Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe that men should not play in women’s sports. The damage has become too clear. We have seen the injuries and lost scholarships and humiliations young women have suffered for ten years. At long last, a current professional female athlete has stepped up by publicly stating the obvious: Only women should play in women’s sports.
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Sophie Cunningham gets the courage award of the year for speaking up. No other current female athlete has been willing to risk backlash that could ruin a career. For stating this simple biological truth, Sophie has been celebrated and pilloried in nearly equal measure. Her own coach disparaged her; her teammates target her. But to thousands of girls trying to make their way in female sports, she is their new and deserved heroine.
Indeed, Sophie’s motivation in speaking up seems to be her concern for younger female athletes. “Young girls should be protected from having to compete against biological males or share locker rooms with them,” she said. Lots of parental heads nearly bob off their necks saying amen to that. No girl should be subjected to a head injury from having a guy spike a ball on her, or fear that she is undressing in the presence of a man.
Could we, however, expand that whole notion of protecting younger women a bit farther? As a therapist, a grandmother, and a mother, and just plain lover of the common good, I question Sophie Cunningham’s willingness to pose for Sports Illustrated.
No doubt that beautiful centerfold sold millions of copies (the operative word being “sold”). What does this say to young aspiring girls looking to Sophie as a role model? Can anyone question why girls at ever younger ages are taught to twerk in sequins and halter tops — girls schooled to see beauty as power?
I would make the case that Sophie is unwittingly playing into false notions as “unreal” as boys in girl’s sports. My body is power, and I can do with it as I please. Sophie’s willingness to use her body for the pleasure of men and some kind of gain feeds the old trope of woman as a plaything. It’s another gnostic form of using the body as a means to an end, a philosophical juggernaut that rolls out in a thousand destructive ways.
When Sophie appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated, she normalizes something that costs other women, slowly but eventually: their innocence and dignity. Those young women show up in therapists’ offices like mine wondering why they feel worthless.
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Perhaps the ironic touchstone in this saga is Sophie’s own recent adult baptism. “Thank you, Jesus,” she said, calling this experience “one of the better things I’ve done in my life.” There’s a whole beautiful world behind that door, and I, for one, hope Sophie finds it in spades.
For the whole of Jewish and Christian history, the body has mattered. It’s not too much to say the body holds a sanctified place in the scheme of things. A person is born male or female for purposes larger than his or her own individual self. Bodies come together and create whole new persons. Christians created hospitals for healing the body, not just churches for the soul. Christ came as a man in a human body. It goes on and on, in ever richer and fuller ways. Lasting relationships, children cared for, the actual stuff of a functioning civilization — this is the fruit of the faith Sophie has newly found.
To Sophie’s courage, then, we plead the addition of a measure of modesty. I’m tempted to say, affectionately, put some clothes on, girl. I see the faces of younger girls watching Sophie. They are the ones so vulnerable to the dark exchange of sensuality for the hope of love.
But love and relationships don’t work that way, and we all know it. You don’t get to flaunt your body without thinking of the impact on other people. Sexuality is like kryptonite. What is meant to be a great blessing, applied wrongly, backfires and burns to the core.
I suspect there are thousands of people like me, terribly grateful that an important female athlete is speaking up for the safety of girls coming behind her. May her tribe increase. Until then, please, Sophie, just play basketball.
Image: Sophie Cunningham. Credit: Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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