The Thursday routine involves alarm clock, coffee, quick game of online scrabble with my wife, and hurriedly finishing off this column. It’s hurried because Thursday is the day we head to the gym before work for a session with our personal trainer, Hamish. Hamish spends 45 minutes encouraging us to lift slightly heavier weights, for slightly more reps, than we would voluntarily choose. We feel virtuous, and a little sore.
Gyms are fascinating places. I mean, I find most places fascinating if they have people in them, but gyms are different again. There are the close-moving huddles of young people clustered around the leg press or the hip drive. There are the regulars working through their routines, week in and week out. Some write down their reps and weights in little notebooks, some record them in their smartphone apps. They are generally doing the same thing but often for different reasons.
We told Hamish we wanted to feel stronger. Sarcopenia, or age-related muscle loss, means that if you don’t exercise, you steadily lose muscle mass year-on-year. In practice that means having to do two trips to the car for the groceries, rather than one. I’m very happy that, thanks to picking up weights and putting them down, I’m back to my grocery-pulling prime. Recently, my wife told Hamish she feels stronger but doesn’t think she looks stronger. Where’s the bicep curl, she asked. Hamish’s answer? “That’s just aesthetics.”
The aesthetics associated with strength have been in the news this week. Well, in my Google feed, anyway. Yahoo Life pushed me an article about Caitlin Clark. Who? Clark is a big deal in American women’s basketball, and recently she was snapped cheering on her old college team, the Iowa Hawkeyes. Yahoo Life was very interested in the reaction to Clark’s muscly arms.
Opinions are polarised. Some folk love the look of a muscled upper arm and others don’t. This is particularly true for women’s bodies. I listened with fascination as one of my students described young men getting “a pump” before going out on the town – doing a bunch of press-ups or curls so your arms look bigger. But nobody seemed to think that a woman doing the same thing even made sense.
It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but there are two broad gender-related body “schemas” that are entrenched in Western societies: negative views of male bodies that aren’t sufficiently muscled, and female bodies that aren’t sufficiently thin.
Writing in 2007, James Grey and Rebecca Ginsberg back this up by noting that average-sized men and women have very different reflections – women feel overweight, and men think they’re underweight.
In fact women tend to agree with men, preferring men who are slightly more muscly than typical, just not as muscly as men think they themselves should be. Men’s self-ideal is about 5-10kg musclier than women’s ideal for them.
While the gym seems to be full of amazingly strong-looking women, when a woman says, outside of the gym, they want more muscle they still mean a slender, lean version of muscly. This can present a double-bind, particularly for women in sport, because the ideal body for sports may not be the culturally ideal body.
In fact, local scholars Kayla Marshall, Kerry Chamberlain and Darrin Hodgetts argue that, culturally, strength and femininity have long been constructed as antithetical. In 2019, they authored an analysis of women bodybuilders on Instagram. They show that even as women bodybuilders resist the dominant stereotype of the thin female body, they still need to be seen as attractive in ways that are consistent with traditional feminine ideals: “ornamented, sexualised, and passive”. Strong women’s bodies are more likely to be admired if they are also lean.
What an awkward position to be in – empowering oneself and still having to fit into the socially proscribed box.
