Sorry for the mess

I enjoy exercise. I cycle almost every day, I run several times a week, I swim, I play badminton, I’ll never catch a bus when I can walk and I can dance for hours without losing my breath. I recently signed up to do the Blenheim Triathlon, and I’ll be doing the 3 Peaks challenge this spring.

Recently I’ve started to notice the different reactions I get from different genders. Obviously I am generalizing a little here, but for the most part, whenever I talk about exercise with my male friends, we talk about the challenge, the excitement and the competition. When my female friends talk to to me about exercise, they almost invariably mention losing weight and simper about how unfit they are and make vague innuendo-laden references to yoga making you bendy. What the fuck?

For the record, I don’t exercise to lose weight. I’m not thin, not even close by industry standards. I have big hips, big thighs and DD cup breasts. Y’know, kind of like a lot of grown women who actually eat food. But I *am* quite fit. And I love it. I love the way beating my personal best time feels, I love hearing my heart pounding in my chest, and I love the independence cycling gives you. But expressing this to others has led to me being called ‘dykey’, ‘butch’, ‘manly’ and, my personal favourite, when I was accused of wanting to be a man.

This got me thinking. Why is being fit and enjoying it a masculine attribute? I mean, it doesn’t even make sense; look at the amount of adverts out there for women to join a gym. Oh, but I forgot. Doing exercise to lose weight doesn’t count. Apparently, exercise goes hand-in-hand with diets for a woman, whereas exercise matches protein shakes for bulking out if you’re a man. The ever-shrinking, increasingly-hairless perfect woman and her enormous, ripplingly-muscled counterpart. Take from that what you will…

Tags:   beauty myth · exercise · feminism · food · weightNo Comments