For most of my life, being feminine felt like a subtraction problem. Less bulk. Less space. Less appetite. Less of everything: on a plate, in a dressing room, in a conversation. I wanted to be toned but petite; the kind that makes you look twice, like Sabrina Carpenter walking into a room. I also wanted my partner to look unmistakably strong in the culturally familiar way: broad, solid, protective. And I wanted to stay safely on the acceptable side of ‘delicate’.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to clock the contradiction. Why was strength magnetic on someone else, yet somehow unbecoming on me? It wasn’t a single ‘eureka’ realisation. It happened gradually, through the ordinary intimacy of gyms: overhearing women count reps, watching them learn to deadlift their own bodyweight, listening to them speak about health with an urgency their mothers never had the luxury to prioritise. It started to feel like ‘inheritance breaking’—a refusal to accept the physical decline we’ve been trained to treat as inevitable.
This week, at Vogue Values: Women of Excellence presented by Tira, that mindset change crystallised into a scene. National record–holding hurdler Jyothi Yarraji arrived in a slinky black Sharnita Nandwana gown, the slit cut just high enough to reveal calf muscles that come from years of relentless training. But what I remember most is the way the light caught her shoulders and arms—deltoids like clean angles, triceps etched, a back that looked engineered. They didn’t look ‘odd’ in eveningwear. The silhouette wasn’t ‘manly’. It was meticulously earned and made the room gasp in admiration. Earlier that day, when the tired binary of sporty or feminine came up during a panel discussion, Yarraji replied, “I don’t ask myself to choose. I love doing my hair and makeup as much as I drown myself in training.”
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