Valour Magazine - Issue 1
POWERFUL IMPLICATIONS Greta Galilee explores the pressures on young athletes to be feminine
REVIEW A short review on a moving play
KIT UP A sport vs street style feature
GROUND RULES The best athletic accessories to get you ready for action
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Valour Magazine - Issue 1
As somebody who is related to a competitive athlete, I have participated in a considerable amount of weigh-ins, waiting, peeking through my fingers at the fights and then the medal ceremonies. However, it has to be said that around 80% of my days at these events are spent people watching and although I’m far from being an athlete, I really get a sense of what it must be like. This issue of Valour digs a little deeper into the subject of pressures on young athletes, and the current links between sport and fashion. Enjoy! Greta Galilee @Greta_Galilee
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Valour Magazine - Issue 1
It’s make or break time. A young girl reaches a platform in her competitive sporting career. She can either push harder to reach her full potential, or ease off a little in training and eventually fall behind. On top of all the other considerations such as time and commitment, she also has to deal with thoughts like “but I’ll look so butch” and “boys won’t like me”. Are the pressures on girls to be feminine and to dress for men spiralling out of control, to the point where their ambitions may be disregarded completely?
To get some confirmation and the inside scoop from a young girl on the receiving end of the media’s burden, I asked Martha Galilee. Being her sister, I can tell you through experience that Martha has some serious throws and even more serious strangles in her repertoire. I guess that is to be expected when you are on the England Talent Development Squad for Judo. Martha and I are both sporty people and lovers of fashion, but I was keen to see if the fashion industry loved Martha back. So, much to Mum’s delight, I roped her into a debate and dishes session. I scrubbed whilst Martha dried. She is 15 so naturally, I had to push past the Facebook gossip and secondary school cafeteria dramas first. When we finally got to the matter at hand and I was shocked by some of the things she said. “I can’t help but think that female football players are quite manly and buff. That is the way they’re seen over all, even though I’ve got friends who play for teams and they’re not manly at all. In fact they’re really girly girls [laughs]”, she said light-heartedly. In 2012, the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation found that “There are 2.2 million fewer women than men participating in at least one session of sport or physical activity each week”. The pressures that Martha describes are likely to be a big contributory factor to this discrepancy.
To find out if anyone else was bothered by, or even aware of this, I spoke to Celine Camille. Celine is currently carrying out her Final Year Project purely based on Women, Fashion and Sport, and the insight she generously gave me was invaluable. “The reason why women were not encouraged to train their physical attributes was because men were scared that their growth in muscle, would lead to a growth in political power, they would feel undermined and that’s how I feel things still are today. People, men in particular are scared to see a strong, powerful and independent woman which can take care of herself.” After only a couple of mouse clicks searching for more evidence of Celine’s theory, I came across a website kindly giving women a list of ways to “Boost a Man’s Ego Through Femininity.” Number 5 suggested “giving him a stream of compliments aimed at his masculinity,” but advised you to stay away from gender neutral comments because “they have become meaningless and watered down”. Meanwhile, number 7 proposed “wrapping your hands around his arm and begging him to make a muscle for you.” This website not only backed Celine’s point up perfectly, but also somehow managed to patronise both women and men simultaneously.
“People, men in particular are scared to see a strong, powerful and independent woman which can take care of herself” - Celine Camille
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Valour Magazine - Issue 1
Half way through our interview and still up to the elbows in bubbles, Martha murmurs, “I mean, a couple of people have called me manly,” as if she almost wants this sentence to go unnoticed. Naturally, as her older sister, I have to fight off the urge to go ‘all Liam Neeson’ on these individuals. Instead, I assure her that comments like that, say more about the insecurities of the person saying them, than they do of her, and that they are pointless and irrelevant. Then I splash her with some water and we carry on with the conversation. I ask her if she thinks that girls her age feel the need to dress to impress the boys and she, without hesitation, says “I feel like everyone at school dresses to impress the boys. And we’re only 15. At parties girls will just hardly wear any clothes.” After this, there is a small silence before she adds “But I’m not even sure they know they’re doing it. Their ideas of what the boys like, are now what they like.” To an extent, we all need the confirmation of others to help us to feel and look good. However, we’ve never before experienced such high levels of exposure to marketing and the media, so the pressure on us to conform has surely never been greater. There is no doubt that a lot of girls are at their most vulnerable and impressionable during their secondary school years, when the idea of liking boys, and boys liking them, comes into play. Also, it is a fact that the fashion media specifically, presses stereotypes of femininity onto these same young girls, from all
angles. In fashion magazines and on the internet there is a notable lack of women with muscular bodies, and sometimes it’s the absence of something that proves the biggest point. This is a huge shame, seeing as the industry produces such beautiful things on a daily basis and has endless opportunities to celebrate everybody involved in it. Fashion is full of diehard perfectionists, and there is nothing wrong with that, but perfection in fashion is subjective. The fashion industry is partly responsible for setting contemporary ideals of beauty, so needs to be careful not to abuse that responsibility. Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton are physically strong and beautiful women, whose idea of pain is more in the realm of burning lactic acid after an intense training session, rather than the sting of getting ones eyebrows waxed or threaded in a salon. But these “beautifying” treatments are now a must if girls and women are aiming to be desired and taken seriously. All in all, the media’s perception of beauty has become the ruler against which we all measure ourselves, but will these superficial values change our society?
“I feel like everyone at school dresses to impress the boys. And we’re only 15. At parties girls will just hardly wear any clothes.”
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Valour Magazine - Issue 1
Raise your hand (in a metaphorical manner) if you have ever gone down to the local park with a group of likeminded friends and played a game of football with jumpers for goalposts. I know I have. A fair few times in fact. The title doesn’t let on to the all-but-trivial matters that are brought up in this play that debuted on the 29th of August and has been touring since. The whole production captures the harrowing revelations and social issues of the close knit team with a surprising dose of humour and team spirit. I am not entirely sure how the writer, Tom Wells, managed to fuse the audience’s strong emotions of empathy and the involuntary laughter that would release itself from our mouths in the immediate moments after. I do, however, know that he did an extremely commendable job of it. The mix of humour and serious matters was a bit shocking at first, but it did the job of dodging the whole preachy vibe that you sometimes get in performances that feature big issues. This play was effectively the one teacher in secondary school that spoke like they just wanted to have a laugh and a joke, but slipped thoughts and facts into your head without you even realising it. And I don’t know about you, but that teacher was always my favourite. Jumpers for Goalposts had a lot to say about identity, not only as an individual, but as a group as well. It demonstrated so clearly that everybody has their own issues and complications to live with, but that you can’t stop them from becoming part of your personality. This sounds all doom and gloom considering that the play touches on issues like HIV and the death of a person close to you, but overall the characters gain strength through these experiences. I would thoroughly recommend this play to anyone and everyone.
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“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body. - David Foster Wallace
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Magazine by Greta Galilee - 2013