Lingerie Company Hired Olympic Rugby Players to Model Their Threads

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Martina Navratilova has led a backlash against a “regressive” campaign featuring Team GB’s Olympic rugby players in lingerie.

Sharron Davies, the former swimmer, and Mara Yamauchi, the former British distance runner, also expressed dismay at a photoshoot purporting to change perceptions that “strong female form is not ‘feminine’”.

Ellie Boatman, Jasmine Joyce and Celia Quansah … were signed up by lingerie company Bluebella’s #StrongIsBeautiful campaign. …

Navratilova, who won 18 major singles tennis titles, and other leading campaigners for women’s sport unimpressed. Navratilova said the campaign “feels really regressive and sexist to me”. …

Davies and Yamauchi said the campaign will not help tackle this issue. Davies wrote on X: “What the actual ---- this is an utterly shameful campaign, whose braindead idea was this? Oh yeah let’s get professional female sports women in porn underwear! Extremely regressive… stereotypes yet again.”

Yamauchi said that the campaign is “exploitative, demeaning, sexist, regressive rubbish”. “Of course the intended audience is men,” she added. “Portraying women as sex objects will not encourage teenage girls into sport.”

The #StrongIsBeautiful campaign has been running for the past eight years and has previously included female athletes for the Rio and Tokyo Olympics.

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