{"id":931365,"date":"2026-10-17T10:52:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T10:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/931365\/"},"modified":"2026-10-17T10:52:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T10:52:20","slug":"women-just-want-to-work-out-in-peace-why-all-the-thigh-rubbing-lechery-emma-beddington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/931365\/","title":{"rendered":"Women just want to work out in peace. Why all the thigh-rubbing lechery? | Emma Beddington"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent the morning doing Shane Gillis\u2019s work: checking out women in the gym. If you\u2019ve avoided Gillis thus far, apologies for enlightening you \u2013 he\u2019s a \u201ccomedian\u201d who recently told a \u201cjoke\u201d on Saturday Night Live<\/a> that began: \u201cI haven\u2019t been to the gym in so long, I didn\u2019t know women just dressed like whores now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, reporting for duty from the weight room, here\u2019s 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\u2019s not exactly the Folies Berg\u00e8re \u2013 there\u2019s not much, I would have thought, to cause Gillis to blush. But maybe I\u2019m wrong \u2013 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\u2019re doing step-ups?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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<\/a>, but bros are still complaining about girls doing squats in shorts in their eyeline, staring, propositioning and commenting (the #gymcreep hashtag<\/a> is a veritable rogues\u2019 gallery of them). Even Gillis\u2019s language isn\u2019t, unfortunately, exceptional: after his monologue, fitness writer Mikala Jamison shared a message on her Substack<\/a> from a man she considered a friend, saying a gym had \u201cwhores everywhere\u201d.<\/p>\n

Thigh-rubbing lechery around women\u2019s workout gear, however jokey, is gross and infuriating, but it\u2019s more pernicious than that. Women get alienated from sport and fitness when they\u2019re not allowed to feel comfortable in their bodies and clothes: research by the England hockey player Tess Howard<\/a> found that many girls were put off sport because of clothing requirements and concerns around sexualisation, while Women in Sport<\/a> found more than 1 million girls in the UK \u201cfall out of love\u201d with sport in their teenage years. Women are less active than men, with 38% still not doing 150 minutes of exercise a week<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cenjoyment\u201d specifically because that\u2019s 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\u2019s business but their own. But what about pleasure? Gyms are many things \u2013 a refuge, a third space, a repository of crimes against music \u2013 but they\u2019re also a place to enjoy your body, including how it looks.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 hard work. I\u2019m proud I can lift a wardrobe now, but I\u2019m 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\u2019t remotely interested in what anyone else is doing, or wearing \u2013 they\u2019re working on (maybe admiring!) themselves.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m 51, and my experience of the gym isn\u2019t the same as it is for younger women. Sport England research<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n

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