A Short Critique of the Women's Gymnastics Floor Routine

by David Balashinsky

I love gymnastics.  And I love women's gymnastics.  However, I have long been bothered by the sexism and the conspicuous gender construction of the women's gymnastics floor routine. The mincing and prancing and the striking of quasi-sexual poses that seem to have become de rigueur during the past several decades makes the event excruciatingly awkward to watch.  What ought to be a demonstration of athletic prowess and  aesthetic beauty is needlessly debased by the gratuitous sexualization of these women athletes.  Could you imagine male gymnasts performing like this?  Gymnastics is gymnastics.  A sumersault is a sumersault. Why is it necessary for gymnastic pyrotechnics to be punctuated by the gymnast's arching her back and sticking out her buttocks when the gymnast is a woman but not when the gymnast is a man?  Why is it necessary for the routines to be accompanied by music and the tumbling interspersed with dance steps when performed by women but not when performed by men?  What do any of these absurd, sexualizing embellishments have to do with gymnastics, anyway?  Why is it not enough for women gymnasts to excel at gymnastics without having to overlay their floor routines with wheedling smiles, constructed and exaggerated femininity, and the overt sexualization of their bodies?

Consider the numerous other sports that female and male athletes both compete in: weight lifting, boxing, equestrian events, track and field - the list is long.  Yet in none of these other events are women expected to perform the sport in a manner that is so thoroughly permeated with gender that it alters the character of the sport itself and results in such a marked difference between the way women and men perform it.  Take the heptathlon, for example.  We would not expect the women competitors - and only the women competitors - to perform any of the sports that comprise this event to music while interspersing the actual sport (say, the shot put or the javelin throw) with mincing, prancing, and dancing around.  Why is the women's gymnastics floor routine treated differently?

In the Olympics, sexism has always determined which events women and men are permitted to compete in and the gymnastics floor routine is certainly not the only Olympic event in which socially constructed gender differences are rigidly enforced. But in the only other two notable Olympic events that I can think of in which they are - synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics - the differentiation between female and male is so complete that males do not even get to participate in them.  (Men's synchronized swimming actually has a long history; in the nineteenth century, competitive synchronized swimming events were restricted to men only.  However, to this day, men are not permitted to participate in this event in the Olympics.)  In contrast, I am speaking here of precisely how the gymnastics floor routines - which both women and men do perform - are performed so differently when performed by each.  (And there is, of course, no rational, non-sexist reason why men should not compete in either synchronized swimming or rhythmic gymnastics.)

A useful test for sexism consists in the simple thought experiment in which a man replaces the woman in any social context or artistic rendering; everything else remains unchanged: only the sex of the participant is different.  Watch any modern women's floor routine but imagine that it is a man performing.  The male gymnast performing exactly those steps and striking exactly those poses would look foolish and ridiculous.  The effect would not be unlike that which is created by posing men in satirical calendars (not "beefcake" calendars, which are intended, say what you will about them, to celebrate, some might argue, exploit, male beauty) in which men are represented in typically "feminine," sexually alluring poses.  You'd likely consider it absurd and degrading to the male gymnast.  Perhaps you'd be embarrassed for him.  What does it say about our culture that movements and poses that are considered cute and sexy when performed by women are considered absurd and degrading when performed by men?  That we take it for granted that women gymnasts should perform their floor routines in a manner that would look degrading, foolish, and ridiculous when performed in exactly the same way by men demonstrates not only how thoroughly our concepts of male, female, and gender are shaped (and warped) by our culture but how the constructs of masculinity and femininity empower men while disempowering women.

Why do the conventions of music, dancing and often sexualized posing exist in the women's gymnastic floor routine but not in the men's?  The explanation may be found at least partly in the fact that the women's floor routine lends itself to being turned into a quasi dance routine simply because it is performed on a flat surface and involves movement that has an essentially aesthetic component, as opposed to an objective component, such as hitting a bullseye, or jumping higher, as measured in millimeters, than one's competitors.  Gymnastics, after all, is judged largely by subjective rather than objective standards.  Yet the men's floor routine is also performed on a large, flat surface and, like the women's routine, incorporates movements that are judged largely by aesthetic criteria.  So why the fundamental difference between the women's and the men's floor routines?  I attribute this to two factors.  One is the construction - or exaggeration, if you will - of gender, and the other is the overt and incessant sexualization of women's bodies.

As for the first of these, it is precisely because aesthetics and subjectivity play such an important role in judging the women's and men's floor routines that gender has driven them into such radically different types of performance.  Where subjectivity prevails, cultural norms will tend to creep in and perhaps come to predominate.  Thus, whereas the men's floor routine tends to incorporate socially constructed notions of masculinity, the women's floor routine tends to incorporate socially constructed notions of femininity.  It goes without saying that, in the case of the men's floor routine, masculinity consists in strength, power, agility, determination, and seriousness (when is the last time you saw a male gymnast smile ingratiatingly at the audience during the performance of his routine?).  And in the case of the women's floor routine, femininity (as specifically tailored for this event - it is gymnastics, after all) incorporates, in addition to the strength, power, agility, determination, and seriousness of the gymnast herself, the additional obligatory characteristics of daintiness, cuteness, sexuality, and submissiveness.  Striking poses such as those that women gymnasts typically assume throughout the performance of their floor routines is analogous to a display of submissiveness in the animal kingdom so as to forestall an act of aggression when a threat is perceived: thus are women expected in our culture to forestall aggression with overt displays of ingratiation and subservience.  (Surely many men come to expect this sort of display of submission as their due, and surely this is why men not infrequently exhort women - perfect strangers - when they pass them in the street, to "Smile, Honey.")  Thus, the projection of masculinity for male athletes and of femininity for female athletes has come to dominate the gymnastics floor routine for each sex, resulting in the radically different events that we see today.

The second factor is our society's obsession with sexualizing the female body.  The women's gymnastics floor routine is certainly not the only example of women's bodies and demeanor being sexualized in ways in which men's bodies and demeanor are not, but it is among the most conspicuous in sports.  (The revealing and sexualizing uniforms that women athletes are required to wear in certain sports, such as beach handball, in contrast to those that male athletes in the same sport are allowed to wear, is another.)  A skeptic may point to the numerous other sports in which women and their bodies are not sexualized.  To this I would answer that the failure of sexism to permeate these other sports to the same degree should not be interpreted as evidence that it is not sexism that has distorted the women's gymnastics floor routine.  Sexism in sports, because it reflects sexism in our culture, tends to manifest itself in different ways depending on the context.  It is not that sexism would not thrive everywhere that it could but that it tends to succeed better in some contexts than in others.  The women's gymnastics floor routine is one example of an area of women's sports in which sexism continues to thrive.

 

Revised 10 January 2023.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the finger lakes region of Central New York. He writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture and politics.