Girls, ignore the sexist rhetoric. Revel in everything that upsets the haters |

 

 

"Khelif’s crime – in the eyes and relentless social media feeds of the “let us tell you how women should look, act, reproduce, breathe and exist on this earth” brigade – lies in choosing not to portray herself as an aspirational Sports Illustrated swimsuit model when her job as a professional athlete is, literally, to punch other people in the face. There’s an online community of “transvestigators” who spend their days with Adobe Photoshop filters and an alarmingly fragile sense of personal identity determining every prominent woman who takes her work seriously must secretly be a man, lest the confections of gender that they cling to collapse in the face of, um, concrete evidence to the contrary. They’ve been going on about Michelle Obama in this way for years.

Don’t be fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that Khelif terrifies because of her height or strength. It’s taking the sport of boxing seriously enough to pop her opponent’s nose rather than flailing about like a hapless doily in a boxer costume that’s the issue. There is, you see, a preferred model of femininity for those in the yelping far right, and it’s of the pretty, homebound, jobless kind that spawns children in the quantities of a brood animal. This demand reflects a masculinity so delicate it relies on the economic and physical dependence of a partnered woman to provide the comparative illusion of strength – it’s packaged online as a fantasy product for weak men by the “tradwife” accounts."

more in the article bY VAN BADHAM

Girls, ignore the sexist rhetoric. Revel in everything that upsets the haters | Van Badham | The Guardian