On my mind: Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and the freedom to say "no." |
 | | Simone Biles at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times |
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The sport of the summer is the women's freestyle no. |
Some of the world's greatest female athletes are finding that their fiercest battles are not against their opponents on the court, but against the demands of sporting federations, coaches, and other institutions who have until now demanded total compliance from young women who wish to compete at the highest levels. |
Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and others are pushing back in unprecedented ways, insisting on prioritizing their own health and dignity over others' demands. And the vitriol their nos have provoked shows that this is a battle that goes far beyond the world of elite athletics — and one that maps how far women have come in their struggle for equality, and how much they have yet to win. |
Ms. Osaka, a tennis champion, set the standard for the field in May, when she informed the French Open organizers that she would not participate in post-match news conferences. Then in July, the Norwegian women's beach handball team refused to wear the bikini bottoms required for women in competition, arguing that they were too skimpy. (They took to the court in shorts that were, they noted, still smaller than the baggy ones male players were allowed to wear.) |
But as with other sporting events, the real "no" action turned out to be at the Olympics. First Serena Williams declined to participate in the games at all because their Covid protection protocols would have forced a long separation from her young daughter. Then Germany's women's gymnastics team declined to wear the skimpy leotards standard in their sport, choosing to compete in full-length unitards instead. |
On Tuesday, Simone Biles delivered a "no" unmatched in difficulty and power. |
Gymnastics is renowned for demanding total compliance from young girls and women, even if that means enduring physical, sexual or emotional abuse, and even if it exposes them to catastrophic injury or death. But Ms. Biles, already known for performing gymnastics skills that no other athlete even attempts in competition, added to that record a performance of the highest-profile no her sport has ever seen: Citing mental health concerns that made it unsafe to compete, she withdrew from the games, mid-competition. |
The higher profile the no, it seems, the more severe the backlash. |
The Norwegian women escaped with only a 150-euro penalty per player, but the French Open fined Ms. Osaka $15,000, and she was mercilessly mocked by the press and commentators for her claim that participating in post-match news conferences in the midst of an ongoing tournament might damage her mental health. And while Ms. Biles received support from her teammates, fans, and gymnastics officials, many commentators lambasted her for "quitting," and suggested her decision was a sign of weak character. (Ms. Biles and Ms. Osaka are also women of color, adding a racial as well as a gender angle to the backlash they have received.) |
Most of these women's asks are small. Shorts are perfectly functional handball uniforms; news conferences are not a fundamental component of tennis. And while Ms. Biles' withdrawal had more significant effects on her team's prospects, her needs were also comparatively greater. Many gymnastics experts have pointed out that loss of focus or awareness can be deadly if it happens in midair. There is no distinction to be made between mental and physical health in a sport as dangerous as hers. |
The clearest framework I have found for understanding the anger these nos provoke comes from Moira Donegan, a feminist author and columnist for The Guardian, who has written that women's freedoms can often be divided into two categories: rights to say yes, and rights to say no. In the context of sexual politics, for instance, "yes" freedoms are those that allow women to be sexual without shame or punishment: to have sex outside wedlock, for instance, or to wear revealing clothing. "No" freedoms, by contrast, are rights to refuse sex or sexualization. |
"Something I like about yes/no is that people can understand that neither is a free choice unless both are available," Ms. Donegan said in an interview. It was an idea that struck her after reading the work of Kate Manne, a feminist philosopher at Cornell University who has argued that women are seen as constantly in moral debt, owing men care, attention, time, and sexual pleasure. "Once I read her book "Down Girl" I started seeing it everywhere," she said. |
And often, Ms. Donegan said, it has been easier for women to win "yes" freedoms because they make them more available for others' pleasure or profit — and more difficult for them to win "no" freedoms because they do the opposite. |
One does not have to look far to find a similar divide in sports. There, the "yes" freedoms have been the freedom for women to compete publicly, to be paid and supported as professional athletes or members of national teams, and to be celebrated for their bodies' athletic performance rather than for their potential to give pleasure to men or care to children. Those are important and hard-won freedoms, but they also come with built-in benefits for others, in the form of medals, glory and profit. |
The 'no' freedoms, which athletes like Ms. Biles and Ms. Osaka are asserting now, are about refusing the demands of coaches, sport governing bodies and the press — and often mean forgoing profits, medals, and other benefits. |
And while the presence of 'yes' freedoms is often celebrated, 'no' freedoms meet with more opposition. And their absence can be invisible. |
Like most American women of my generation, I remember the extraordinarily young, gold medal-winning U.S. women's gymnastics team from 1996. But amid all the praise for Dominique Moceanu's heroics after a bad fall on the balance beam and Kerri Strug's vault on a severely injured ankle in the team competition, no one asked why these children were being exposed to such danger in the first place. |
"Simone Biles' decision demonstrates that we have a say in our own health — 'a say' I NEVER felt I had as an Olympian," Ms. Moceanu wrote on Twitter this week. She shared a video of her fall on the balance beam, writing that she competed in another event just minutes after she fell, striking her neck, even though no one had even examined her spine for injury. She was 14 years old. |
And in that same Olympics, Coach Bela Karolyi pressured Ms. Strug into vaulting on her already-injured ankle in order to "clinch" gold for the United States in the team competition. But in fact, her score in the previous vault was already enough for the team to win. And no one seems to have considered that her safety was worth protecting even if that meant coming home with a silver medal instead. |
Such problems were not limited to gymnastics. This week, Alberto Salazar, once the most famous running coach in America and a partner with Nike, was permanently banned from participating in track and field by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, which cited Salazar for sexual and emotional misconduct. Elite female runners, including Mary Cain, Amy Yoder Begley and Kara Goucher, accused him of years of psychological abuse. |
Ms. Goucher told The New York Times in 2019 that she had not felt she could say no to Mr. Salazar's abusive demands because doing so would have risked being kicked out of his elite training center. "When you're training in a program like this, you're constantly reminded how lucky you are to be there," she said. "It's this weird feeling of, 'Well, then, I can't leave it. Who am I without it?'" |
But this summer, 'no' by 'no,' women are proving that refusing to submit to others' demands can be a way to protect their achievements, and more. "The outpouring love & support I've received has made me realize I'm more than my accomplishments and gymnastics," Ms. Biles tweeted on Wednesday, "which I never truly believed before." |
- Nonviolent resistance is usually held up as the gold standard for protests. But a forthcoming paper in the American Political Science Review finds that only ethnic majorities are able to get its full benefits. When minority groups protest, they tend to be perceived as more violent than they actually are.
- Two articles rethinking the basic assumptions of U.S. gymnastics: Time for the End of the Teen Gymnast. And what if everything we know about gymnastics is wrong?
- "Surrender on Demand," the autobiography of Varian Fry. A former classics student and foreign policy journal editor, Fry went to France after the Nazi invasion and used every legal and illegal means at his disposal to save thousands of artists and intellectuals from deportation and death. (Bonus points to anyone who emails me with the correct identification of the man the book refers to only as "Beamish," whose work many readers of this newsletter will be familiar with from other contexts.)
- This article was designed in a lab to appeal to me. It worked!
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