Recently a friend shared an unpleasant experience she’d had while on a run. As she passed by a group of young men, one started running alongside her, imitating her supposedly “girly” movements while his friends laughed and egged him on. My friend kept going, staring straight ahead, waiting for the men to lose interest, which, thankfully, they did. She knew, as would any woman, that this was her only option.

To challenge them would have meant, at best, attracting further mockery, at worst, risking physical assault. To stop running could have led to accusations of being a humourless bitch who just couldn’t take a joke. Or perhaps they’d have gone for that trolling denial schoolboys start honing the first time a female classmate flinches — “what? I wasn’t even doing anything! Just having a little jog, same as you!”

“We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance”

In all probability, these men were not violent. Nonetheless, like all men who harass women, they were capitalising on the fact that my friend had no knowledge of how far they might go. Hence she had to carry on like it didn’t matter, like she couldn’t feel it, as though each part of her — her legs, her arms, her breasts, her stomach, her face — didn’t suddenly feel all the more shamefully female, each movement, all the more shamefully feminine. 

In her 1980 essay “Throwing Like A Girl”, the philosopher Iris Marion Young examines the way in which girls’ relationship with their own bodies — and with it, their understanding of their physical capacities — is distorted by the way in which we are forced to view ourselves through the eyes of others. We move differently, not simply because our bodies are different, but because we experience ourselves at one remove. 

“Not only,” she argues, “is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl.” Objectification renders us self-conscious, unable to inhabit ourselves fully: 

We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the media for the enactment of our aims. We feel as though we must have our attention directed upon our body to make sure it is doing what we wish it to do, rather than paying attention to what we want to do through our bodies.

When women engage in sport — or any form of physical activity that exists purely for its own sake — we do so in spite of this sense of alienation and discomfort, perhaps even in an effort to overcome it. There is something particularly cruel in men choosing to snatch any comfort away again, purely, it seems, for the lols. 

It’s well documented that girls lose interest in sport after the onset of puberty. A recent survey by Women in Sport put this down to “fear of being judged and lack of confidence”. These are similar to the things Young was driving at forty years earlier, though the framing feels more superficial. Girls, we are told, are being “pushed out as a consequence of deep-rooted gender stereotypes”, rather than as a consequence of their social position in relation to boys because of gender. This might seem a minor distinction, but I don’t think it is. Girls have not simply absorbed ideas about femininity and decided such a thing is incompatible with physical exertion. Girls understand what their bodies mean in the world; the adoption of a “feminine” – that is, subordinate – way of moving is not down to any misunderstanding on their part. This tension is something which Rachel Hewitt explores beautifully in her forthcoming book In Her Nature.

Mulvaney parodies “girly” exercise and, just like them, basks in the knowledge that women can’t do anything about it

I can’t remember a time when I did not experience my body as a separate, shameful thing. When I was a child, the men in my family had a running joke that involved announcing my arrival as the start of “the fat and ugly show”. This lasted for years. What I remember most is not panicking about being fat and ugly — although obviously I felt it — but about how to respond to the “joke”: what expression to have on my face, how to move through the room, whether or not to laugh. I knew I wasn’t supposed to take it seriously, but it was unclear how else to take it (not least because, when I became very thin, the “joke” changed to just “the ugly show”). It made me feel — in a way I still feel — that I did not belong to myself, but also that to dwell on this was impermissible. I felt this way at school (where, thanks to the popularity of the flower fairy Victoria Plum, I was known as “Victoria Plump”). To be openly distressed by the mockery would have marked me as humourless and vain; that I still remember it today, forty years on, presumably means we can add “bitter” to the mix. But that sense of distance — the vicious circle, cringing at myself for cringing at myself — never quite goes away. 

I can say it has improved with time. Like my friend, I run, and most of the time I am left in peace, able to find moments where I can fall back into myself and just be my body. Last year, when England’s Lionesses won the Euros, I felt real delight at the sight of women who looked so emotionally engaged with their own physicality, neither observing from a distance nor in flight from themselves. When Chloe Kelly whipped off her top having scored the winning goal, the writer Lucy Ward tweeted “this image of a woman shirtless in a sports bra — hugely significant. This is a woman’s body – not for sex or show — just for the sheer joy of what she can do and the power and skill she has”. The tweet went viral and Ward went on to write a piece for the Guardian, describing how “typically, public images of women are contrived, designed by others – often men – for an outsider’s gaze”:

Even ‘natural’ representations of women in our infinite variety, such as those co-opted so profitably by the Dove campaign, are commodified, stylised. Here instead is a woman thinking about herself, her sporting skill and her team: looking out, even as she is being looked at.

I have a mug with the image on it. The mug also features the Nike logo, since this was the brand of bra Kelly was wearing. It could have been a brilliant message for the company: that immersion, that wholeness, that is there for the taking. 

Instead, like many women, I am now incapable of considering Nike’s position on women without thinking of Dylan Mulvaney’s partnership video. Like the men who harassed my friend on her run, Mulvaney parodies “girly” exercise and, just like them, basks in the knowledge that women can’t do anything about it. As Jean Hatchet writes, “he performs a series of ridiculous moves including comedic side stretches, a theatrical run kicking his heels up nonsensically and failed chorus-line high kicks”:

He almost runs backwards into a hedge at one point and pulls a comedy expression of shock. It all looks ridiculous and slapstick. It mocks women by suggesting they exercise trivially and ineffectively, but smiling throughout.

Ha ha, girls! That’s what you look like, you do! Only since Mulvaney claims to be a trans woman, one year into “girlhood”, you are obliged to play along. After all, should you fail to do so, instead of being called a humourless bitch, this time you’ll be called a transphobic one. It’s the same frat boy humour, the same delight in female bodily alienation, the same pleasure in female pain. 

Just like the men who target female runners, Mulvaney displays the exact same sadism accompanied by mock denial: “what? I wasn’t even doing anything! Just a bit of girly exercise, just like you!” Nike can order female customers to “be kind” but I do not believe for one second that they do not see it, too.  

Women and girls deserve kindness. We deserve the freedom to be in our bodies, not forever floating above, watching ourselves, every move over-analysed, every part considered defective. There’s no empathy in what Nike and Mulvaney are doing. It is utterly without heart, completely joyless, the opposite of all the possibilities captured by that image of Kelly last year. 

Writing on anorexia, Hilary Mantel protested that “it ought to possible to live and thrive, without conforming, complying, giving in, but also without imitating a man”:

… it should be possible to live without constant falsification. It should be possible for a woman to live – without feeing that she is starving on the doorstep of plenty – as light, remarkable, strong and free.

Women and girls should not be emotionally excluded from our own bodies. They are our space, our selves; they belong to no one else. Often, it is unsafe for us to say it, let alone feel it. We must grab every chance we can.