Ilona Maher Is More than Her Lipstick
Can we shine a spotlight on her brain?
Ilona Maher — the elite rugby athlete you may recognize from the United States Olympic team or Dancing with the Stars — was already a viral sensation before the 2024 Paris Olympics sent her to new heights. I remember coming across her account on Instagram in 2023 and thinking, This is exactly the type of person I want to highlight in Women’s Barbell Club. She talked about athleticism and femininity and body image, making the point that beauty and brawn aren’t mutually exclusive.
This past summer, when her TikToks started being seen and shared by seemingly everyone, I was reminded how much I like her. What’s not to like about a smart, funny, athletic woman who’s unapologetic about showing up as herself?
Her message is the same one I’m trying to spread: size and strength are not at odds with femininity. You can embody all of them at once.
Where Ilona and I differ (aside from the obvious: she’s an Olympic-level athlete and viral sensation; I’m definitely not) is in the way she lays claim to the more stereotypical expressions of femininity. Ilona is incredibly vocal about the fact that you can be athletic and feminine; however, the way she speaks of femininity makes it seem like femininity and lipstick and looking glam are one and the same. She explains wearing lipstick on the rugby field as a way of demonstrating that she’s still feminine, while also being fiercely athletic.
Why does she need lipstick to send that message? The choice seems like an echo of early women’s sports leagues, like the All-American Girls Baseball League which required athletes to wear skirts and makeup and keep their hair long to avoid the “mannish taint” of the sport.1
Although I agree that you can be strong and big and beautiful all at once, I reject the idea that beauty requires extra work on the part of women. To be clean and groomed is one thing, to be primped and painted is another. I don’t think Ilona needs lipstick — or the makeup artists on Dancing with the Stars — to be feminine or beautiful. Makeup may accentuate the beauty that’s already there, but her beauty, and her innate femininity, is there to begin with. You don’t have to perform femininity to be feminine.
This summer, Ilona was invited to be part of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Her image appeared on the September issue of the digital magazine. I understand that it was a big deal for a woman of Ilona’s stature and build to be called for the opportunity and I don’t fault her for saying “yes”, but I also don’t think the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is a harbinger of progress in how society views women. The swimsuit issue is and always has been a way to put women’s bodies on display for the magazine’s overwhelmingly male audience to salivate over, while the magazine itself continues to mainly cover men’s sports.
The photos of Ilona only prove my point. From butt shots with the swimsuit bottom tugged up between her cheeks to the topless photo with her hands purposefully arranged to keep it from qualifying as adult content to the choice of swimsuits that barely cover her areolae, every photo is another example of objectification. It doesn’t really matter how much she enjoyed the photoshoot or how sexy it made her feel or how many words are written between the images. The result is a world-class athlete being reduced to a pinup for male consumption.
While it’s fine and normal to want to be sexually appealing to the opposite sex, there’s a thin, dotted line between being considered beautiful by broader culture and being rampantly objectified and even fetishized for your body type. One relevant portrayal of this is the Disney+ mini series She-Hulk. In it, Jennifer Walters, a petite and beautiful attorney, doesn’t get any male attention on dating apps until she creates a profile for herself as She-Hulk. But then all the matches and eventual dates are only interested in her because of her size and brawn when she’s hulking out. They’re ready to get in bed with She-Hulk, but have no interest in knowing her in any meaningful way. One spends the night, and when he wakes up and sees that she’s actually this cute, petite brunette, he high-tails it out of her apartment.
She-Hulk can (and should) be watched as a commentary on the state of dating and hookup culture in the 2020s — it also paints a picture of how embodying a physical ideal (in this case, big, muscular, and green) can actually make it harder to find connection and be treated like a full human being. That’s my fear for Ilona.
Partway through her time on Dancing with the Stars — another opportunity that came from her viral summer — rumors were spread that Ilona was going to be the next Bachelorette. It seemed only natural, right? Olympics to Sports Illustrated to Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) to dating 30 men on television. The follow-up interviews all but shut the possibility down:
“You think my man’s on The Bachelorette?” Ilona asked, skeptical.
Those candid moments, with her dance partner Alan Bersten at her side, the two of them so natural and normal together, showed a grounded Ilona. She was loving life on DWTS, but The Bachelorette? That seemed like a stretch.
I’m with Alan when he starts describing the standards he’d want a potential boyfriend to meet. Ilona deserves to be with someone who appreciates every part of her: beast, beauty, and brains. And she shouldn’t shortchange herself in any of those areas.
