Ilona Maher's authentic body positivity

Ilona Maher spent her childhood in Burlington, Vermont, playing softball, basketball, and field hockey. But it wasn’t until she discovered rugby at age 17 that something clicked. “The sport fit my body like a glove,” she recalled in a June interview.

Maher has long been made conscious of what “fits” her physique. The broad shoulders and muscular frame that helped her lead the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team to their first-ever Olympic medal Tuesday have never conformed to certain notions of femininity. She’s been called “masculine” all her life.

The beauty of athletics is that the only authority that matters is the stark, uncompromising authority of physical reality.

Maher’s fame as a breakout Olympic star and social media sensation has amplified the jeers along with the cheers. She handles it with good humor and aplomb. “I do have a BMI of 30. I am considered ‘overweight.’ But … I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not,” she responded to a hater on TikTok last month.

The day the games officially began, Maher posted another video, encouraging viewers to “see themselves” in the athletes they were about to watch: “I want you to take a look at of all the different kinds of body types on display … from the smallest gymnast to the tallest volleyball player … all body types are beautiful [and] can do amazing things.”

Maher’s message was widely praised, and it burnished her reputation as an icon of “body positivity.” But hours after she made her post, the Olympic opening ceremony confronted viewers with a very different celebration of unconventional body types: a sort of "Last Supper" tableau, with an obese woman at the center of a long table, flanked on either side by drag queens, all eventually upstaged by a bearded, nearly naked man painted blue.

This, too, is “body positivity,” we’re often told. Whereas Maher’s post defending her weight made a point about the uselessness of the body mass index metric (which doesn’t differentiate between fat and lean muscle), some people are genuinely overweight, and that’s OK, too. “Fat acceptance” means never having to admit an extra hundred pounds or two may be hazardous to your health.

Also beautiful are male bodies pretending to be female (and vice versa), no matter how unconvincing the impersonation. Both drag queens and “transwomen” present a grotesque parody of womanhood, but you’re only allowed to laugh at the former.

How do these two visions of body positivity relate? Unsurprisingly, conservatives and progressives are split on the matter. For the left, Maher’s measured and specific affirmation of “inclusivity” is laudable largely because it advances the liberal project of blurring distinctions and value judgments.

For the right, to accept Maher’s slightly unconventional femininity without comment or insult is but a slippery slope away from proclaiming “transwomen are women.”

Both sides miss the point. What makes this latest debate notable – and so very tiresome – is how out of touch it is with basic reality. What does this feud over a manufactured ideal of femininity have to do with actual women?

People arguing over representations of representations (and so on) and getting farther and farther from the original point is nothing new; it’s pretty much standard operating procedure for internet discussion. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a word for the place we often find ourselves when online: hyperreality.

Hyperreality is where you land when you become so immersed in the images, words, and stories we use to represent reality (an immersion that has never been easier) that you mistake them for the thing itself.

In his 1981 book “Simulacra and Simulation,” Baudrillard illustrates the process in four steps. These are: 1. the faithful copy, 2. the perversion of reality, 3. the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original, and 4. pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever.

Women’s bodies have been particularly susceptible to this treatment. In fact, body positivity originated as a reaction to the predigital dissemination of “unrealistic” depictions of female beauty in fashion magazines and TV advertisements, specifically the so-called “heroin chic” look of the early ‘90s, represented by waifish models like Kate Moss.

The movement started with good intentions. Young girls imbibing the monolithically skinny and boyish heroin-chic representation of womanhood (which, among other perversions, scrubbed the adult female body of natural indicators of fertility) were driven insane trying to reconcile what they saw in the mirror with what they saw in the media. The solution was to break the spell with images expressing the variety of real women’s bodies.

And it worked, for a while, communicating a benign “strong is beautiful” message not far from Maher’s. But then, in typical leftist fashion, the body positivity movement began to eat its own. What about those for whom being strong or athletic was an unrealistic beauty standard? Are you really suggesting that the morbidly obese are somehow “less than” physically fit women – and to change their bodies to be more like them? And what about female bodies that were born male?

Body positivity’s mission to reconnect images of womanhood to reality was hijacked by extremists who took it even farther afield. They presented a newer, more hideous ideal, arguably even more divorced from reality than the wan, expressionless China dolls in sleazy Calvin Klein photo shoots.

Those old images seduced with beauty and erotic mystery. Hulking middle-aged men in dresses and 400-pound bathing beauties have no such ability. And so they had to impose their ideal by fiat, legitimized by the authority of their victimhood.

The beauty of athletics is that the only authority that matters is the stark, uncompromising authority of physical reality. This is why the incursion of ambiguously-sexed athletes into women's sports -- as in the recent case of two Olympic boxers -- is so hotly contested. The intangible qualities that we admire in competitors – determination, courage, resilience – only have meaning when tested by gravity, distance, time, and force, as well as by the limitations set by the body God gave each. These bodies can be pushed and transformed, but they can never be escaped.

This is usually the point at which the writer would extol the virtues of putting down the phone and “touching grass.” And let’s hope the display of physical mastery on our screens will inspire us to do just that. But I think the disputants in this particular case would do well to take in more of Ilona Maher’s social media.

If they do, they’ll find a person who appreciates her atypical female body for what it can do on the rugby pitch. But they'll also find a person who embodies the more conventional attributes of femininity: girlishly flirting with guys, showing off adorable fits, unabashedly expressing emotion.

In short, they'll discover that Ilona Maher is intuitively and undeniably female while also being irreplaceably unique and irreducibly herself. In other words, she's a woman. The world is full of them.