Month: June 2013

body image · triathalon

Triathlon and body image

Sam B

Great post on the theme of athletic versus aesthetic values (we’ve blogged on this theme too):

How Putting Performance First is Saving my Body Image.

Except: “After a summer spent climbing mountains and taking on a solo cycle tour around Vancouver Island, I learned that I was happiest when physical activity aligned with something other than weight loss. Then, at 27, I joined a spin class taught by a spunky blonde who just happened to do Ironman triathlons (single-day events consisting of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run — yep, that’s a marathon). Somewhere along the way, my lifelong dabbles in swimming, cycling, and running combined, and completing a triathlon — the combination of all three — landed squarely on my bucket list. Lisa’s spin class had given me the kick I needed, and I became a triathlete that summer.”

Now go read the whole thing!

cycling

Sexiest Pro Cyclists? Really? Good grief.

Sam B5 Comments

It’s not new. But my anger is. Last week I found this, Sexiest Female Pro Cyclists.

Of course, they’re modeling not racing. Cleavage is sexy, I guess, but speed isn’t?

You don’t do women athletes any favours when you portray women in sport as sexy, rather than athletic. Tracy blogs about that here.

But what makes it especially galling is that women athletes need to make their income modeling because women’s sports isn’t particularly lucrative. I know that not all models do it to because they need the money but for women athletes it’s often necessary.

And yes, it’s complicated. Women athletes model in part so as to affirm their femininity and attractiveness in a culture that largely denies those attributes to athletes.

Do these women freely choose it? Yes, sure. Would those choices be less problematic in a culture in which women athletes made the same salary as their male counterparts and in which we didn’t see a contradiction between athletic performance and sexiness? Yes.

I talk a bit about the tensions between sport and femininity in my post about women’s rugby and lingerie football, here.

If you’re really interested you need to look up the work of Charlene Weaving. Char was the student on whose committee Tracy and I served as readers. Her doctoral thesis on the objectification of female athletes first got us thinking about many of the subjects we’re blogging about now.

The three of us enjoyed meeting up again and talking on a panel on feminism and fitness just held at the University of Victoria as part of the Canadian Philosophical Association meeting. Future collaboration is afoot!

charming city street with bicycles and autumn leaves
Photo by Thuyen Vu on Pexels.com

diets · health · sports nutrition · training

Gatorade as pre race mouth wash?

Sam B2 Comments

So I’m doing Precision Nutrition’s Lean Eating program. It’s a habit based program I really like. We’re fans of habits here at this blog.! (See Habits versus Goals, and Making a Habit of It.)

I’ve blogged a bit about my motives here:  Fat, fit, and why I want to be leaner anyway and Nutrition is the foundation of health and fitness. You simply cannot out train a poor diet.”

The latest habit–drink only beverages with zero calories–has mostly been pretty easy. I drink water, black coffee, and green tea and not much of anything else really. I quit drinking alcohol a few years ago and so while most others find that hard, it’s a breeze for me.

I have one exception. I do drink sports drink while cycling. Not on rides under 80 km but on hot days, after a 100 km, I need something more than water on my bike. I keep two bottles with me on the bike, one with plain water and the other filled with a water/sports drink combo. And I’m experimenting with other options. We’ll see. I’m a lousy intuitive eater on the bike. When I ride hard my appetite disappears and I can crash for lack of fuel. After long slower rides, I’m hungry for days and keep eating long after fuel is needed.

But this post is about another use for sports drinks, race performance.  They make a difference and that’s well documented.

But what’s surprising is that it turns out they make a difference even if you just taste them and don’t swallow.

Really, swish and spit works. Sports drinks improve performance even if you don’t actually consume them.

But what’s puzzling is why. It’s not new news but Precision Nutrition recently reminded me by sharing this link to recent research: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=23438223

Here’s the conclusion of one of the studies: “The results demonstrate that carbohydrate mouth rinse has a positive effect on 1-h time trial performance. The mechanism responsible for the improvement in high-intensity exercise performance with exogenous carbohydrate appears to involve an increase in central drive or motivation rather than having any metabolic cause. The nature and role of putative CHO receptors in the mouth warrants further investigation.”

Kind of intriguing.