It’s significant that Ilona’s two main side quests in 2024 — Sports Illustrated and Dancing with the Stars — overwhelmingly focused on her beauty. As much as people have been talking and writing about the return of “heroin chic,” we are not in the same place regarding women’s bodies as we were in the ’80s, ’90s, or early 2000s, and despite what the internet trolls may tell you, there is broad recognition of the beauty of women larger than your average model.
At the same time, image is still an end-all, be-all, and it’s easier for purveyors of culture to appreciate a female athlete’s physical appearance than to engage in a meaningful on-the-record conversation that gives her smarts time in the limelight.
Here’s the thing: Ilona isn’t just an athlete who happens to wear lipstick and make funny TikToks. She’s smart. She has the mind of both a nurse (what she went to school for) and a businessperson. All of those TikToks are part of a strategy to make a living that she couldn’t make through rugby. While we get a peek at her smarts through some of her videos and the interviews she does outside of Hollywood entertainment, I’ve yet to read or listen to an interview with her that goes beyond the low-hanging fruit of what she’s gone viral for. (If you find one, please send it to me.)
Now that she’s back to playing rugby, I’m hoping we’ll see more recognition of her mind — the way she thinks about the game, teamwork, life, business, and so on.
Ilona is currently in the UK, playing Premiership Women’s Rugby with the hopes of a shot at the Rugby World Cup this August and September. After months of learning how to sway, follow Alan’s lead, and move smoothly across the dance floor, she’s returned to the world’s most physical sport, with all the soreness that entails.
Her joining the Bristol Bears has already brought new attention to the sport. The team moved its January 5 game to a bigger stadium because of booming interest in watching Ilona’s league debut. 9,420 fans turned out2, more than double the team’s previous attendance record. In the interviews I’ve watched, Ilona seems to be taking it all in stride, with a confident humility and realism about the world she lives in.
I know that Ilona has big dreams and wants women’s sports to get the attention they deserve. I know that she wants women to appreciate their bodies and find the sport that makes them feel at home, the way rugby does for her. I feel like if we met, we’d have plenty of things to talk about, we’d probably be friends.
But that’s probably what everyone who follows her thinks — her down-to-earth relatability is why she appeals to so many people. She’s the person that everyone feels like is their best friend. That’s why we love her. She’s an Olympic athlete and TikTok sensation, but she’s really just like us: finding joy in sport, wrestling with body image, stepping out of her comfort zone, trying to make the world a better place, and inevitably stumbling along the way. I hope 2025 brings her more opportunities to share her message with the world, and hopefully those opportunities will go beyond her beauty to highlight her brains.
Recommended Reading
‘I love being a superstar, but we can’t just have one’ — Maher’s mission (BBC)
What is Hyrox, the new challenge dominating the fitness world? (Stylist)
What’s coming next?
A guide to getting your first pullup
Page 140 of Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport by Susan K. Cahn: “Endeavoring to build on the popularity of women's softball while avoiding its mannish taint, Philip K. Wrigley and Arthur Meyerhoff founded the All-American Girls Baseball League (AAGBL). The AAGBL advocated a unique 'femininity principle,' deliberately contrasting players' amazing 'masculine' baseball skills with their 'feminine' attractiveness, an appeal accentuated by league-mandated pastel-skirted uniforms, makeup, long hair, and strict standards of off-field dress and behavior." Later, on page 148, Cahn writes that Wrigley “was personally repelled by the pants-wearing, tough-talking female softballer.” His co-owner coined the term “femininity principle”: "In accordance with the femininity principle, management instructed recruiters to weigh both ability and appearance in prospective players. In a section titled 'Femininity with Skill,' the league handbook reasoned that it was 'more dramatic to see a feminine-type girl throw, run and bat than to see a man or boy or masculine-type girl do the same things. The more feminine the appearance of the performer, the more dramatic the performance.'"
I understand the irony of linking a Sports Illustrated story about Maher's debut after calling the publication out for mainly covering men's sports, but my critique still stands. Just scroll the home page.
This is really interesting! Something I've wrestled with in thinking about her is that her highlighting her femininity is not as subversive as it's made out to be. Yes, we don't often see women with her build and athleticism positioned as "feminine," and I don't see any issue with her choice to represent that. But we already live in a culture that celebrates feminine women, and because women's rugby is a sport that frankly many people associate with masculine, often queer women, it doesn't surprise me that the person who broke through is a deliberate rejection of that. I don't blame her, it's a societal thing, but it's something I'd love to see discussed more.