DEXA scans became harbingers of doom. “Whenever I would eat a cookie, I would feel so guilty. I would be like ‘Wow, it’s going to make my next DEXA scan bad. I’m going to get in trouble.’”
[Oregon head track coach Robert] Johnson told The Oregonian that the use of those scans and body fat percentages meant that his judgments of athletes’ weights weren’t based on appearances but on data. “When we get the numbers from our DEXA scans, we have an Excel spreadsheet that we can plug the numbers into, hit a button and it gives us a starting value for a training program,” he said. He added, “Track is nothing but numbers. A good mathematician probably could be a good track coach.” And he explained that the DEXA scans were helpful for that “nothing but numbers” approach. “That’s one thing the DEXA scan helps us do,” he told The Oregonian. “It takes our personal opinions out of it.”
But while track might be about numbers, people and their bodies definitely aren’t.
Robert Johnson
Johnson’s use of DEXA scans in this manner is problematic in two ways. First, the recommendations for women athletes were concerning at best and deeply harmful at worst. And second, the “nothing but numbers” approach attempts to paper over the fact that in women’s sports, the pursuit of performance and the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal are almost impossible to separate. …
Seriously, maybe in rhythmic gymnastics or ballet, but not in track and field. Most women’s sports are just imitations of sports invented by young men as tests of manliness, so feminine beauty doesn’t play a role in who wins. Have you ever seen a female hammer-throwing medalist?
And therefore, it’s all the fault of men. After all, who hates voluptuous women more than straight men:
Not that every coach is subtle. In a lawsuit filed last month, distance athlete Mary Cain, who shared her story in an Op-Doc for The New York Times in 2019, accused her former coach Alberto Salazar of telling her she was “too fat and that her breasts and bottom were too big.” …
The body fat percentages that the athletes were told to reach, according to The Oregonian, were often dangerously low. According to the American Council on Exercise, a healthy range for female athletes’ body fat percentage is 14 to 20 percent. … Another athlete was told that she would not be permitted to compete in away meets until her body fat percentage was under 12 percent. Four of the athletes interviewed said that team members who didn’t hit the body fat percentage marker required of them by coaches frequently had to do additional cross training.
… Extremely low body fat in women can result in amenorrhea, or lost menstrual periods, which can have serious consequences for their bone density, fertility and general health. In fact, the athlete whose DEXA scan showed she was at 16 percent body fat told The Oregonian that she had not had her period for more than a year — a fact the nutritionist was aware of, she said.
Seriously, if these DEXA scans are really legit and get past the old problems with BMI, women’s athletics organizing agencies should make minimum body fat percentages mandatory for eligibility. Don’t let women compete to starve themselves below the body fat necessary for fertility. Sure, performances would get worse, but women athletes would be healthier.
… I’ve been thinking about the Oregon revelations nearly constantly since I read about them in late October. As a novice runner with a deep interest in sports and fitness — and a woman who exists in America, and thus a woman with some (OK, many) thoughts and feelings about how I look — this all feels familiar.
It’s precisely because women self-obsess over their own personal looks constantly that their NYT opeds about looks are so comically poorly thought through. The motivation of each and every one is that society must be deconstructed and then reconstructed so I, personally, am considered hotter looking.
Do you think Foucault, who, I suspect, did a lot of body-shaming in the bathhouses of San Francisco, where he contracted AIDS, had any inkling that it would all come to this?
I am constantly under a barrage of Instagram posts and magazine covers that urge me toward strength and performance goals while simultaneously implying that maybe if I meet those goals I’ll also meet an aesthetic goal, too. And maybe that aesthetic goal is more important.
Ya think?
Sure, Women’s Health magazine may have promised in 2016 that it would stop using terms and phrases like “bikini body” and “drop two sizes” on its covers because, to quote the magazine’s editor, “we’d rather focus on the greater benefits of getting a strong-as-hell core,” like being able to carry your kids up the stairs. But the October 2021 cover of the magazine encourages readers to “Change Your Body” and get “Sculpted Abs,” neither of which has anything to do with performance or carrying anyone up stairs.
A DEXA scan doesn’t know how fast the athletes at Oregon are, or how high they can jump. Maybe some of the athletes at Oregon would run five seconds faster with a body fat percentage that was three percentage points higher.
I’m sure the women’s track coach at the U. of Oregon is slapping himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand right now: “Why didn’t I ever think of that?” …
Hopefully, there’s a special level in Hell where demons force Foucault to read every op-ed about body-shaming by women who took a college class in which Foucault was cited reverently.
