From Gymnastics Dreams To Cancer Realities: Navigating The Male Gaze And Medical Gaze

Navigating adolescence can be a tumultuous journey, especially for young girls caught between the pressure to perform and the scrutiny of those around them. For Ellie Henkus, gymnastics was a source of escape and personal achievement, yet it also became the stage where she first encountered the harsh realities of the male gaze. What was once an innocent pursuit of flexibility and skill soon collided with unwanted attention, revealing how young girls’ bodies are often seen through the eyes of others before they can even fully understand themselves.

This is Ellie’s personal story of growing up in a world that constantly measures, judges, and assigns value based on appearance – whether through the admiration of peers, the objectification by strangers, or the impersonal, clinical assessments of the medical world.

Trigger Warning: This article discusses themes of sexual harassment, body image and cancer treatment.

To begin with, here is a little bit about myself. I am 24 years old and originally from Devon. I graduated in June 2023 from King’s College London with a BA in Liberal Arts, majoring in Comparative Literature. Since leaving university, I have been working as a Special Educational Needs (SEN) teacher at a secondary school. Currently, I am based in Rio de Janeiro, where I work as an English teacher for adults and children. Rio is a place that brings me great happiness, and I can see myself living here long-term.

At 17, I became disabled due to surgery following cancer treatment. I had a hemipelvectomy, which left me with a limp and required the use of a walking stick. Navigating life as a disabled person has not been easy. Only recently have I started to voice my struggles and openly communicate my needs to those around me. Becoming disabled has been a challenging process, both mentally and physically, but I am now in a place where I feel a sense of acceptance.

From gymnastics to validation: navigating adolescence and the male gaze

The 2011 Acrobatic British Championships, tutorials on how to do a back handspring, and videos on 10 ways to increase flexibility were plastered all over my YouTube homepage. I would spend hours watching them because, back then, gymnastics was the only thing I cared about.

I even joined an acrobatic gymnastics club that required me to attend 12 hours of weekly training and compete in regional competitions. My secondary school held a lunchtime gymnastics club every Friday. Here, I could prove I was the best gymnast in year 7. I decided the scorpion would be the best trick for this. The move consists of balancing on one leg whilst bringing the other behind you to make a perfect split.

As I performed the move to an audience of less flexible Year 7s, a group of older boys entered the school hall. However, unlike the on-lookers of tween girls, these boys weren’t impressed by my pointed toes or bendy back. Instead, they were more fascinated with how my bum looked in tight-fitting shorts.

As a young girl utterly obsessed with gymnastics, I wondered how anyone could find a bum more interesting than a skill that showcased flexibility and balance. The incident helped me understand which body parts men were interested in and which sports they weren’t.

Teachers always say Year 9 is the year children change. When they go from sweet kids to off-the-rails teenagers, I suppose this was true for me as well since it was the year I developed an interest in older guys. My friends and I became enamoured with a group of boys two years above us. They styled their hair into perfect, ice-gem-like quiffs and skated around our small countryside town in skinny jeans.

I popped up saying “hey” to one of the boys on Facebook, followed by, oops, sorry, wrong person, to avoid looking keen. My pretend mishap led to hours of conversing online, securing an invitation to smoke a spliff in his garage after school.

The next day, I lied to my mum, saying I was at my friend’s house and then snuck off to his. When I arrived, his friend was there. We all hung out in his bedroom; the friend stayed for a while and then left, locking the door on his way out. As soon as we were alone, the boy grabbed my face and started kissing me. His hands slid under my school shirt, removing it and undoing my M&S bra whilst he remained fully clothed. It was the first time anyone had seen my body bare in that way. He took a picture of us in bed together, with me topless, and sent it as a group Snapchat to other boys in his year.

At 6pm, I walked home for dinner, feeling a mixture of shame and excitement. Part of me was extremely validated getting with someone I had been obsessed with for months. Yet another part felt violated that people would see half-naked photos of me in bed with an older boy.

Although, at first, these encounters made me feel uncomfortable, I soon became used to them. In fact, I enjoyed them. Not because, deep down, they made me feel good, but as a young woman, being attractive is social currency. It meant I was popular at school; I didn’t have to worry about not having friends or a boy not liking me back.

By the time I was 16, I had received invitations to every social event. I would kiss men in their 20s at music festivals, and Snapchat with at least three boys simultaneously. This was fun. It made me feel good. And the more it made me feel good, the more dependent I became on the drool of boys.

From desire to diagnosis: the transformation of identity through the male and medical gazes

The male gaze was like a drug, and when I was diagnosed with cancer at 17, I quit cold turkey and lost all sense of who I was. Cancer meant I was no longer a desirable young woman, instead patient. I would spend most of the next year in the hospital being examined by medical professionals. The male gaze turned into the medical gaze.

I surrendered myself completely to the NHS. Drunk boys grabbing me non-consensually at a house party was replaced by pre-operative enemas administered by a middle-aged nurse. Stares from older men on the side of the street transformed into a group of doctors surrounding my bed, examining my bare pelvis to inspect the tumour. Low-cut tops and short skirts changed into hospital gowns that exposed my bare arse. Being touched and inspected in any way necessary ensured my survival. Saying “no” to invasive procedures was not an option.

A “no” meant death, and I was too young to die. When a ‘no’ has no power, saying ‘yes’ is meaningless. In this sense, being a patient was like being a teenage girl: consent doesn’t exist.

With cancer, you have no choice but to look like a patient. My hair fell out, my thick eyebrows and eyelashes disappeared from my face, and I no longer had to worry about shaving. I always believed women had to be completely hairless from the eyes down, yet when chemotherapy made my body completely hairless. I was uncomfortable with how childish it looked on my curvy, nearly adult figure.

My body was baron, apart from a Hickman line hanging off it, which allowed doctors easy access to my veins. Two tubes grew from my collarbone, draping over my chest and dangling like a long down toward my belly button. When chemo killed everything, only a medical device could exist on my body, and I was forced to carry it with me everywhere I went. The hospital had entered my flesh.

I could not separate myself from illness. Even when I was not in the hospital, all I saw in the mirror was a cancer patient. My appearance no longer warranted erotic stares from men. For the first time since the age of 12, my body was de-sexualised. Cancer took an identity that was never truly mine, but I needed so much to feel whole. I yearned to be seen in this way again.

Through the medical gaze, being looked at and displayed took on a different meaning. Unlike the male gaze, the medical gaze was perfectly trained. The medical gaze could recognise and diagnose every intricate part of my anatomy; it knew my body better than myself. A 17-year-old female with Ewing’s Sarcoma, there was already a protocol for treatment, tested on hundreds of people before me. I was to be read like a textbook, becoming entrenched in medical discourse. Cancer meant my body existed before I entered the world and would continue to exist after I left it, immortalised through scientific journals, national sarcoma conferences, and medical student’s dissertations.

The medical world made my body no longer feel like my own. Yet, it never really has. From the age of 12, it belonged to the eyes, voices, and hands of men. Everyone is looked at every day, yet some looks carry more weight than others and are powerful enough to not just be stares but projections of identity.

Through the medical gaze, I am an object of study, yet through the male gaze, I am an object of desire. Although I have carried the gazes with me from my teenage years into adult life, I am peeling away the layers until they are no longer entrenched in my sense of self but are merely lived experiences shared by many others. And when I reach the core, I hope to find the 12-year-old girl who was utterly obsessed with gymnastics.

Can you relate to Ellie’s experience? Let us know in the comments box, on social media or contact us to share your personal story.