Interested? Read more here:

Sports Science Update: Spit Out Your Sports Drink

High energy sports drinks boost performance even if you spit them out

Research Review: Can gargling glucose make you faster?

body image · fitness classes

“Strippercize” and Other Sexy Fitness Activities: What’s the Problem (or not)?

Tracy I10 Comments

doll pole dancerWe had a great session at the Canadian Philosophical Association. One of our panelists had to cancel, but that still left Sam presenting on women and cycling, me presenting on fitness culture and exclusion, and our colleague and friend Char presenting a feminist analysis of “strippercize.”

I loved Char’s contribution and it got me thinking about just what, if anything, feminists have to be concerned about with respect to strippercize and pole dancing. While her talk is still fresh in my head, I’m going chime in a bit, summarizing some of what she said and giving my own two cents.

What is strippercize? It turns out to be a lot more stripper-like than I thought. I thought, before today, that it was really all about pole dancing. But it’s actually only partly about pole dancing and quite a bit about getting sexy.

The Carmen Elektra 5 DVD set that Char talked about included instructions to put your finger in your mouth in a seductive way, mimicking fellatio. It also had an “advanced” section that teaches women how to play the sexy librarian.

This is all packaged as a fitness video. And it’s the packaging as a fitness practice that raises this feminist’s eyebrow. Sure, lots of feminists might have criticisms of stripping or other forms of sex work in itself. I’m not as critical of it as many — it can for some be a legitimate income-earning choice and we should care about the working conditions of the women who choose it.

I also think that a simple “how to” about stripping wouldn’t be out of line. If you want to learn how to dance in an erotic manner, then you’ve got to learn somehow. A DVD seems like a good place to start. So the issue here isn’t the standard feminist objection to stripping.

Rather, it’s the mixing of activities meant to get us “in shape” with the whole idea of being sexy. We’ve posted quite a bit on the blog (links coming in a later draft–sorry!) about how refreshing it would be if there were at least one domain where women could be free from the expectation to be attractive and sexy for men.

Strippercize pretty much eliminates the possibility that the women who do it are engaging in this activity for themselves. Somewhere not too far away is the idea that if I engage in this activity and learn these moves, not only will I get an awesome body but I will be able to entice my man (with the moves? with the new body? It all gets melded together).

The fact is, much like the elusive “yoga body,” the stripper body you imagine getting from the DVD is not easy to come by just through the DVD.  A lot of it is about genetics. And a lot of it is about hours in the gym. And eating in that fitness model way. And so on.  So that’s misrepresentation.

It’s a misrepresentation that is not unique to stripper-themed workouts, however. That alone is not what makes them irresponsible. As I mentioned above, stripping is usually about pleasing men.  And so packaging fitness pursuits in this way alienates us further from doing these things for ourselves.

Of course, sexual empowerment is a wonderful thing, and there is nothing sexier than a confident woman who is comfortable with her sexuality.  But our bodies are not only sex objects.

Developing our bodies’ strength, grace, power, and endurance contributes greatly to our sense of confidence and well-being.  Tying that development so closely to sex appeal strikes me as promoting the idea that our sexuality is our greatest asset.

An astute commentator on Sam’s Facebook post about this makes this excellent point:

What bugs me about the exercise fad is that it reinforces the virgin-whore dichotomy by denigrating actual dancers-for-money (wives and children are supposed to do it for a: their self-esteem/body image and b: their current or future hetero hubbies/boyfriends — but certainly never consider it the well-paying and very safe job that it can be).

I would shout out “sing it, sister,” but the commentator was a man!

Now I can already hear people saying that at least where pole dancing is concerned, it takes the strength of an athlete and the grace of a dancer to do it well.  Pole dancers who do it well are truly impressive in their skills. Caitlin, from  Fit and Feminist went pole dancing and amazed herself with what she learned she could do. I have the utmost respect for Caitlin and I believe that she and lots of women can discover that they are strong through pole dancing.  But I also notice that (unless she’s under-reporting) Caitlin has not turned to pole dancing as a regular feature of her athletic life.

