A Review of Going to the Gym By Someone Who Has No Idea How to Take Care of Herself But Is Trying

Breasts. There are lots of them. Not the kind that bounce up and down on a treadmill, the kind harnessed in by inhumane Spandexial restraints — although I’m sure such breasts are bouncing out on the gym floor, where only men notice.

I’m talking official fully, naked-as-the-day-god-made-them breasts. Vaginas, too. Every size, shape, color. This was the scene that greeted me the first time I entered the locker room in a mass-exercise establishment: women stripping off sweat-drenched attire, women lotioning long nude legs, women emerging from behind steam-soaked shower doors with towels protecting their hair and nothing else.

I was shocked. Not in a puritanical sense, just in a, this is what they never told me about the gym sort of way. The last time I’d been in a gym locker room was the early 90s, when I was a camper at the YMCA. I was going through puberty and would use the mounted hairdryers to cool my armpits. And if I remember correctly, prancing around nude was not a part of locker room culture. There was one outlier, a Park Slope Mom with a lizard tattoo on her shoulder and the crunchy, going-grey curls that were a rite of passage for the PSMs of my time. Park Slope Moms were a different breed back then — they wore lots of silver and Teva sandals and…