I saw the Sydney Sweeney sports campaign yesterday morning, and I’m not gonna lie, it triggered me!
I mean, are we really still doing this kind of thing?
Women have spent years fighting for their place in sport. We are strong, skilled and talented, and time and time again it gets reduced to our bodies being the most interesting thing in the room.
Women in sport are extraordinary. I want to see more of them!
They are breaking records, winning medals, building careers, pushing their bodies to limits most of us can barely imagine, creating businesses…
More importantly, they are inspiring young women to get involved. Young women like my daughter Milly, who can lift 45kg Atlas stones!
And yet somehow, despite all that, we still end up with sport being represented by a naked woman on a basketball hoop.
I mean WTF?
Women absorb messages about appearance before we even understand what they mean. When we are younger, we are told to be attractive, but not too aware that we are attractive.
Sexy, but not too sexual. Confident, but not intimidating. Ambitious, but still likeable. Visible, but not attention-seeking.
Blah blah blah.
And then somewhere around our forties or fifties, the rules change again. Now we mustn’t try too hard. We mustn’t dress too young. We mustn’t look desperate.
I could retire if I got paid for the number of times I hear, “I don’t want to look like mutton dressed as lamb.”
Why the hell not?
Why dress as mutton?
It’s exhausting and absolute rubbish!
No wonder so many women lose confidence in what they wear.
I see it all the time. I work with intelligent, capable women who run businesses, manage teams, make decisions all day long and are absolutely brilliant at what they do.
Then they stand in front of a mirror and second-guess everything.
Somewhere along the way, many of us have absorbed the idea that how we look can somehow cancel out who we are.
I think there is something really powerful about choosing how you want to show up in the world.
I believe we are all allowed to be sexy, whatever that means to us. We can show off our bodies, cover them up, wear tiny clothes, huge clothes, sequins, tracksuits, heels, trainers or very little at all if that is what we want to do.
But that is very different from believing your primary value is in how ‘pleasing’ you are to look at.
And it is very different from believing that caring about your appearance somehow makes you less serious.
A woman can care deeply about clothes and still be brilliant at her job.
Of course she bloody can.
Clothes are never just clothes. They communicate. We read visual information constantly.
The difference is whether you use clothes to communicate who you are, or use them to make yourself easier for everybody else to approve of.
And I think a lot of women spend years dressing for approval without even realising it.
Don’t stand out too much.
Don’t look as though you’re trying too hard.
Don’t be too sexy.
Don’t look too young.
Don’t draw too much attention to yourself.
And slowly, almost without noticing, we can end up feeling completely disconnected from the person looking back at us in the mirror.
Perhaps that is why this touched such a nerve.
We have fought so hard to be recognised for what we can do.
In business. In sport. In politics. In every flipping room we were told wasn’t for us.
And yet it keeps coming back to how we look.
So boring!
I don’t have a neat answer. I needed to rant.
But I do believe we need to reclaim who we are and how we show up.
Make clothes ours.
Decide for ourselves what they mean.
Enjoy them. Use them. Have fun with them. Wear things because they make us feel more like ourselves, not because we’ve managed to work out which version of ourselves everybody else might find acceptable.
And yes, let’s be sexy if we want to be sexy.
Let’s be powerful.
Let’s be clever.
Let’s be ambitious.
Let’s be soft, feminine, loud, understated, colourful, glamorous, practical, eccentric, elegant or whatever the hell else feels like us.
Because it’s time women were seen for more than the shape of our bodies.
That’s possibly the least interesting thing about us.