Too muscular. Too short. Too stocky. Too young-looking.
Former gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson was called a lot of things by the media in her time as an athlete. Often, few of them had anything to do with her athleticism.
Her mother would tell her over and over: “Honey, look at your success. Look how happy you are when you are out there on the floor. Don’t let what someone else is saying affect you.” Now, Johnson wants to be that voice for the next generations of girls, advocating for a shift in how we talk about female athletes.
Johnson announced on Tuesday that she’s teaming up with Dove to launch the #MyBeautyMySay campaign, encouraging the media and the general public to focus on the athletic ability of women in sports, not their looks.
“Our world today is pushing beauty over athleticism for young girls.”
“I feel like our world today is pushing beauty over athleticism for young girls,” Johnson told Mashable. “I want to be an advocate to change that.”
The campaign launches Wednesday in Times Square in New York City, via a billboard that will broadcast actual sexist comments the media has made about female athletes, which Dove started collecting in June. As the comments appear over images of women playing sports, the athletes in the billboard will disappear.
The billboards, according to Dove, are meant to represent how these comments obscure a female athlete so much that we end up not truly seeing her or her achievements. Similar advertisements will appear in Los Angeles and Toronto before the end of the month.
“That turns into a large population, and something you can’t deny.”
Another key part of the campaign is encouraging Twitter users to take a stand against sexist language in the media industry. Both Johnson and Dove are encouraging Twitter users to visit the campaign site to tweet media outlets, using the hashtag #MyBeautyMySay and encouraging them to change offensive language in headlines and articles.
“You have a community standing together, one person at a time, and saying, ‘That’s not really right. You shouldn’t say that,'” Johnson said of the social media campaign. “Suddenly, that turns into a large population, and something you can’t deny.”
In an open letter to launch the campaign, Johnson called out language she’s recently seen the media use to describe female athletes. “Hot blonde,” “huge nipples” and “great bottom” are just a few examples the former gymnast described as “insulting,” “trivializing” and “belittling.”
And Johnson knows how hurtful these comments can be. The 24-year-old said she was the target of sexist comments starting at just 16 years old. Media outlets and spectators even criticized the size of her ears.
“I don’t care if people critique me. I want you to,” Johnson said. “But I want you to critique my performance. If you say my backflip wasn’t high enough, I can either [disagree] and say it was, or I can go home and work on it. If I do a backflip and you say, ‘Well, you just aren’t pretty enough,’ there’s nothing I can do with that. It’s a helpless feeling.”
Shawn Johnson performs a balance beam routine, winning a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Image: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
In the end, Johnson said, confidence in her athleticism — and ignoring hateful comments — led to her astounding success as a woman in sports. But even though she found strength in overcoming the hate, she doesn’t want young girls to experience the same criticism she had to endure.
When Johnson spoke to Mashable over the phone, she was in a room of energetic, screaming little girls. She was taking a break from teaching gymnastics to children. This campaign, she said, is special to her because it could mean a change for those enthusiastic young gymnasts.
“If we can be an advocate now and change it now, hopefully that means the next generation doesn’t have to go through it in such a negative way,” she said.
“They can truly join sports for the athleticism side of it and the hard work side, not worry that they don’t look the part.”
