Cover Sofie Fella, whose talk at TEDxTinHau Women will cover taking up space, body image, sports and more (Photo: courtesy of Sofie Fella)
Sofie Fella, whose talk at TEDxTinHau Women will cover taking up space, body image, sports and more (Photo: courtesy of Sofie Fella)
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In a conversation ahead of her TEDxTinHau Women talk, athlete Sofie Fella unpacks why sexualising women’s bodies under the banner of “sport” hurts female athletes—and why strength is about performance, not aesthetics
To rugby player Sofie Fella, a recent advert came as a slap in the face. The campaign for an American sports betting app featured the actor Sydney Sweeney breathily chanting “sports, sports, sports, sports”, in between clips of her holding American footballs against her bare chest, posing on a pool table, and swinging a golf club—all while completely nude, or clad in underwear branded with the app’s name.
“We’ve sacrificed so much to play sports, to grow sports, to crowdfund for our sports, to teach young girls that sport is amazing for your body,” says Fella, a Chinese-German rugby player, entrepreneur and Harvard graduate.
In contrast, the controversial campaign used a woman’s body as mere decoration for sports equipment, which according to Fella would “naturally trigger a lot of female athletes because we’ve spent our whole lives trying to create that separation from sex and what our bodies look like, and performing for males rather than performing for ourselves.”
Was the fundamental issue that Sweeney, an actor renowned for her figure, posed nude for the camera? Fella draws a distinction between that campaign and coverage such as ESPN’s Body Issue, where athletes including Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe posed nude. “The message there is: look at how powerful and strong my body is for what it can do,” she says. “I’m an athlete, and we are celebrating our bodies for what they can do.”
Fella is careful not to argue that women should police one another’s choices. “You shouldn’t feel like you can’t put make-up on or you can’t wear a bikini and post bikini photos,” she says. “It’s your body. You can do what you want with it.” Her objection is that visibility carries responsibility. “We do need to think about the influence that we have on young girls, especially if you are someone with more of an influence,” she says.
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From aspiring towards smallness to reclaiming ‘too big’
As someone with a platform of her own, this sense of responsibility to shape young women’s aspirations runs through the talk Fella is set to give at TEDxTinHau Women in October. Titled “Dare to Be Big”, her speech is themed around the Chinese character for “big”, pronounced “da” in Mandarin. Fella, who grew up in Shanghai, says she was frequently shamed for being too big—or “tai da la”—for her muscular frame. She’s aimed to reclaim this language around size through a clothing line called the Da Collection, which features the character for “da” on T-shirts and hoodies.
Fella traces the shame around being big back to her childhood years as a dancer, before she switched to rugby as a teenager. At the ballet studio she attended, students frequently weighed themselves in front of one another; losing weight became a silent competition.
“I remember wanting to be as small as possible,” she says. At one point, she photoshopped a photograph of herself to make her body appear thinner—not to post anywhere on social media, she says, but to show herself what she could look like.
Looking back at the image now, she calls the proportions unhealthy. “It’s not whether I’m big or small,” she says. “It’s that in my head, growing up, I thought I was way too big all the time.”
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Above Fella competing (Photo: courtesy of Sofie Fella)
Fella competing (Photo: courtesy of Sofie Fella)
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Navigating performance over aesthetics
In the pursuit of confidence that stems from internal, rather than external, achievements, one important concept is: what actually is beauty?
“I feel super beautiful on the rugby field because I’ve escaped from thinking about what my body looks like all the time,” Fella says. “It’s a feeling inside of you, of confidence, energy, feeling like you can do anything in life, and feeling strong.”
She applies a sense of scepticism to marketing built around female strength. “There are brands out there promoting this ‘strength is beautiful, strength is sexy’ message,” she says, without naming specific companies. Her issue is that this approach promotes certain expectations around image. “It’s still about the aesthetic of strength,” she says. “Strength is beautiful not because having muscles is now the new skinny—it’s because strength feels amazing.”
The rugby player acknowledges that the topic of commenting on women’s appearances is “tricky, icky” terrain. She notes that she often gets her own eyelashes done, while her teammates might also wear make-up before matches. “If it makes them feel more confident going on the field, that’s great,” she says, describing a “look good, feel good, play good” mentality among some athletes.
“But it’s important to take a step back and ask, where does this come from?” she says, pointing to the beauty industry at large. “This whole economy is fuelled by women being insecure. [Companies] need women to be insecure about the way that they look, so that they go spend money on these things.”
Fella acknowledges that her own initiatives are not immune to commercial interests. Through her community fitness platform Girls Lift Girls, Fella hosts female fitness events—but there is pressure to make events look polished in order to draw participants. “If the event doesn’t look [aesthetically pleasing], or well put together, then it feels like we can’t reach the women we actually want to influence,” she says.
“What we actually care about is how you feel after you’ve done this sweaty workout, and the connections that you make with each other.” One method she uses is handwritten Post-it notes placed around event spaces with prompts such as “How do you feel in your body today?”—an attempt to prompt more open conversation between strangers.
Teaching the art of taking up space
Fella has also taken on talks at secondary schools around Hong Kong. When asked what advice she would give a 14-year-old struggling with body image, she suggests starting with a simple question: when do you feel most confident?
In her experience, the answers she hears rarely involve a specific outfit or make-up look; more often they involve time with loved ones or achieving something unexpected. “Their answers don’t become about external things,” she says.
Through her work, Fella aims to encourage women—particularly younger teenagers—to reclaim a sense of self-assurance. “It’s having confidence in who you are, knowing what you care about, what you value, what your non-negotiables are,” she says. “[It’s] when you look at your life and you’re like, ‘Wow, I can do anything.’”
Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
