What is "Amazon feminism"?

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia has an article on Amazon feminism. It starts out so:

Amazon feminism is dedicated to the image of the female hero in fiction and in fact, as it is expressed in art and literature in the physiques and feats of female athletes, martial artists, and other powerfully built women, and in gender-related and sexual orientations.

Later it says:

Amazon feminism is concerned about physical equality and is opposed to gender role stereotypes and discrimination against women based on assumptions that women are supposed to be, look or behave as if they are passive, weak, and physically helpless.

(Accessed June 28, 2007; see also: Amazon Connection)

I think that explains it well enough. And it makes perfect sense, too. Indeed, gender is a much more nebulous concept than many people realize, and feminine comprises a spectrum, not a lone, distorted ideal.

Are there differences between men and women? You bet. But society often works to exaggerate and harden those differences. So what is, at best, a statistic in nature (the average woman not being as strong as the average man) gets perverted into a misguided absolute (physically powerful women are considered aberrant and frowned upon).

The pressure on women to conform to this artificial standard has been immense, and it has been going on for a long, long time now. We really don't know the extent to which women have been and still are held back by it, but no doubt it's considerable.

However, now with the relaxing—though there is still a ways to go—of superficial, outdated social mores and standards in liberal societies over the last thirty years, we're starting to see what women can accomplish in the athletic arena and just how physically powerful they can be. In virtually every sport, including strength and combat sports, women are competing and performing at higher levels and in greater numbers every year, already surpassing what could only have been imagined thirty years ago.

That's not to say that women haven't demonstrated their athletic prowess in the past; it's just been downplayed or ignored altogether.

For example, there were female athletes in ancient Greece, and Spartan women in particular were prized for their athleticism and strong physiques. We know from ancient sources that freeborn women in Sparta were expected to exercise just as strenuously as the men, and they competed often in athletic events and tests of strength (Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 14.1-4; Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 1.3-4).

And even at a time when it would seem social mores were solidly against them, strongwomen like Vulcana thrived, wowing audiences and performing feats of strength that were astounding at the time (and are still worth noting today).

So yes, the female athlete is as natural as the male, and just as worthy of our respect—perhaps even more so. That is Amazon feminism in a nutshell, and what this blog is here to call attention to.

Welcome to the Athletic Women Blog!