Why Are So Many Men Online Weird About How Women Choose to Exercise?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Social Media | May 7, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Social Media | May 7, 2024 |

The algorithm is a cruel and exhausting beast. It does nothing but take, take, and regurgitate, leaving behind a questionable array of memes, content, and pure unfiltered nonsense. No matter how carefully I try to cultivate my online presence and the stuff that makes its way to my screen, I’m forever overwhelmed by crap (no, Marky Mark, I do not want your Catholic prayer app, I am so not your target demographic.)

Lately, I’ve been seeing the same thing over and over again. There will be videos or photos of women in exercise spaces, sometimes a gym or yoga studio. They’ll be exercising in various ways. Then a catty caption will pop up or it will cut to some over-muscled dude with a tan the shade of varnish ranting about how ‘women will do anything other than lift weights.’ They’re exercising wrong, apparently. This is especially confusing to me since, every time I’m shown videos of women doing cardio or weightlifting or trying CrossFit, the comments are full of those same guys grumbling that these women are still doing it wrong. Well, that or they’re hogging up valuable gym space because they’re clearly only working out for social media clout. This cycle is inescapable. It seems like every fourth or fifth video or post I’m shown on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok is this tedious trend of sexism under the guise of motivation.

Women’s fitness and healthcare is already a loaded topic, especially in the context of social media and influencers where fatphobia and disordered eating have been rebranded as ‘wellness.’ Society has already decreed that there is no correct way to have a body that is in any way femme-coded, and more so if you’re larger than the sample size mannequin advertising those Lululemon leggings. Avenues have opened up to expand workouts for various levels of accessibility and fitness, with YouTubers like Yoga with Adrienne thriving in a post-lockdown market, but this remains scary territory for many. It’s why a lot of women prefer female-only classes or ones with low-impact movement that gives them a solid foundation to try out new things.

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We all have different motivations for why we exercise (or why we don’t.) So it cannot help but prove aggravating to be barraged by this sexist jackassery. What’s wrong with line dancing classes or bungee fitness or water aerobics? Oh, it’s not hard enough? Sorry that we don’t want to spend every minute of our lives suffering for your satisfaction (I can’t say I find the viewpoint that working out should be total agony to be a healthy one.) You don’t want to lose weight? Well, you should! Oh, you’re trying to lose weight? Not quickly enough for my liking! The goalposts are always moving when it comes to the ways that we are allowed to accept or change our bodies.

A lot of these workout influencers are, alas, tied to misogynistic movements that preach an archaic brand of gender rigidity wherein domesticity and passivity are demanded of women. Fat women offend them because they don’t want to f*ck us but those with clear muscle definition are likely to be insulted with barely-veiled transphobic rhetoric. We’re told to get in the kitchen, but then you see videos of women cooking for their loved ones, and those guys are crawling around in the comments lambasting their ingredient choices. Again, nothing is good enough because they don’t believe women to be worthy of equality. They demand the narrowest definition of beauty but dismiss any form of health and fitness that could be used to attain it (not that any woman owes prettiness to any man, nor is exercise designed exclusively for transforming yourself.) Pilates is viewed with particular scorn, seen as a copout for skinny women who don’t want to try too hard, which suggests to me that none of them have ever tried it. Anyone who’s taken even one Pilates class would never have the gumption to call it soft or easy exercise. See also pole dancing.

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But, of course, it all boils down to the same strain of misogyny that views any little thing a woman does as either grossly offensive or part of a ‘woke’ campaign with an agenda so nefarious that no mouth-breathing contrarian can actually define it. When your view of the world is so narrow as to see everything as an act of aggression against your being then it’s no wonder you’ll find yourself tied up in knots over the sight of women enjoying themselves in a group setting with a workout routine not designed for you.

Speaking for myself as a plus-sized woman with bad feet and zero self-motivation, finding a form of exercise I enjoyed and a place to do it was a very big deal. It was freeing to locate a studio where I could try out different kinds of yoga and movement classes, have fun doing so, and never feel like I was being judged for not perfecting every move. I’ve been doing yoga and barre for about five years now and I still suck at a lot of it. It doesn’t matter to me or my instructors or the other people in the room. They don’t laugh when I fall over unless I do first. The term ‘weight loss’ hasn’t been mentioned once in the entire time I’ve attended sessions. All of that gave me the freedom to embrace exercise as something that was indeed for me, something I’d never truly considered up until that point as a person who found high school P.E. to be akin to psychological terror. Why would you want to remove that pleasure and satisfaction from a total stranger? Do you think insulting us will make us change our lives (and subscribe to whatever snake oil service you’re almost certainly shilling?) Do you truly think it’s ‘woke’ to try out new exercises or is your mind so warped by misogyny that the mere sight of women is enough to set off your panic?

We are used to seeing how the male gaze defines our bodies and our health. Consider decades of ads for ‘attaining the perfect beach body’ or how losing weight made some woman’s awful husband like her more. Women’s exercise was frequently heavily sexualized, whether in music videos, TV ads, or posters at the bus station begging to be graffitied over. It’s an image that made places like the gym or yoga studio no-go areas for so many women for so long. Now, that’s (slowly) changing, and a lot of dudes seem terrified by it. What, you mean that anyone can exercise? Sacrilege! So, of course they malign women who push back against the norm, but don’t worry, they also have enough hate in their hearts for the conventionally attractive and fit women who just want to lift some weights and not be accused of baiting your erection. It’s the joy that freaks them out more than the movement. Well, that and the fear that they couldn’t keep up.