Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) welcomed Olympic rugby medalist Ilona Maher this season, breaking the standard mold for women’s body types.
Partnered with Alan Bersten, a professional dancer, the pair claimed second place for the 2024 season, all while Maher promoted healthy femininity and strength.
Maher’s confidence in her own femininity comes at a time when popular culture has been immersed in a trend of isolating women’s body types and mannerisms as a means to diagnose their sexuality.
In a world of increasing genders and sexual orientations, Maher has been a standout to many for identifying as a heterosexual woman when it has become increasingly more normal for someone of her height and strength to exhibit queer mannerisms.
Her countercultural approach that blends strength with glamour has been marketed before but never presented with the trailblazing qualities of humor and likeability that she exhibits.
It has been unfortunate that because of certain situations where opposite genders were allowed to compete in sports at different division levels, there would be a suspicion that women like Maher are actually a male assigned at birth, Greg Wolfe, an instructor of kinesiology and sport management, said.
“People may say, ‘Well, it's rare for a female to have that height and build,’” Wolfe said. “Yeah, rare. But (if) you look through the Olympics over the years, you're gonna find a few."
Maher posted a video on social media at the start of the 2024 Olympics, telling women that body types of all shapes and sizes matter and that it is their diversity that makes them functional for so many different occupations and sports.
The Taylor women’s rugby team has sometimes encountered players on opposing teams who look quite masculine, Caroline Draper, a senior illustration major and team captain, said. While the league has put rules in place to prevent opposite genders from participating in a game, she said they have had difficulty enforcing them.
This poses a problem for more than that small group of people who don’t identify as their original gender, she said.
“I think it's really easy now, just in our culture or out in public, for people to assume, then, if you look different, that you probably identify differently,” Draper said.
The visceral quality of the game is an aspect that draws a certain type of woman—someone who is willing to go against the normal cultural standard, Nicholas Kerton-Johnson, the Loy Chair of Political Science, associate professor of international relations and coach of the women’s rugby club team, said.
“You're dealing with women who are willing to actually say there's something about a woman or being a woman (that) doesn't preclude the ability to be powerful, to be strong, and even to be aggressive,” he said.
Maher has been on a journey filled with confidence that she exhibited long before going viral. Her willingness to be her own true and authentic self despite comments that described her as “masculine” illustrates an often-mislabeled aspect of women.
That aspect is strength.
Body dysmorphia has been carried out in different ways over the years—whether that is working out certain muscles in an unbalanced way or starving oneself, Wolfe said. The common denominator is an obsession with having a physical build that is not your natural one.
It is difficult to cut through the web of lies that has existed for so long in the beauty and fashion industry, because for many women, they represent a beautiful ideal: something that may not be able to be achieved but will always be the best choice.
Maher has presented a new option by leading the way and showing women that they should only conform to one standard, and that is being the strongest and most capable version of themselves.