The fact is, there are other ways to empower ourselves.  And as women we do well to focus on activities that (even if media and culture manages to sexualize them) do not have sexuality at their core. There are lots of other ways for women to get strong and, more importantly, for women to BE strong.

And as Sam pointed out to me when we were chatting about this later over email, there are also lots of ways to be sexy that don’t necessarily have to do with appealing to men. But these instructional DVDs and pole dancing classes aren’t usually packaged to promote alternative, non-heterosexist ideals of sexuality or sexiness.  Being eye candy for men hardly presents us with a robust account of women’s sexual agency.

The most alarming thing I heard in Char’s talk was that there are pole dancing classes for little girls! And that sometimes mothers book pole dancing parties for their daughters’ sweet sixteen! And that there is even a pole dancing doll that is marketed for little girls.

Why is the targeting of little girls so much more disturbing than targeting what we think of as a more age-appropriate audience?  I think it’s because it shines a spotlight on what we would like to deny, namely, that little girls are sex objects in training.  But that should also help us see what is disturbing about this kind of focus for adult women, even as an account of what it means to be a sexual being, and certainly as an account of what it means to be physically strong and confident.

Sexy is good.  But this trend in fitness mixes an already fraught endeavor (i.e. getting into “good shape”) with learning how to be sexy for your man (or generic men). So while it may be fun and can certainly be challenging, the cultural messaging about women’s sexuality is just not, in the scheme of things, all that empowering.

There’s a lot more to say about this topic. But right now my plane is boarding and I want to hit publish.  So if there is more to say, please say it in the comments!

 

ergonomics · running

To go barefoot or to wear “foot coffins”? Searching for a middle ground…

Sam B11 Comments

Someone commenting on the blog recently referred to traditional running shoes as “marshmallow foot coffins.” Love that expression. I’m not sure where exactly it originated but “Shoe Coffins” is the title of a blog post here.

From the blog post:

“The shoe arguably got in the way of evolution,” said Galahad Clark, a seventh-generation shoemaker and chief executive of the shoemaker Terra Plana, based in London. “They’re like little foot coffins that stopped the foot from working the way it’s supposed to work.”

(Foot coffins! Too perfect!) Last year, I was hobbled by unbearable and untreatable foot pain whenever I attempted even moderate running and hiking — until I went barefoot. While barefoot is surely not for everyone, I say: foot coffin dogma be damned!”

They were responding to a blog post I wrote about lawsuits against wobbly unstable running shoes which were marketed as toning devices. Turns out they didn’t tone but some people did fall and twist their ankles.

But “marshmallow foot coffins” refers more broadly to the ever expanding range of protective running shoes designed to get everyone out there, whatever their gait, whatever their foot problems. Buying a running shoe is now like buying a medicial appliance. You need to know if over pronate or under pronate, if you need a hard structured shoe or a soft padded one.

I’m part of the problem. I wear serious running foot wear with orthotics after a bout of plantar fasciitis and two stress fractures. (Not caused by bone density. They tested. I have rock star bone density.)

But last year after reading lots about barefoot running, I decided to give it a try. I ran barefoot in the playing fields near my sabbatical rental house in Canberra, Australia. I felt like a kid again. I didn’t keep it up though.

Aside from feeling great my toenails also loved it. No more black or missing toenails. Bonus. But I didn’t keep it up once I returned to the land of pavement.

I’m not a complete convert to going barefoot for physical activities. But I do see the benefits. I love doing martial arts in bare feet. My feet seem stronger as a result. For CrossFit I’ve switched to minimalist athletic footwear and I like that too.

My daughter brought the barefoot habit home from New Zealand. There stores had signs, “no shirt, no shoes, no worries.” And lots of young people went barefoot everywhere. It’s not so well accepted here and she’s taken to carrying duct tape flip flops in her back pocket in case she’s somewhere people insist she wear shoes.

I’m not there yet though I’ve been going barefoot days when I ride my road bike into work and forget to carry shoes. How about you? Bare feet? Do you like it? Have you tried it? Tell us your story…

Some resources:

Throw out your orthotics and shoes that will last a million miles (CrossFit London on strengthening exercises for feet)

The Benefits of Going Barefoot

The Once and Future Way to Run (New York Times)

“We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world.

