What it feels like for a girl

I’ve been working out fairly regularly — so regularly, in fact, that I took both Saturday and Sunday off this weekend and I feel as though I’ve been a big fat slacker. I run, on average, three days a week and lift weights three days.

There’s a guy who works out at the Y at the same time I do. He’s an older guy, knows a lot about weight lifting, used to teach the women’s weight training class. He’s complimented me on my form and said he’s impressed by the amount of weight I lift, particularly when doing squats. When he taught the class, he could never get the women to put any weights on the Smith machine bar when doing squats, and he wished he could show them me doing a hundred pounds. Once, he said that I was in great shape for a thirty-year-old (which led me to consider that he was trying to pick me up, but he’s never gotten any friendlier than that, so I don’t think so).

Last Friday, while I was doing my upper body workout, there was a teenaged couple there. Mostly the girl watched the guy, but he also showed her how to do a series of exercises. She did chest presses with 8 pound weights and he had to help her lift them. Was she really that weak? I wondered A gallon of milk weighs eight pounds alone. We can lift so much more than we give ourselves credit for.

During this same workout, when we were both resting between sets of our various activities, the older guy asked me, “Are you angry or something?”

I was confused. “What?”

“You lift so much weight. Are you angry at somebody or something?”

He was just talking, making chat the way people in the gym do, but I was suddenly very annoyed. “Do you ask the guys if they’re angry?” I said.

He seemed surprised that I responded that way; I’m sure he just thought he was complimenting me. What I should have said was, That attitude is why women won’t lift anything more than marginal weights. That’s why that skinny teenager won’t use higher weights: her boyfriend might ask if she’s angry or something. Or a dyke. Or whatever.*

I’m kind of amazed that in 2006 a woman at the gym still threatens guys. I’m certainly not physically threatening — this guy is in his fifties and he can bench over a hundred pounds, a weight that I can only imagine. And he knows the benefits of working out, and I’d think he’d be acquainted with the special benefits weight training holds for women.

But of course, we’re dealing with a world in which women just frighten men. I haven’t run into naked sexism very often (yes, I lead a charmed life) but I can still remember the outstanding examples. Such as the guy at Coffee Society who informed me that female sports reporters are pretty much only in the job for one reason. Which, in case you don’t know, is to look at naked men and not because, say, they love sports. Yes, he was totally serious. Or the guys at USC Film School who were writing scripts that, much like the produced films we get to see at the theater, pretty much only had film roles for females who were there to fuck the male leads and not do very much else (so much for artistic freedom).

A big part of the American Taliban’s aims have to do not with “protecting the family” but completely disempowering women. Read the incomparable Digby on this topic here and here on this topic.

I can’t remember where I heard this, but whenever you hear the phrase “family values” replace it with “patriarchy,” because that’s what they really mean. Stay in your place, women, or you’ll get your punishment.

Hmm. Come to think of it, I guess I am angry.

But when I’m at the gym, it’s pretty much just pop music driving me.

 

 

 
* I realized after writing and posting this that this list doesn’t come off quite right. I was trying to think of labels that women get tagged with when they don’t fit some kind of expectation of what’s “girly.”