I tend to get into philosophical arguments with my textbooks. I spent a lot of my childhood getting sat on by the dominant paradigm and it only slowly occurred to me that it didn’t have to be like that. When I end up butting heads with the Fitness Industrial Complex in the course of my continuing education, I get grumpy.
The specialization I just completed was in women’s fitness. Most of my clients are women and, shockingly enough, I am one, too! I hope someone gets around to alerting the patriarchy that about half the population are, in fact, female. They don’t seem to have figured it out yet.
The breathless prose of my text announces that women and men are different! Who knew? There is a way to describe the differences between men and women that is respectful and neutral. The text does not find it. Women are not only different, but also weird, lesser, and mysterious. It is entirely true that in general women do not build as much muscle mass as men. Describing this as some kind of failing is as silly as describing men’s inability to have a baby that way.
Basically, there is no need to belabor the differences between men and women. Men are not the norm and women some kind of aberration. The issues of women’s fitness pretty much come down to modifications that are needed for pregnancy, postpartum, and lactation and some specific issues that affect older women. Healthy people of all sexes, genders, and identifications require respectful, careful, safe, and individualized workouts. This is what I work to provide to all my clients. And maybe some smashing of the white imperialist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy—it’s good exercise.
End of rant.
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