According to the lingerie brand Bluebella, “the idea that strength and femininity are mutually exclusive is problematic”. This is their reason for spending the past eight years using elite sportswomen to market their hyper-feminine wares. By using female athletes at the top of their game to present barely-there pants and scratchy-looking bras, the company claims to be countering the “image concerns” which make teenage girls three times more likely than boys to drop out of sport. “Don’t worry!” their campaign seems to say. “There’s nothing about being good at netball that means you can’t have a thong halfway up your arse! And screw sports bras — there’s nothing like underwires digging into your flesh to counteract any suggestion that you’re getting a bit too manly!” 

Forgive me for thinking — in my boring, old-style feminist way — that this isn’t quite addressing the problem. As Rachel Cooke wrote a decade ago, on the question of girls avoiding sports due to it being unfeminine, “it’s the idea of ‘femininity’ that needs a rethink, not sport. Better still, we could ditch the word altogether”. If sport is incompatible with femininity, why isn’t femininity to blame?

The Bluebella campaign feels at once very old and very new. Old, insofar as it brings to mind the “raunch feminism” of the nineties and early noughties, which told us it was okay to drink pints as long as we got our tits out later (it’s okay to play rugby, as long as you’re wearing some weird strap-like contraption we’re calling a “bodysuit”). New, insofar as it fits with the “progressive” reinscription of femininity — as opposed to femaleness — as the thing that defines a woman. In order to accommodate the inexorable rise of pornography and queer theory — both of which third-wave “feminism” committed itself never to question — the feminist critique of femininity itself had to be sacrificed. 

This leads us to a place where a lingerie brand can co-opt pseudo-feminist messaging for anti-feminist ends. And why shouldn’t it? Mainstream feminism has been attempting to square the progressive circle by conflating femininity with strength and beauty for years. In 2007’s Whipping Girl, the trans activist Julia Serano complained that “many feminists buy into traditionally sexist notions about femininity — that it is artificial, contrived and frivolous […] that femininity is subordinate to masculinity”. Well, sorry to be a spoilsport, but that’s because it is (and no, this isn’t sexist, because that’s femininity, not women and girls). Unfortunately, to many liberal feminists, Serano’s theories were a godsend. If you can no longer deal with the cognitive dissonance of fighting sexism while cheering on the sex trade, just stop trying to liberate women themselves. Liberate the porn-defined image of woman instead. 

There’s a certain amount of linguistic obfuscation that can support you in such an enterprise. Alas, it can only take you so far. You can keep insisting femininity is about freedom and beauty, but anyone can see that it isn’t really. Sexism doesn’t stop being sexism just because you’ve made mentioning the “sex” bit taboo. You still can’t run in heels; plastic surgery still hurts; male sportsmen are not similarly “empowered” by being trussed up like Christmas turkeys (and if one was, we’d no doubt take it for some masochistic fetish; with women, we are supposed to see it as them getting back in touch with their “true” natures, natures which are supposedly put at risk whenever they get too muscular and sweaty). 

“To preserve personal beauty,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “the limbs and faculties are cramped”. Wollstonecraft deplored the way in which girls’ worlds were made smaller “while boys frolic in the open air”. As Wollstonecraft and countless other feminists have pointed out, what is sold to women and girls as beauty is restriction: hold yourself in, take up less space, suffer pain, reduce yourself to an object. Girls are supposed to believe that if they do not do all this, they will be ugly and unwanted. They are encouraged to think their worth lies in remaining “feminine”. In 2024, it is incredibly depressing to find that when spaces do emerge in which to be unfeminine, rather than telling girls that this is okay — run, make mess, be at one with your body instead of constantly observing yourself from the outside —–we tell them not to worry, we’ll find ways of making these spaces just as restrictive, too. 

What the Bluebella campaign rightly identifies — but responds to in the worst way possible — is that female sports pose a significant challenge to the conflation of femaleness and femininity. Instead of seeking to correct this, we should celebrate it. As Rachel Hewitt documents in In Her Nature, a great deal of male resistance to female inclusion in sports has revolved around preserving it as a space in which to demonstrate and elevate masculinity. If women are being aggressive and competitive too — if they are using their bodies, not to attract men, gestate babies or care for others, but just for their own sake — then the means of differentiation, gender itself, collapses. The old-style way of controlling this was to physically exclude women from sports: deny them playing fields, club membership, competitions, sponsorship. I would argue that the new way is to redefine the female sporting category as a feminine sporting category: sports, not for exceptional females, but for the innately feminine, who run slower, wear impractical clothing, never lose awareness of themselves as visual objects. Real sports remain something for the men. 

There is just nothing exceptional — or strong, or beautiful — about wearing an uncomfortable bra

I do not blame any female athlete who takes part in such campaigns. The playing field, as we all know, is tremendously uneven, and these women remain exceptional in their chosen fields. There is just nothing exceptional — or strong, or beautiful — about wearing an uncomfortable bra. If anything, these images make the function of femininity clearer than ever. It is offering up an apology, attempting to offset all that power and ambition by donning markers of female submissiveness. It is telling girls it is acceptable to be strong as long as they weaken themselves at the same time. It’s okay to move, as long as you’re never too comfortable in your own skin; it’s okay to grow bigger, as long as you indicate all that flesh is for someone else, not you. 

There are so many images of female athletes that capture strength and beauty. See, for instance, Chloe Kelly after she scored her winning Euros goal, or Serena Williams at the height of her powers. These are not photos in which the subjects are thinking “look at me”. They are in the moment, fully in their bodies. As Hewitt writes, with reference to Iris Marion Young’s essay “Throwing Like a Girl”, girls’ experience of participating in sport can be hampered by an inability to “think through their bodies”. Instead, they are “encouraged to see themselves through the eyes of others”. What is the Bluebella campaign encouraging, if not that? 

The problem girls face is not that sport — a refuge from the pressures of femininity — is not feminine enough. It is that girls are surrounded by so much evidence that the world does not value female strength as much as it values femininity. The #strongisbeautiful campaign is just once piece of it. 

To change how girls feel, we need to send different messages. The beauty of female athleticism lies in its capacity to expose the emptiness of femininity set against the wonder of femaleness. Once you see this, how could you ever have missed it?