Women just want to work out in peace. Why all the thigh-rubbing lechery? | Emma Beddington

I’ve spent the morning doing Shane Gillis’s work: checking out women in the gym. If you’ve avoided Gillis thus far, apologies for enlightening you – he’s a “comedian” who recently told a “joke” on Saturday Night Live that began: “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dressed like whores now.”

Well, reporting for duty from the weight room, here’s the clothing tally: eight women in leggings and T-shirts; six in T-shirts and trackie bottoms; five in shorts and vest tops; one in a crop top and leggings. It’s not exactly the Folies Bergère – there’s not much, I would have thought, to cause Gillis to blush. But maybe I’m wrong – how undressed, exactly, constitutes whorish? Is a glimpse of a female forearm a distracting provocation? Should we pull up our socks to avoid inflaming male passions with our slutty ankles when we’re doing step-ups?

There’s a long, grim history of women trying to do physical activity in appropriate clothes and not being allowed, or feeling able to. We might not be sweating in floor-length dresses and corsets like early Olympian women, but bros are still complaining about girls doing squats in shorts in their eyeline, staring, propositioning and commenting (the #gymcreep hashtag is a veritable rogues’ gallery of them). Even Gillis’s language isn’t, unfortunately, exceptional: after his monologue, fitness writer Mikala Jamison shared a message on her Substack from a man she considered a friend, saying a gym had “whores everywhere”.

Thigh-rubbing lechery around women’s workout gear, however jokey, is gross and infuriating, but it’s more pernicious than that. Women get alienated from sport and fitness when they’re not allowed to feel comfortable in their bodies and clothes: research by the England hockey player Tess Howard found that many girls were put off sport because of clothing requirements and concerns around sexualisation, while Women in Sport found more than 1 million girls in the UK “fall out of love” with sport in their teenage years. Women are less active than men, with 38% still not doing 150 minutes of exercise a week. When girls and women are deprived of, or never allowed to develop, a sense of ease and enjoyment around having a body in public, this is the result.

I say “enjoyment” specifically because that’s something I think gets left aside in making the inarguable, entirely correct, case that what women wear to work out for comfort, practicality or ease of movement, is nobody’s business but their own. But what about pleasure? Gyms are many things – a refuge, a third space, a repository of crimes against music – but they’re also a place to enjoy your body, including how it looks.

I know, because going to the gym made me feel good about (bits of) mine for the first time since puberty. I was the one in the crop top this morning, flaunting my stretchmarks, hernia and distended belly button, yes, but also the results of two years’ hard work. I’m proud I can lift a wardrobe now, but I’m also proud to look a bit pumped. It gives me confidence: enough to walk into strange weight rooms full of men wherever I happen to be and do my thing. Those experiences in turn have shown me that most gym-goers of both sexes aren’t remotely interested in what anyone else is doing, or wearing – they’re working on (maybe admiring!) themselves.

But I’m 51, and my experience of the gym isn’t the same as it is for younger women. Sport England research published this summer found 19% of women aged 16-34 felt uncomfortable or unsafe in fitness centres because of the possibility of harassment or intimidation; 86% reported experiencing physical, verbal, non-verbal or online harassment or intimidation in a fitness or leisure centre in the last three years. This kind of comment feeds the fear, and emboldens aggressors, making it not just unfunny, but depressing and enraging. Everyone should be able to enjoy moving their body unmolested, that’s a given. But dammit, we should also get to enjoy wearing short shorts, second-skin leggings and spaghetti-strap tops. To look safely and happily in a gym mirror and find ourselves, yeah, a bit fit.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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