How keeping fit is different for girls
BODY LANGUAGE
Rachel Cugnoni
Men are weird in so many ways but they are at their weirdest when they play football. I’m not talking about the freaks who make a living out of it but the kind who spend their Sunday mornings shouting things like “man on” and “all the way” at each other in parks up and down the country.
Last night I was observing these creatures in one of their natural habitats a municipal sports hall somewhere in south London. There they were, 10 thirtysomething blokes bonding over a soft, yellow ball. Running around in their Zola shirts, losing dangerous amounts of fluid, their faces so contorted with the effort they looked more like Graham Taylor.
For these men keeping fit is only a tiny part of this instinctive behaviour, as, in fact, is the male bonding. What it’s more about is imagining you’re someone you’re not that is, not a lardy-arsed, knock-kneed fumbler but an elegant sportsman and athlete, a legend in your own leisure time.
Every man could have been a contender, coulda been someone, could have had trials with Leyton Orient. They’ve all got a great future behind them. Women have different dreams. That’s why they opt for the gym, where there’s plenty of sweat but no glory.
The truth is, though, I must have more than my fair share of the Y chromosome in me. Because I want to be Zola too, and watching them I felt rather jealous.
You see I love competitive sport and I hate, hate, hate gyms. And for women of a certain age who may reluctantly be considering the alleged benefits of fitness, the choice one is confronted with is truly dismal the ritualised humiliation of the aerobics class, complete with fascist instructor or, even more grisly, the unrelenting hamster-wheel boredom of the stationary bike.
Competitive team games for females over the age of consent are simply not allowed outside the Olympics. When I was at school it wasn’t like that things weren’t different for girls. Being good at hockey earned you B-list credibility; being hockey captain hitched you into the A-list zone.
But when I reached university it became shockingly clear that the world outside girls’ grammar schools operated under different rules. Suddenly being good at sport counted for nothing in the social hierarchy stakes; showing an interest was a dangerous confession rather worse than admitting to a preference to Abba over the Smiths. That was nearly 20 years ago and I haven’t dared bully-off since.
Despite Brandi Chastain’s efforts at the 1999 women’s World Cup when in celebration of her winning penalty she got them out for the boys, women’s football is a complete turn-off. At the time a couple of over-excited hacks (Americans what do they know?) told us that the “future of football was feminine” but here we are three years later, about to witness the England women’s team play their first home-game World Cup qualifier at Blundell Park, home of Grimsby Town. Don’t know about you, but I won’t be tuning in.
So what’s a girl to do? There are actually a few other things available to the woman submitting to the hideous inevitability of exercise for exercise’s sake.
Pilates, for instance, which may sound like a skin complaint, but is in fact a form of self-improvement. Or Madonna’s PE of choice, Ashtanga yoga. Talk about weird you may as well join the Moonies. But go to any gym these days and the place will be full of believers, sweating their way towards toned salvation.
Sounds more like hell to me but something’s got to be done. I’ve been resisting exercise like most people resist pensions but the time may be coming soon when I slip on my Cindy Crawford replica kit and go for the burn. Then I’m sure I’ll discover the thing I fear most the gym’s own perverted form of competition and artifice.
I’m told by the converted that there’s nothing quite like the thrill of taking your turn on the leg press and having to add more weights, arriving at the running machine and turning up the speed.
And then there’s the body-fat ratio charts, fitness performance ratings, all leading to the holy grail of lycra-clad weight loss. Apparently, I too can be a supermodel. Women, it seems, are just as competitive and self-deluding as men but the really unfair bit is that men have more fun.
Rachel Cugnoni is editorial director of Yellow Jersey Press
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