Prejudice at the Gym

I work out at a gym that is full of stereotypes.  There’s the “meatheads” that pump up their biceps and then spend their rest time flexing them in front of the mirror.  There’s the college girls with the sports bra and low-rise yoga pants and sculpted stomachs.   Teased-up ponytailed lithe fairy yoga girls and over-aerobicized models lacking child-bearing hips.  Of course there’s normal people, too, with oversized t-shirts and sweaty backs toting their bottled water from machine to machine.

But there’s one regular denizen of my gym who was sure to send me into a tizzy every time I saw her.  She is maybe 5’2″, 90 pounds, with smooth tanned skin and size 56 DDD additions to her chest that she has a difficult time covering, if she had an inkling to attempt covering them at all.  Smacking gum like a junior-high student, she would work with the free weights, the exercise ball, the cable machines, all the time viewing herself in the ample mirrors.  Everyone–especially the meatheads–knows her, and she is jovial to anyone that speaks to her.  She never speaks to me, since I spend most of my time glaring at her and never attempted to strike up a conversation.  Of course my boyfriend knows her well, because they use the same machines in the northeast corner of the gym.

She’s a stripper–no surprise– but to me she was a threat for no good reason.  For she embodied the kind of person that spent all of her time focusing on her external appearance in order to please others.  After all, that’s how she makes her money,  pleasing others with the body she spends so much time perfecting.  She was the embodiment to me of the perfect little love doll that every man wanted purely for pleasure; and that to me was somehow sleazy, undermining healthy relationships with the allure of easy sex.  But as I watched this woman so different from me, I recognized a trigger in myself from some past experience where I had felt like I was not enough–and I redirected my thoughts to remind myself that we are all one.  She was simply different than me, but still a human with wants and needs and issues.  Perhaps she wasn’t the Jezebel I wanted her to be.  For all I knew she was putting herself through law school, or paying her grandmother’s nursing home expenses and dancing was a way to make that happen with the gifts she was given.

So a few days ago, I stopped glaring at her, and started smiling at her.  I haven’t received a smile back yet, but I am sure it will come in time when she realizes that I accept her for who she is, not what she looks like or how she earns her living.