So how did one of our greatest strengths become such a liability? “The data suggests up to 79 percent of all runners are injured every year,” says Stephen Messier, the director of the J. B. Snow Biomechanics Laboratory at Wake Forest University. “What’s more, those figures have been consistent since the 1970s.” Messier is currently 11 months into a study for the U.S. Army and estimates that 40 percent of his 200 subjects will be hurt within a year. “It’s become a serious public health crisis.”

Nothing seems able to check it: not cross-training, not stretching, not $400 custom-molded orthotics, not even softer surfaces. And those special running shoes everyone thinks he needs? In 40 years, no study has ever shown that they do anything to reduce injuries. On the contrary, the U.S. Army’s Public Health Command concluded in a report in 2010, drawing on three large-scale studies of thousands of military personnel, that using shoes tailored to individual foot shapes had “little influence on injuries.””

From Why Things Hurt: Shoes: good support or coffins for your feet?

athletes · body image · diets · fat · fitness · stereotypes

Fitness as a Feminist Issue

Tracy I24 Comments

Feminist-Coming-Out-DayOne criticism of this blog that I’ve encountered, mostly from anti-feminists in disguise, but also from some who take a feminist perspective on at least some issues, is that in scheme of issues facing women in the world, fitness just doesn’t rank all that high on the list.

Domestic violence and violence against women more generally, lack of representation of women, let alone a diversity of women, in positions of influence and power, global poverty and its disproportionate impact on women, the restricted options available to women where employment is concerned, all sorts of issues regarding differences of privilege and oppression among and between women–all of these issues arguably strike more deeply than sport and fitness.

A spate of harsh criticism and even ridicule came in the wake of my recent post on why we should replace “ladies” with “women” on locker room doors everywhere. Much of the criticism involved the claim that if this is what feminists are worrying about these days, then that’s proof enough that feminism has run out of things to complain about.

We’re at a philosophy conference (the Canadian Philosophical Association annual meeting) this week and so, in proper philosophical fashion, I’m feeling motivated to jump in and defend our position against this particular criticism. Why? Because it’s a criticism worth taking seriously and I believe there are a number of good ways to respond to it.

I don’t dispute the point that there are lots of pressing, and even lots of more pressing, feminist issues. In fact, I address lots of them in my research, teaching, and day to day life. I’ve been on a study leave this year, but in courses I taught before my leave and in courses I will teach when I return in September, the students and I covered such topics as: marriage and motherhood, reproductive technologies, disparities of power and privilege among women globally, and anti-racist feminist theory and practice. I write about collective action theory, and my recent book on moral responsibility includes a chapter on cultural ignorance, responsibility, and oppression.

Last year, a colleague and I co-organized a conference on gender and transitional justice in which distinguished scholars presented sophisticated work in philosophy and legal theory. I am currently co-editing a special issue of the Transitional Justice Review on the same topic. I’ve just completed a paper, forthcoming in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, in which responsibility for sexual violence against women figures prominently. I presented parts of that paper at a seminar the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health on a trip to Washington D.C. a couple of months ago.

My co-blogger, Sam, is equally engaged in feminist scholarship on a range of issues that have nothing to do with fitness. Her body of work is nothing short of impressive.

We are also both of us engaged daily in feminist practice, organized and not organized. And I don’t just mean lifting heavy weights and blogging about the ways in which fitness discourse, culture, and practice invites feminist analysis.

So the first point I want to make here is that we have no quarrel with the claim that feminist issues in fitness are not the only feminist issues there are. It’s obvious to both of us that there are lots of other concerns about gender equality and equality more generally that warrant (and get) our attention. Those who think that the post about “ladies” is meant to exhaust the things feminists have left to discuss have missed the mark.

Even in the context of all that we blog about here, it’s easy to see that that post was meant as a fairly light discussion of the more serious general issue of the subtle power of language. Similarly, the post about pink was meant to raise a more abstract question about the way social meanings of seemingly harmless things can stand as obstacles to equality. In feminist discourse we sometimes call it death by “a ton of feathers.”

