But it’s one whose time has come. Increasing wealth and leisure, a slow shift in social mores and exposure to international role models mean that Asian women are flocking to gyms and playing fields around the region. Southeast Asian career women are destressing on weekends playing ultimate Frisbee. Japanese moms are catching waves on their surfboards. Women are hitting Stairmasters from Mumbai to Bangkok. With the fresh burst of energy has come a new beauty aesthetic. For Asian women athletes, tans, sweat and bulging muscles are no longer feminine taboos.
Far harder to change are traditional attitudes about women as wives and mothers. Professional sportswomen and athletic moms remain rare. But their daughters enjoy vastly better prospects. “It’s all so different from when I was a girl,” says 43-year-old Delhi soccer mom Meenu Nageshwaran. “The attitude that said ‘boys could do this and girls couldn’t’ has gone.”
Rising prosperity has helped kill it off. Improved incomes mean that hobbies have blossomed in tiger economies like Hong Kong and Singapore. Just as Westerners did a generation ago, the professional classes have discovered sports for fun and health. As more Asian women have moved into the workplace, they’ve gained the leisure and means to begin working out. Richer governments have even been providing women’s athletics with cash and infrastructure. Hong Kong has appointed a commissioner of women’s sports.
The sports boom that began with the middle classes has started trickling down to poorer ones. In India, girls from fishing villages near Chennai have won swimming medals. In a working-class district of Calcutta, Muslim, Hindu and Christian girls pull on boxing gloves for thrice-weekly spars at the Kidderpore School of Physical Education. Suman Kumari’s tram-conductor father originally hesitated before letting her attend. At first, he would have preferred that his 12-year-old take embroidery lessons, but now figures boxing might even be a route to fame and wealth.
Satellite TV and Western ads, movies and role models urge the budding athletes on; 24-hour sports channels expose Asian girls to a dazzling range of games. B. J. Mapua, a 26-year-old student from the Philippines, decided to become a professional body-builder after watching international competitions on television. She’s now one of about a dozen Filipinas on the competitive body-building circuit, and dreams of one day running her own hard-body gym. “I want to be really ripped,” she says. “Just cut.” Her boyfriend has begun working out to keep up with her.
Last year’s movie “Bend It Like Beckham,” a soccer bildungsroman with a British-Asian heroine, hit screens in India to electrifying effect. In Delhi last spring, a girl’s soccer program with 60 regulars nearly trebled its membership in a matter of months. Plans for a girls league were pushed up a year, and the Bend It With Benetton League, sponsored by the Italian clothesmaker, was born. On a monsoon-drenched training field outside Delhi, 12-year-old girls in cleats and shinguards dribble with the boys before breaking off for their own five-a-side games. “I think this is wonderful training for [the girls] as people,” says Arun Dang, father of player Manavi. “It gives them confidence. When they play with boys, it teaches them to use their brains to outwit brawn.”
Not everyone is as enthusiastic. Nel Belgado, a former member of the Philippines national fencing team, recalls long talks with her mother, who worried that sports meant late-night practice, time away from the family and solo commuting. And the old standards of feminine beauty linger among traditionalists. Mothers still fret that their daughters will develop big muscles, or that they may be scarred by rough play, making them tough to marry off. Some Asian sportswomen paint their faces with zinc oxide to protect against dreaded tans. Others wear layers of clothes to guard against bruises.
Institutions will take as long to change as attitudes. Though half the physical-education majors at the University of the Philippines are women, only varsity table tennis has a woman coach, and there are no professional women’s leagues for after graduation. But on Asian playing fields, there are many young girls eager to change all that.
title: “Girl Power” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-31” author: “James Marbut”
Home-schooling from 8 a.m. to noon. Voice lessons from 1 to 2. Recording sessions from 3 to 6. And “no time for boys” since things went sour with pint-size pop star Aaron Carter. That’s a light week for the tween icon, whose show is now one of the highest rated on basic cable. Lizzie’s fizzy middle-school misadventures, like buying a bra and scoring a first kiss, are always sweet, never syrupy–making the show palatable for parents and even twentysomethings. Duff, who’s got a giddy charm and unexpected vulnerability in person, has established herself as the best actress of her generation, easily outclassing the Olsen twins and Nickelodeon’s Amanda Bynes.
Now, with just a dozen “Lizzie” episodes left, Duff’s headed to the big screen. Her film debut, as the damsel in distress opposite Frankie Muniz in “Agent Cody Banks,” opens this week. It’s just a supporting role in the cute “XXX” knockoff, but she’s awfully convincing as the prettiest girl in high school. (Typecast much?) In May, Duff will fall for a sleazy Italian rocker in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” And even as an untested leading lady, she’ll take home a whopping $2 million for a modern-day “Cinderella Story,” which her mother, Susan, will coproduce. The ink’s barely dry on that contract, but at “George Lopez,” Mom’s back on her mobile phone: “You tell them we’ve got the movie to take Hilary to the next level. If they don’t want it, the other studios will be all over it like a duck on a June bug.”
So, obviously, the Duffs are from Texas. A makeup artist turned rancher, Susan insists she “never wanted to be a stage mom.” (Older daughter Haylie is also an aspiring actress and singer.) But, five years ago, when the kids begged to be performers, she loaded them all into the family Acura–along with a hermit crab, a gerbil, two goldfish and a rabbit–and drove the 20 hours from Austin to L.A. Her husband, Bob, stayed behind to run a string of 53 convenience stores, but promised to fly in every three weeks. After winning the lead in “Casper Meets Wendy,” Hilary landed at the Disney Channel. “When we were casting ‘Lizzie McGuire’ we called her in four times,” says Rich Ross, president of the channel’s entertainment division. “She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She just wore such great outfits, and we wanted to see what she’d come in with next.”
TV executives aren’t always so supportive of Hilary’s fashion sense. One Monday afternoon, a rooftop video shoot for Duff’s new single, “Why Not,” gets delayed while the Disney folks e-mail each other pictures of her Jean-Paul Gaultier shirt, trying to decide if it’s inappropriate. Never mind that it’s the kind of blouse Britney would wear to church–long-sleeved, with small holes that suggest more than they reveal. “It’s not like my boobs are exposed or anything,” she says. “This is what I’m comfortable in.” They finally reach a compromise: the holes cannot reveal her actual bellybutton, just the skin around it. That’s how you come of age in Hollywood, painstakingly negotiating your sexuality with an army of handlers. “It really is a strange life, always surrounded by men who don’t want to hang around with a 15-year-old girl,” her mother says. “The ones who do want to hang around, I have to be really careful with.”
Under Disney’s–and Mom’s–protective gaze, Hilary is now focused on life after Lizzie. “Since I’m getting older, it’s hard to find parts that are wholesome,” she says. “I know I can handle dramatic roles, but I don’t think I should have to play a young mother on crack to prove it.” While she waits for a grown-up role, Hilary tries to find time for the teenage things–school dances, lunch with her sister, bouncing on a trampoline (a favorite pastime that’ll do nothing to dissuade the older men). “Sometimes I just wish I had a day off,” she says wistfully. “I really need to clean my room.”
Yes, seven months from a driver’s license and counting the days–TV’s hottest tween star is sweet and well-adjusted. Go ahead, hang that on your idea tree.
