For women in sport, winning need not be macho

NATALIE Portman has her views on women's roles in films. A Harvard graduate in psychology,  she's worth listening to, which brings us to sport.

Thumbs & Ammo

NATALIE Portman - Princess Padme in Star Wars, the Black Swan in Black Swan and so forth - made the front page of The Times this week for her views on women's roles in films. She's no fool - Harvard graduate in psychology, multilingual and so forth - and she's worth listening to.

"The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you're making a feminist story, the woman must kick ass and win. That's not feminist, that's macho," she said. Or as Professor Higgins sings in My Fair Lady: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?"

Which brings us to sport, these being the sports pages. Sport is male-dominated, the prevailing trend more macho than feminist. So does Portman's Complaint stand up as a sporting as well as a filmic truth? Does sport celebrate only the Lara Crofts, the macho types who kick ass and win? Does sport celebrate successful women for being like successful men?

Most sports on the calendar were invented by men to be played by men. In the main, the trend has been for women to take up a ready-made men's game and play it as best they could. Very few sports were invented for women. Netball is one example. Lacrosse was adapted for women. Softball was invented as a form of baseball for small and indoor spaces; it was a women-only Olympic sport from 1996 to 2008.

The Olympics has two women-only sports (technically they're classified as disciplines within a sport) these being synchronised swimming and rhythmic gymnastics. Not macho: a lot of make-up involved here.

In artistic gymnastics, as the main discipline in the sport is confusingly called, two of the four women's apparatus are specifically female: the A-bars and the beam. Both were invented to highlight female skills. Massive upper-body strength is not a requirement: neatness, accuracy and courage in the A-bars, and obviously, balance on the beam.

The beam is a particularly feminine or feminist event: men are incapable of doing what the top females do. It's not about physical size: Svetlana Khorkina, a giant of 162cm, regularly performed somersaults on the beam. No man can do that. If track and field had been invented by women, perhaps there'd be a 1500m allcomers beam race. Women would beat the men every time.

In 1874, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield applied for a patent for a game called sphairistike: an ideal garden recreation involving male and/or female players. Someone suggested that a better name would be lawn tennis. It became the most important sport in the history of feminism.

Start with the breakaway from the men's game under Billie Jean King in 1973, go on to King's victory in the infamous Battle of the Sexes against the preposterous Bobby Riggs, Martina Navratilova's frankness about her homosexuality, the transformation of the game under the Williams sisters, the question of equal prize-money - which is still considered by some people a legitimate area of debate - and you find a brief history of the women's movement in the one sport.

But does Portman's Complaint stand up here? Do we admire the victors for being pseudo-men? I'm not sure that we do. If a fear of showing your vulnerabilities is an essential mart of machismo, then Navratilova, the greatest of them all, is not macho. Tennis is also full of have-your-cake-and-eat-it feminists who trade on their looks as well as their athleticism. Let's make no judgments here, merely say that tennis is not about a single type of woman.

Track and field is much the same. These are the two sports that regularly get women on to the sports pages of mainstream newspapers such as this one, but they are radically different in nature. Track and field is non-confron-tational, even in the men's events an essential element of traditional macho behaviour is at once ruled out. The 100m is not about confronting, it's about running away. Track and field is male and it's female, but it's not macho. Swimming is much the same, with the added point that the beautifully honed bodies of the contestants of both sexes are not presented sexually. It's a very pure sort of beauty and no contestant, not even the most successful males - Ian Thorpe, Michael Phelps - come over as kick-ass types.

Sport is much broader than you'd think from a quick skim of the papers during the football season. Equestrian sports demand more sympathy and understanding than self-assertiveness, and here women take on men in all the leading disciplines and win.

There is a strong female presence in sailing as well. Ellen MacArthur's record solo circumnavigation celebrated her sense of perfectionism, her constant drive to improve, and her ability to go without sleep for sustained periods: any male who has failed to observe this female skill is presumably childless. Her record was subsequently beaten by a man.

When women take on a man's sport, they tend to subvert it. Women don't play cricket like men, nor do they play like boys. There is less thunderous slogging, more placement and deflection. The debate about whether women could play men's county cricket is a distraction from the real issues. It's not about whether women can be as good as men, the point is that when women play it becomes a different game.

So when it was suggested to Serena Williams that she take on Andy Murray in some daft exhibition, she was realistic about her chances, which would be zero, even if she got the tramlines and Murray forfeited his second serve. There is no percentage in trying to prove that women's shoulders are as powerful as the shoulders of an equivalent man.

Which brings us to Nicola Adams, who won the flyweight boxing gold for Great Britain at London 2012. Tough, strong, brave, capable of dealing with pain and not averse to inflicting it - but would you call her macho? Would you call her 10 zillion-megawatt smile macho? It certainly wasn't prinking Kournikova winsome. It wasn't feminine in that I'll-be-what-men-want-me-to-be page 3 sense. But all the same, it was unmistakably female, one that celebrated a great achievement by a terrific woman who seized her moment with all she'd got.

In sport we do tend to celebrate women for being winners, but that's not necessarily macho. When we get it right, we are capable of celebrating women for being women. In sport we concentrate on the victors: but victory isn't necessarily a macho trait, nor is it invariably the reward for macho behaviour. Lara Croft is a male fantasy: an kick-ass youth attempting to smuggle a pair of policemen's helmets through customs. Real women - real sportswomen - have rather more depth and meaning.

Moral: Hollywood is an unreal fantasy. Sport is a real fantasy.