The ‘skin gap’ between men and women is fully displayed at the Olympics

(RNS) — There is a revolution underway among female athletes battling the gender imbalance embedded in sports uniforms. But the battle must develop beyond the sporting arena to fulfill its feminist promise fully.

The German women’s Olympic gymnastics team wore unitards in a recent qualifying event instead of leotards. A few days earlier, the Norwegian women’s beach handball team was fined for wearing shorts instead of the required bikini bottoms.

Unbalanced uniform requirements are regulated in great detail in the official rules for this sport. For female gymnasts: “The length of the leotard leg should not exceed the horizontal line around the leg, which is drawn no more than 2 cm below the base of the buttocks.” Male gymnasts, on the other hand, “should wear solid-colored competition trousers and footwear.” In some cases, they can wear shorts.

This difference is as surprising as beach handball. Women should wear a “belly” open top with “deep-cut sleeves at the back” and a “bikini bottom” that is “cut at an angle up towards the top of the leg”, with a “side width” of “maximum 10″. centimeters.” Men’s tops, on the other hand, are standard “sleeveless” T-shirts, and they “must wear shorts” that can be “10 centimeters above the kneecap”.

Why do team sports guidelines have different standards for male and female athletes? Perhaps because Western society has developed a skewed understanding of what female modesty means. When the PGA attempted to add more conservative standards to women’s uniforms in 2017, to better match men, they were faced with accusations of body shaming, with one online commentator comparing it to ISIS.

Unfortunately, the idea of ​​women covering up has been associated with conquest when, in fact, many religious women, from Orthodox Jews to Muslims to conservative Christians, consider it a form of liberation.

On the other hand, the “skin gap” — the difference in the amount of skin that men and women are expected to exhibit in the same social setting in contemporary Western culture — is a form of conquest in itself. From gymnasts to volleyball players, actors to news anchors, we are constantly being fed images of girls and women in less clothing than boys and men, making women’s bodies hypersexual and normalizing the idea that female body parts are meant to be. consumption.

It was a woman wearing a strapless, low-cut dress next to a man in a tuxedo. It was a teenager in a crop-top and shorts with his girlfriend in cargo shorts and a polo shirt. The fashion industry designs and aggressively markets clothing options for women with fewer materials than clothing for men.

The skin gap, a term I coined, begins in infancy. Stephanie Giese writes about this difference, comparing size 4T Cherokee shorts for girls versus boys. While the inseam on girls’ shorts is only 1 inch long, the same brand offers the inseam on boys almost seven times longer.

The skin gap continues as long as a woman meets Western beauty standards. Then, once he exceeds a certain amount in either age or pounds, we prefer him to cover. “Older actresses also do nude scenes,” one man told me, trying to disprove my theory, “like Helen Mirren,” where he shows his disgust, destroying his rebuttal.

While enforced modesty certainly oppresses women, the pressure to reveal does exactly the same. Empowered simple religious women have known for years there is tremendous autonomy in deciding who and in what context others see our bodies.

In Hebrew, the word for politeness, “tzniut,” means “privacy.” Tzniut is not about shame or control. It’s about recognizing that covering the body allows talent, personality and skills to shine through. We will never want to go back to a time when women were forced to cover up. But while women are gaining equal status with men in almost every other field, the pressure for us to expose ourselves more than men is one of the things holding us back.

Women should not cover up because of shyness or social pressure, but, as men do, to simply take our bodies out of focus, so that we are seen as more creatures and less as bodies. There are some who would say that women can freely choose what to wear (though apparently not at the Olympics). But how can one be truly free in a society where one is inundated with constant media messages?

Courageous women like those on the Norwegian handball team and German gymnasts can take the lead so the Western world can begin to change the inequalities in expectations inherent in skin gaps. We need to end the objectification of girls and women and build a world where women are judged not by their hotness, but by their skills, talents and character traits.

(Allison Josephs is the founder and director of Jew in the City, a non-profit organization demonstrating relevance and meaning in Orthodox Judaism. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of the Religion News Service.)