Growing up in Burlington, Vermont, Ilona Maher played softball, basketball and field hockey, but it wasn’t until she discovered rugby at age 17 that she found her groove. “The sport was just right for my body,” she recalled in a June interview.
interview.
Maher has long been made to self-identify as to what “fits” her body type. Her broad shoulders and muscular build, which led the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team to its first ever Olympic medal on Tuesday, have never fit any particular notion of femininity. She’s been described as “masculine” her whole life.
The beauty of sport is that the only authority that matters is the stark, uncompromising authority of physical reality.
Maher’s Olympic fame and social media popularity have amplified the boos as much as the cheers. She weathered it with humor and poise. “My BMI is 30, I’m considered ‘overweight,’ but… I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not,” she responded to a hater on TikTok last month.
Maher posted the day the Olympics officially began.
Another videoShe urges viewers to “see themselves” in the athletes they are about to watch: “Look at the variety of body types on display… from the tiniest gymnast to the tallest volleyball player… all body types are beautiful.” [and] It can be amazing.”
Maher’s message was widely praised, and her reputation as a body positivity icon grew. But just hours after her post, the Olympic opening ceremony surprised viewers with a completely different celebration of unconventional body types: a sort of Last Supper scene, with an obese woman sitting in the middle of a long table flanked on either side by drag queens, all topped by a nearly naked man with a beard painted blue.
This is also often touted as “body positivity.” While Maher’s post defending her weight pointed out the meaninglessness of a metric called BMI (which doesn’t distinguish between body fat and muscle mass), some people are genuinely overweight, and that’s OK. “Accepting obesity” means never having to accept that being 100 or 200 pounds overweight might be dangerous to your health.
Also, a male body masquerading as a female (and vice versa) is beautiful, no matter how unconvincing the imitation may be. Both drag queens and “transwomen” offer grotesque parodies of femininity, but only the former is funny.
How do these two visions of body positivity relate? Not surprisingly, conservatives and progressives are divided on this issue. On the left, Maher’s careful and specific insistence on “inclusivity” is laudable because it advances the liberal project of blurring distinctions and value judgements.
For the right, accepting Maher’s slightly unconventional femininity without comment or insult is almost the same as declaring that “trans women are women.”
Neither side sees the point. What makes this latest controversy so remarkable, and so tiresome, is that it is so far removed from basic reality: What does this fight over an invented ideal of femininity have to do with actual women?
It’s nothing new for people to argue over representations of representations, and stray further and further from the original point: It’s standard procedure in internet debates. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard coined the term “hyperreality” to describe the places we often encounter online.
Hyperreality is a state in which we become so immersed in the images, words, and stories we use to represent reality (it’s easier than ever before) that we mistake them for reality itself.
In his 1981 book Simulacrum and Simulation, Baudrillard describes this process in four steps: 1) faithful copying, 2) distortion of reality, and 3) the absence of a deeper reality where no symbols exist.
pretend It is a faithful copy, but it is a copy without an original, 4. It is a pure simulacrum, and a simulacrum has no relationship to any reality.
Women’s bodies are particularly vulnerable to this treatment: indeed, body positivity began as a reaction to the pre-digital proliferation of “unrealistic” depictions of female beauty in fashion magazines and TV advertising, specifically the so-called “heroin chic” look of the early ’90s, epitomized by skinny models like Kate Moss.
The movement started with good intentions: Girls who had imbibed a monolithic, skinny, boyish, heroin-inspired image of womanhood (which, among other perversions, erased natural markers of fertility from the adult female body) were desperate to reconcile what they saw in the mirror with what they saw in the media. The solution was to break the spell with imagery that represented the diversity of real female bodies.
And it worked for a while, conveying an innocuous message not so different from Maher’s: strong is beautiful. But then, in typical leftist fashion, the body positivity movement started to eat itself alive. What about those for whom being strong or athletic is an unrealistic standard of beauty? Are you really saying that morbidly obese people are “inferior” to physically healthy women, and that they should change their bodies to be more feminine? And what about the bodies of women who were born male?
Body positivity’s mission to reconnect women’s images to reality has been hijacked and further derailed by extremists who present a newer, uglier ideal that’s even more removed from reality than the pale, expressionless china dolls in a cheesy Calvin Klein photoshoot.
The old images were seductive, with their beauty and erotic mystique. The heavy-set middle-aged men in dresses and 400-pound bathing suit babes were incapable of this, so they had to dictate an ideal that was justified by the authority of victimhood.
The beauty of sport is that the only authority that matters is the stark and uncompromising authority of physical reality, which is why gender-ambiguous athletes invade women’s sports, as has been the case recently. Two Olympic boxers — is a highly competitive sport, and the intangible qualities we look for in athletes — determination, courage, resilience — are only tested by the limitations of gravity, distance, time, force, and the God-given bodies that each of us has built — bodies that can be pushed and deformed, but not escaped.
Normally at this point I’d be extolling the virtues of putting down your phone and “touching the grass” — and hopefully this on-screen display of physical proficiency will inspire people to do just that — but I think debaters on this matter would do well to take a closer look at Ilona Maher’s social media.
If she does, she’ll find someone who appreciates what her atypical female body can do on the rugby pitch, but who also embodies more conventional femininity: girly, flirtatious, showing off her beautiful body, and expressing her emotions unashamedly.
That is, they will discover that Ilona Maher is intuitively and unmistakably female, yet also irreplaceably, uniquely, irreducibly herself. In other words, she is a woman. And there are many women in the world.
