Who is free?

It was one of the images of the Olympic Games. Very likely one of the images of the year. A German beach-volley player wearing a bikini faces her Egyptian rival, who covers her body completely. An example of the cultural diversity of the Olympics. But it was also a polemic picture, rising a lot of questions:

Is one of the players freer than the other? Are they both victims of different kinds of sexism? Is it possible that they are both free? It would be easy to say that the German girl was free to play as comfortable as she wants while the Egyptian one was forced by her religion to cover her body and head. But is it that easy?

The rules about how to dress in female beach-volley are now a bit lighter, but until 2012 the sides of the down part of the bikinis couldn’t be larger than seven centimeters. Was that in order to make it more comfortable for competing? Was that a way of sexualizing the players? Would those dresses derivate attention from the performance of the players to their bodies?

In 2012 the rules admitted other uniforms (like the one of the Egyptian player) because “many countries have religious or cultural demands”, like Richard Baker, speaker of the International Beach-Volley Federation said. Not because women had the right to choose over their dresses, but because some religions or cultures wouldn’t allow their women to play dressed with just a bikini.

So, did both players choose their dresses freely? They both said so, but, were those “free” decisions really free or were they based on sexist subjacent ideas that see the female body as something to hide or to show but not as something to compete?

And maybe the biggest question of all: why are we debating about the way sportswomen dress but we don’t do the same with sportsmen?

We can clearly see the interplay of religion, culture or sexism in this debate. This case is just a very visual and recent example about it, but in Aspire we have prepared a Track inside our Conference 2016 that will tackle many other similar cases, with much more developed questions and answers and addressed by real experts in the topic.

(Published in the Blog of Aspire. Manufactury of Change to promote the Aspire Conference 2016)