Women, eh? What are we like? When we're not earning 27 per cent less than men and doing most of the housework for them, we're trying to take over their precious gyms! Well, some of them. For about an hour. Kentish Town Sports Centre, a north London gym co-owned by the local council, runs regular women-only sessions - and the downtrodden men of the area aren't going to stand for it anymore. At least, British journalist Peter Lloyd (who writes for - what a surprise - the Daily Mail) isn't. Lloyd is suing Kentish Town Sports Centre, because he believes that we live in "we live in an age of acceptable misandry" which has allowed a "group of agenda-driven feminists" to "ban men and boys" from the gym, seemingly just for the fun of it.
Lloyd's language may be extreme, but does he have a point? After all, men are members of the gym too - why shouldn't they be able to use it whenever they want? The thing is, the sessions weren't introduced because crazy zealots wanted to "ban men" from the gym. They were brought in because it's been shown that women don't always feel comfortable exercising in male-dominated gyms.
In fact, Kentish Town Sports Centre told Lloyd that "A report by the Women Sport and Fitness Foundation showed that a significant proportion of women (26 per cent) “hate the way they look when they exercise”. This takes on an even greater significance when you consider that women feel even more self-conscious when taking part in sport and physical activity when men are present. If you are wondering who or what [we are] it's a charity that specialises in increasing women’s physical activity levels."
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The thing is, both men and women can benefit from single-sex services. I'm not talking about, say, elite golf clubs that shut out women, but services devoted to mental and physical health. Men often feel uncomfortable in mixed weight-loss groups, for example, and tend to do better in men-only meetings. As Glen Poole wrote in the Guardian,
When a service is dominated by one gender it can act as a barrier that prevents others from accessing local facilities that should be open to all...Providing effective services for everyone isn't about insisting on a men-only service every time such a service is provided for women. That would be like insisting that all men are screened for breast cancer just because women are. It may help a tiny minority of men but it isn't proportionate to need....There are times when men and women can both benefit from gender-specific services and there is no question that there are still far more services targeted at women than men. But rather than attacking initiatives for women, the men's movement needs to learn from the achievements of the women's movement and take action to develop better services for men.
So what do you think of the gym's women-only scheme? Would you be more likely to go to a gym if there were no men allowed? Or do you agree with Peter Lloyd that it's "toxic sexism?"
