Winter Olympics

"Just imagine if you could record this, travel back in time and show it to the 1896 Olympic Committee," said the Long Suffering Husband, while we were watching the snowboarding.
I agreed that they would be astounded.
"And then you told them that they were women. Do you think it would blow the space-time continuum?"

It's an interesting question.  Personally, I don't think they would have believed that they were women.  It's one of the things I have really liked about the Winter Olympics, that even though the men and women still compete separately, it is often difficult to tell which sex you are watching, as when they are spinning 100ft above a mountain in their full snow suits, men and women look pretty similar.  It turns out that we are the same species after all.

Can you tell which are women and which are men?

I know that there are still inequalities; there is better funding for men's sport, more television coverage outside the Olympic times and probably many others that I haven't even considered but at last sport is beginning to look a lot more equal.  There are also as many women presenters as there are men, who know their stuff rather than being eye-candy.

Then, in the midst of this, Helen Grant, Conservative MP for Maidstone and The Weald and Sports Minister, spoilt it all by getting quoted in the Telegraph saying, “[Women] don’t have to feel unfeminine. There are some wonderful sports which you can do and perform to a very high level and I think those participating look absolutely radiant and very feminine such as ballet, gymnastics, cheerleading and even roller-skating.”

I could be wrong but I very much doubt that the women competing in the Olympics feel any less female than I do.  Women who participate in sports that are considered to be unfeminine are not less likely to have boobs and a womb.  The very idea might even put women off trying different sports.  On BBC breakfast there was a female rugby player/coach discussing this issue and she couldn't have looked and sounded more traditionally feminine if she tried.

Ms Grant was talking about the problem that teenage girls drop out of sport and was saying that they had to be given more choice about what they participate in.  I'm all for that.  But shouldn't all teenagers be given more choice about what they participate in?  There seems to be an unwritten suggestion that male teenagers are all loving the football they are forced to do at school and I know several who aren't.
There are teenagers who drop out of sport of both sexes, many of whom decide to spend more time studying, to pass those exams that everyone tells them are so important and why shouldn't they?   Not everyone can be an Olympic Athlete.  Some women may be less healthy for doing no exercise during puberty but so will some men.  Some women will go back to exercise, as will some men and others won't but can we please stop pretending that men and women are different species that need to have different rules placed upon them.