To be (feminine) or not to be….that is the question (in sport)

Charlotte Tilbury’s sponsorship in F1 is groundbreaking! But is ‘hot lips’ on the car empowering or cliché?For too long, women have been pressured to choose between ‘feminine’ and ‘sporty’ and as we raise the profile of female athletes and women’s sports in general it’s. debate that will continue to rear it’s head.

A couple of weeks ago Charlotte Tilbury became the first female founded sponsor of the F1 Academy, and the first beauty brand to sponsor F1.

How incredible. How inspiring. How refreshing.

But the ‘hot lips’ branding on the car and helmet has left people divided. Empowering, fun, or cliche (motor sports marketeer Silvia Schweiger thinks the latter).

The ‘pink it and shrink it’ model is as cliche as it gets in sport – where kit and products that were originally designed for men, get a splash of pink or lilac, and made smaller, in some kind of lazy attempt at marketing to active women.

But I think Charlotte Tilbury’s lipstick covered F1 car is amazing! For so long women and girls have believed they have to choose between being ‘feminine’ and ‘sporty’ – that the two identities are mutually exclusive. In fact some of the reasons girls drop out of sport during puberty are that they don’t want to appear unfeminine, or they fear judgement if they get hot and sweaty. Equally, some gym-goers are quick to judge those women who chose to come to spin class on to lift weights with a full face of make up.

Why can’t we wear make up to do sport?

Why can’t we being muddy and sweaty be feminine? We shouldn’t have to choose. There is something wonderful about the collision of make up and petrol, of manicured nails and weightlifting, of beautifully blown out hair flying over hurdles. There’s also something wonderful about bare faces blushed by the cold air of a morning run, scraped back greasy buns stuffed under a cycle helmet, and bloody grazed knees, the sign of a tackle well made.

You see, what’s wonderful hasn’t got anything to do with make up or no make up – it’s about women getting to be exactly who they want to be, and not giving a fu@k about what anyone else thinks. It’s about being able to show up as yourself. And not letting others decide what’s too feminine or not feminine enough in sport. It’s about celebrating that for some women make up is fun and empowering, not a patriarchal pressure.

It’s interesting that male footballers have never had trouble pulling off the range of images that we can occupy as humans – sweaty one minute, sporting a trend setting haircut the next, sponsored by aftershaves and ‘the best a man can get’ type brands, in blues and blacks, and no one offers up a running social commentary.

The very first paragraph in our book, The Female Body Bible, reads:

“It’s 1967, and Katherine Switzer is about to run the Boston Marathon by stealth. They don’t allow women to run, because such a distance is thought to be too much for our fragile feminine body. Switzer’s coach is worried that she’s put on earrings and lipstick, and it will draw undue attention to the fact that she is female, and get her dragged off the start line. Katherine Switzer doesn’t remove her earrings, or her lipstick. In her account of that day she recalls that as she ran, she wondered why more women had not tried to race before her. She thought it was because they just didn’t get the attraction of physical activity. But as she ran, she realised it wasn’t that women didn’t want to move, it was that they believed all the old myths like running ruins your reproductive organs, or that it isn’t lady-like.”

It seems there is both a stigma to combining the feminine and sport, and to sport being unfeminine. Flipping heck – does it ever feel like we just can’t win?