Granted then that there are more important issues. That doesn’t mean that a feminist analysis of sport and fitness is so trivial that it warrants no attention. Some of the issues we raise on the blog call attention to significant impediments to women’s flourishing: fat shaming, body image, the tyranny of dieting, the narrow aesthetic ideal of femininity and how antithetical it is to athleticism, the sexualization of female athletes, women and competition, issues about entitlement, inclusion, and exclusion, the way expectations about achievement are gender variable, the harms of stereotyping.

What’s more, we also interrogate the very assumptions about what constitutes “fitness” in the first place. And in the future, as I start exploring disability theory in more depth, I will be asking more questions about the concept of “fitness,” its Darwinian origins, and thinking and talking more about ableism and non-disabled privilege. Discussions with philosopher, Shelley Tremain, have contributed to my thinking in these matters.

So I would also dispute the charge that there are no significant issues regarding feminism and fitness. And in many instances, sport and fitness provide us with microcosms of more general feminist concerns about power, privilege, entitlement, and socialization.

Despite that there are other pressing issues—many more urgent than fitness—facing feminists, I stand behind the blog tagline in which we declare that “fitness is a feminist issue.” Fitness is most certainly a feminist issue. Yet nowhere do we claim, nor would either of us ever claim, that fitness is the ONLY feminist issue.

If you happen to be at the Congress of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Science this week in Victoria BC and want to hear more feminist philosophical analysis of fitness, please join us at the joint session of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy and the Canadian Philosophical Association on June 5th (tomorrow) in the Clearihue Building, room 109 from 9-noon.

aging

Blasts from the past about aging

Sam B

Tracy and I are away attending the Canadian Philosophical Association meeting in Victoria. Between our own work, hearing talks by students, meetings with friends and colleagues from across the country, it’s a busy exciting time.

I’ll be blogging a bit less this week but here’s some of my past posts on the theme of aging to tide you over.

Enjoy!

Three books about inspirational older athletes

On not growing old gracefully

Middle aged bellies, body acceptance, and menopause

Monday morning, peri menopause, and metabolism

Aging and the myth of wearing out your joints

Is aging a lifestyle choice?

Crossfit · Rowing

The Aikido, Rowing, CrossFit triathlon?

Sam B1 Comment

So an attentive reader might have noticed that I’m doing three physically active things regularly: Aikido three times a week,
Rowing three times a week, and Cross Fit three times a week. Occasional bursts of soccer, bike riding and dog jogging have occurred.

Now Tracy and I (along with a friend and my daughter) are  committed to doing a try-a-tri distance triathlon in the middle of the summer, the Kincardine Women’s Triathlon and from my schedule you might have thought it was Aikido, Row, and Fran (a tough CrossFit workout).  And while there are quite a few unique triathlons  the one we’ve signed up for is your standard issue: swim, bike, run. From most deathly to least deathly activities…

Clearly, one month out, it’s time to ramp up the biking, running, and swimming!

In light of that looming mid July deadline I’ve revised my schedule as follows, once I return from this round of conference travel:

Monday: CrossFit AM, Aikido PM
Tuesday: Swim AM, Rowing PM
Wednesday: CrossFit AM, Aikido PM
Thursday: Swim AM, Rowing PM
Friday: CrossFit AM, Bike ride PM
Saturday: Swim, Bike, Run
Sunday: Row AM, Soccer PM

I’m the least worried about my cycling. It’s a short distance, 12 km, I think, and I know the course. I’m also riding some recreationally. I commute by bike lots. And I’m a strong cyclist. But I want more time on the bike anyway to get ready for some other summer events.

Running is covered in a way by all the CrossFit running and soccer along with dog jogging. No doubt I can run 3 km. I just need to get faster and be able to do it after swimming and biking. Saturday is my brick day when I’ll practice biking after swimming and running after biking.

It’s swimming I’m actually nervous about. I need to make a wet suit decision and practice in it. And though it’s a short distance I want to be completely comfortable that I can finish it without resting. You can read about my past triathlon challenges here.

This time I also want to practice the transitions and get used to swimming in a wet suit. You can read about Fit and Feminist learning to swim in a wetsuit in open water here.

Any other advice? We all have our weak spots. Tracy’s is cycling, mine is swimming, and Mallory’s is running.  Here’s me on the right, below, the last time I did this event.

wetsuit