Media, marketing, and mental health for women athletes

My dissertation is focused on the individual athlete experience, within the context of sport culture. They are inseparable. Therefore, when discussing the individual, it becomes important to consider the context they exist and perform.

Earlier this year, I was asked to present on “Media, Marketing, and Mental Health,” with a focus on women athletes experiences. As I continue to write my dissertation, one of the most notable difference between men athletes and women athletes is their body-related experiences. So, let’s talk about it.

Women athletes exist in a man’s world. Sport was built for men, by men, where women where intentionally “policied” out of opportunities to take part. For instance, despite drawing more impressive crows than men, the Canada Football (Soccer) Association chose to prohibit women’s soccer in 1922. While women athletes kept baseball alive during WW2, they were later banned from signing Major League Baseball contracts in 1952. In 1973, Billie Jean King competed in a historical tennis match against Bobby Riggs to fight for equal pay in professional tennis. (She continues to be a baddie in sport, thank her if you follow the PWHL!). These policies and inequities are fueled by the notion that women are not as strong and capable as men, and that women need to be treated as if physically fragile. Being sport is about competition, domination, and winning (inherently masculine values), women are not welcome.

Being women exist in a man’s world, they have to contend with (self-)objectification. To define objectification, it means that one’s value is tied to their appearance. Women are taught that they are to be looked at, evaluated, and judged (De Souza et al., 2025). When a woman applies this kind of belief system to herself, it is termed “self-”objectification; she believes her value is in her appearance and that she will be judged for how she looks. Objectification often leads to body surveillance (i.e., monitoring your body’s appearance) and body shame (i.e., feeling like a bad person for not looking a certain way).

Objectification often connects with diet culture, which is the belief that thinness is a reflection of health, social status, and moral value. Basically, the more thin one is, the more healthy, affluent, and moral they must be (Jovanovski & Jaeger, 2022; Plant, 2024). The belief that “thin is best” is perpetuated in the media and marketing for capitalism: Barbie dolls, America’s Next Top Model, Cosmopolitan Magazines. Women who buy-into diet culture beliefs experiences poorer moment-to-moment body image satisfaction (aka. they are less satisfied with how their body looks).

Basically, we are taught that our appearance is the most valuable thing about us, and a valuable appearance is thin.

As women, this is wild. Our biology, and how our bodies naturally change as we mature, requires us to lay down body fat so our hormones can function properly.

For athletes, there is added complexity by the fact that women athletes need muscle to perform well in their sport.

So, while women’s bodies naturally move away from the thin ideal and women athletes feeling pressure to “look like an athlete”, there is a perfect storm for body dissatisfaction to show up for women athletes.

Body dissatisfaction is a negative view of one’s own body, which is driven by a comparison to an unrealistic ideal, particularly a thin ideal. The bigger differences between where someone thinks they are at and where their ideal is, the greater body dissatisfaction they will experiences. And being a woman athletes means your body may not align with that thin ideal (Heider et al., 2018; Mosewich et al. 2009; Rafique & Khan, 2024; Turk et al., 2021).

When one gets an intense pre-occupation with their body imperfections, that’s what is termed “body dysmorphia”. It is characterized by worry or emotional distress about perceived flaws, and is related to more frequent body comparisons and body checking (e.g., measuring, weighing).

So, to ease the worry and fears, women may try to control their appearance through diet and exercise. That can appear as disordered eating, which is a range of irregular eating behaviours that are not necessarily diagnosable. This is particularly true for athletes who are in a “thin” sport (e.g., long-distance running), an evaluation-based sport (e.g., dance, skating), or in a weight-class sport (e.g., wrestling; De Souza et al., 2025).

Athletes who show disordered eating behaviours are also more likely to experience “relative energy deficiency” (i.e., an insufficient energy intake that can lead to fatigue, mood changes, hormone disruption, and muscle breakdown in the short-term, and impaired performance and increase risk of injury long-term; Cabre et al., 2022).

If you want to do different for yourself, the athletes' you coach, your daughter, or other women in your life, I also want to offer you some tips.

#1 Mindful media consumption: notice how people’s content makes you feel about your body, and work to follow women (athletes) who do not buy-in to self-objectification and diet-culture belief systems. I recommend Ilona Maher, Dr. Alyssa Olenick, Mik Zazon, Sarah Puhto, Jameela Jamil, freckcurls

#2 Work towards body acceptance and appreciation: you do not have to LoVe everything about your body’s appearance to have a base level of respect for your body Instead, practice shifting from appearance to what your body does for you on a daily basis and into what makes you a fabulous human being. Your body does so much for you. It breathes, digests food, and keeps you alive. It has probably seen some sh*t. But it is still here! That deserves appreciation. And YOU! You are a wonderful, fabulous, beautiful human being who has spent way too much energy trying to control how she looks. Practice seeing your character as what makes you beautiful, rather than focusing on appearance.

#3 Call in other women athletes to change body conversations: reduce language like “junk food” and “clean eating”, which perpetuates the belief that food as moral value. Set boundaries around body- and food-related conversations. Maybe that means asking not to comment on your body or food consumption (Linder & Daniels, 2017).