Olympic Women

I’ve been watching the Olympics religiously for the past week and a half. I’ve been reading various posts on Feministing about women and the Olympics. But the subject I haven’t seen is the women who are not on center stage, the women who seem to act as living props (Chinese women, I think it’s important to note). These are the women who carried the country signs in the opening ceremony. The women (though, to be fair, there were also men) who acted as cheerleaders, stomping and clapping and smiling for the entire opening ceremony while acting as a human fence. The women who carried the signs around on the gymnastics floor. The women who carried the medals and flowers for the medal ceremonies, handing them to a man to give to the athletes. I’m sure there are plenty of other women in such positions who I haven’t even noticed but who still deserve to have their position as scenery questioned.

I tried one of my favorite mental exercises: thinking, “What if those women were men?” What if there were men in blue and white suits handing award paraphenalia to another man? What if some of the people who carried the signs for gymnastics and the opening ceremony were men? The idea is ridiculous. If I’m honest with myself, the men who acted as cheerleaders/fences seemed a little ridiculous, simply because I’m not used to seeing men as cheerleaders-slash-stage-props. But that’s the fundamental difference, that women in my culture and it seems Chinese culture as well are so often seen as knick knacks that happen to smile and breath rather than human beings who can do things. Men are largely exempted from the position of props; even the male cheerleader/fenceposts seemed to be herding the athletes into their human-boundaried pens on top of their other duties.

The hand-off in the ceremonies confuses me too. Why aren’t the women the ones who anoint the athletes? Why must the medal and the bunch of flowers be handed to a man? I’m sure the man is someone important in the Olympic system, but this doesn’t assuage my questions. It only transfers them to the Olympic Committee as well. And prompts me to ask, why doesn’t he carry the stuff himself?

I can only conclude that my completely unobjective statements in the previous two paragraphs reveal the truth, that women are being used as objects, pretty living filler, like baby’s breath in a floral arrangement. Men could just as easily carry those signs and flowers and metal-weighted necklaces. There is nothing that makes women inherently more capable of transporting minutiae. The only criteria I can discern for this incredible tilt seem to be youth and femaleness.

When I contrast this to the female athletes, I can’t help but feel disappointed. We’re supposed to take them seriously against a backdrop of solely feminine curves. We’re supposed to pretend that the exploitation of women has somehow been cured because women are athletes! Meanwhile the old system of seeing women as their bodies and their beauty rather than their abilities continues at the edges, where no one is supposed to look too hard.

Pretty young women are the backgrounded burden-bearers of the Olympics, the dressed-up mules in a hypocritical procession.