{"id":803749,"date":"2026-10-15T20:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/803749\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T20:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:38:08","slug":"i-wish-women-would-stop-filming-themselves-at-the-gym","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/803749\/","title":{"rendered":"I wish women would stop filming themselves at the gym"},"content":{"rendered":"

A furious row has been raging all week after the American comedian Shane Gillis<\/a> was accused of telling a sexist joke. In case you aren\u2019t familiar with his work, Gillis set a Guinness World Record this summer by playing to the largest crowd for a stand-up comedy gig in history (73,946). But on the latest edition of Saturday Night Live<\/a>, he caused uproar by making a crack about a highly sensitive topic: women\u2019s shorts.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t quote what he said because it\u2019s rather graphic. But, essentially, he expressed the view that the skintight shorts favoured by many young female gym-goers these days are a tad too revealing.<\/p>\n

Cue apoplectic accusations of misogyny, sexual objectification, failure to respect a woman\u2019s inalienable right to wear as little clothing as she chooses, etc. Personally, I think Gillis\u2019s critics are barking up the wrong tree, though, because they\u2019re overlooking the second, far more important point that he made about young women at the gym.<\/p>\n

Which is that, for some unfathomable reason, an awful lot of them now insist on filming themselves exercising<\/a> and then uploading the video to social media<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My problem with such behaviour is not that it\u2019s vain, self-obsessed and downright weird. My problem is that if I too happen to be exercising \u2013 and thus looking even redder, sweatier and flabbier than normal \u2013 I would really rather not appear in the back of the shot. Especially if the woman shooting the video has a vast number of online followers, all of whom will get to have a jolly good laugh about what a revolting sack of middle-aged blubber I am.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, I don\u2019t go to the gym very often these days. Primarily this is because I\u2019m a bone-idle pig who would rather slob on the sofa rewatching 40-year-old Rambo films. But it\u2019s also, in part, because there\u2019s now a risk that 17 million complete strangers around the world will soon be in stitches over my jiggling moobs.<\/p>\n

I appreciate that, having made this complaint, I too will now almost certainly be accused of sexism; for failing to respect a woman\u2019s inalienable right to film both herself and everyone in a 50-yard radius while they\u2019re puffing and wheezing like an asthmatic St Bernard. Nonetheless, I believe it needed to be said.<\/p>\n

At any rate, if I ever do muster the willpower to get off my sagging backside and go to the gym again, I can promise you one thing: I most certainly will not be wearing a pair of skintight shorts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A furious row has been raging all week after the American comedian Shane Gillis was accused of telling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":803750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[5337,106541,6647,102,263887,50,6884,159955,7447,224,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-803749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-comment","tag-daily-features","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-michael-deacon","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-other-features","tag-sexism","tag-social-media","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/803750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}