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Making your masculinity in the gym

By Peter West - posted Wednesday, 29 November 2006


When I moved into Bondi Junction from the suburbs I had to do something to exercise my rotten old drooping, hunch-shouldered academic body. My physio-terrorist used to say "Exercise, Mr West, exercise those poor old shoulders and back! That’s what you need!"

So what does a 40-year-old man do (OK, I admit it, I’m over 50 and then some) in this post-feminist age? Join a boxing club? Become a lifesaver? Join a football club? Do they have such things for geriatrics?

So I went to the gym.

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The first I visited was Power Gym. (Please note that all names have been changed, mainly to protect me from being thumped by people four feet wide.) Power Gym was brisk and efficient. There was strong but subtle pressure to sign up and it was made clear that if I did so I would save a lot of money. But people in the gym were a bit surly. Some guy snarled at me when I was using his equipment (I wondered about making a little joke of this, but didn’t want to touch that one). And so I dropped out after a couple of visits.

I was glad I didn’t sign up. The gym closed one day without a squeak of warning. All those who had signed off were shunted off to another gym elsewhere in the Junction.

So I went to another gym around the corner. This worked out for a time. There was a huge room where all the big boys worked out, with a great deal of grunting and groaning. Occasionally I would come in to find a mirror had been smashed or there was a hole in the wall, but I never witnessed any aggression myself.

When I went upstairs to yoga classes there seemed to be some tension between the yoga aficionados and the bodybuilders. As we came down the stairs from yoga one day, a woman snarled "Look at those guys with their massive legs and arms. They couldn’t do yoga, the PUSSIES!"

I spoke to the guy behind the counter. Most of the guys in the gym were 25 or thereabouts, he said. Only about 75 per cent of them were on steroids, though there were a few bits and pieces of other stuff. Bodybuilders call this the grey area, the stuff that hasn’t been banned yet. I heard fragments of conversation about "Now I’m taking half a tablet of extract of bull’s penis every day I’m really seeing my arms change". Although I lived in daily expectation that someone would offer me a cheap deal on eye of newt or toad’s testicles to improve my tiny chest, this never happened.

I struggled through my exercise routine, often worrying about paying bills, getting retrenched, the usual stuff. As I did so some great lunk twice as wide as me would sometimes lumber across from lifting 1,500 pounds on bench press and explain that I was using the machine backwards, or not squeezing my biceps sufficiently. They seemed reasonable enough at first and nobody ever seemed to be nasty.

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Then I began to look around me. The people in the gym strode past me as they went about their quest to be bigger, stronger, bigger. They had discreet tatts in the right places, muscles that bulged from their carefully cut tank tops, amazing abs that gleamed as the muscles shifted beneath hairless skin, muscles that burst out of their shorts.

That was just the women.

You should have seen the men! Some of these guys had chests that you see in bodybuilding magazines. Their legs were so huge they had to waddle around, legs placed far apart so the muscles didn’t impede each other as they lumbered along. Their lives were carefully moulded around the gym: chest today, legs tomorrow, abs Thursday, carb up, pig out, rest up, start again.

One day I saw a woman dressed as if for a garden party, with a slinky black dress, high heels, handbag, the whole bit. She perched daintily on a bench while a strongly muscled, fit young black man finished his workout. And then off they went together. Was this one of the rich women I heard about who divorced their banker husbands and picked up a toy boy for a couple of years? I was busting to know but I let them go unmolested.

I tired of this gym in the end. I was the only person in the place who had a head bigger than his neck.

And I was offered a freebie in the mall. Bondi Junction mall is a hideous place where the pleasant sounds of trumpet and accordion are drowned out by barking salesmen (amplified), usually three or four competing in a jumble of noise. There are marauding Mormons who craftily ask you questions to snare you into a discussion about the Book of Mormon. And so on. So when I got a free ticket to a gym, I thought I’d check the gym out.

This was Paradise Club. Its reception area was gleaming and new, complete with a gleaming attendant in matching shirt and shorts who looked as if he had stepped out of Vogue magazine.

Knowing Bondi Junction as I do, it’s quite possible that he had already been in Vogue magazine. The attendant asked me how he could help, checked my free pass, and guided me to a change area. This, like other areas, was shiny, new, and brightly lit. It was a far cry from the stinking old sweatboxes I had seen when I was a boy. Upstairs there were racks and racks of gleaming weights. But it was the people who freaked me out.

Everyone walked around in designer gear. Every single piece of their outfit matched. There were women in shades of aqua, tight little dresses and little halter tops. Their stomach muscles were so firm and neat they made me nearly gasp with amazement.

The men wore matching outfits in grey and cerise, or black and red. All the outfits were designed to show off the abs, biceps, pecs and calves of the body on display. Upstairs lithe athletic men and women leapt about while the music boomed. Everywhere there were shiny muscles and no hint of a hair on a chest or legs, in most cases.

Obviously there must be some sort of ray that went over Bondi at night time and removed all this unwanted masculine hair. It seemed to be a daytime version of all those nasty nightclubs on Oxford Street with tall black-shirted giants guarding the door, places where you can hear the music three blocks away. Presumably these people rocked and bopped all day in the light and then went and bopped and rocked all night. I don’t know when they found time for all the things I had to do in my life, like talking to my old mum, sucking up to my superiors or dragging my kids off to the opera.

I couldn’t see anyone here who was fat or skinny or a bit lumpy. In fact nobody here NEEDED to exercise. What was I doing here?

I have a Brazilian friend Marcus who told me I had missed the whole point about Paradise Club. "Peter, the important thing isn’t to GO there, it’s to be SEEN there!’ This made perfect sense to me.

Finally I found Aussie Gym one day by accident. This had a pleasant air of slight decay. There was some rusted equipment and parts of it had seen better days. I started to think this might be the gym for me. Its inhabitants took time out from their workouts to enjoy themselves.

Yani ran the gym. He put his artwork on the walls and seemed to enjoy his creativity. He didn’t seem to care if some of the depictions of the human body were anatomically incorrect, with testicles hanging from some guy’s stomach and so on. He would grab a friend and hug them and then keep on walking, chuckling as the other guy wondered what such a hug meant. Yani had been part of Striparama or some such, a team of male strippers, and the souvenir photos adorned the wall, Yani beaming from the pack.

The women in this gym seemed different. They looked good, but they took time to relax. They would tease their male friends, or possibly boyfriends. They mocked in a gentle way guys who seemed too pretentious. If I was puzzled or uncertain in my never-ending struggle to become an acceptably tough male they would help out in a matter of fact way.

The guys, too, were the best of the bunch I’d seen. They seemed to have lives that they fitted the gym into, rather than fitting their lives around the gym. There were older guys, younger guys, businessmen and tradesmen. The gym had parties and outings. It wasn’t perfect but it was the best I’d found so far.

Even Aussie Gym has its crazies. One day John came out from his cave behind the counter and was marching around half naked, showing off his arms and chest. "You could look like this one day, Peter" he said. "Great, thanks!" I called back as I was nearly flattened underneath an overloaded bar. This gym, too, seems to have closed or moved, as when I drive by its door is always shut.

I don’t know what I think about gyms, finally. Maybe I prefer to be a real person instead of looking like somebody in a cartoon. Maybe I prefer to have a life and go to the gym, not have a life in the gym. But God help us, it looks like making your masculinity in the gym is the future for men in Sydney.

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About the Author

Dr Peter West is a well-known social commentator and an expert on men's and boys' issues. He is the author of Fathers, Sons and Lovers: Men Talk about Their Lives from the 1930s to Today (Finch,1996). He works part-time in the Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

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