Fitness and FeminismProfessors Tracy Isaacs and Samantha Brennan

Department of PhilosophyRotman Institute of Philosophy

Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist ResearchWestern University

Objectives

1. To consider some of the barriers to women for participating in fitness activities

2. Provide a feminist context for the discussion, focusing on social attitudes, cultural expectations, conflicts between athletic and aesthetic values, assumptions about fitness and fatness.

3. Engage in a discussion about how to perpetuate positive messages that encourage women to get active.

Barriers to women’s participation in fitness activities

Presentation Title Here

Barriers

1. Making fitness about weight loss2. Focus on aesthetics instead of athletics3. Gender gap in sports and fitness activities that starts in

childhood4. Unjust gendered divisions of work time and play time5. Feeling excluded from gyms and other fitness spaces because

of weight, age, lack of knowledge/skill, gender, clothing (a general perception of not belonging)

Barrier 1: Making fitness all about weight loss

• Efforts at improving activity (and nutrition) shouldn’t be measured solely in terms of impact on overweight and obesity.

Why?

• The inactivity crisis may prove to be less intractable than obesity and the health benefits of moving more are well known, independent of BMI.

• Thin people need to move more too and overweight and obese people shouldn’t quit exercising if the scale doesn’t move

It’s not an all or nothing thing: Small amounts of exercise make a very big difference

Yoni Freedhoff: “My exercise mantra remains the same. Some is good. More is Better. Everything counts. And the good news too is that lesser amounts of exercise, while unlikely to have a dramatic impact upon your weight, may well have a dramatic impact upon your health, mood, sleep, and quality of life, all the while preserving your functional independence as you age.”

http://www.weightymatters.ca/

Barrier 2: aesthetics versus athletics

• “Strong is the new skinny” isn’t much of an improvement over the pursuit of weight loss as an end-in-itself because “strong” is aligned with achieving a certain look.

• What would a focus on truly athletic values look like?

Athletic Values

• Focus on:• what the body can do• learning new skills• getting stronger, faster, more agile, more balance etc.• cardiovascular efficiency

• Though not perfect, it offers a wider range of measures and goals than weight loss and aesthetics, and easier to see sustainable improvements.

Would there be room for strong but not skinny?

Kristin Rhodes?

r Amanda Bigson

Barrier 3: Gender gap, fitness, and youth

• There’s a gender gap in physical fitness that starts when we are very young. Canada’s children just got a D-minus in physical fitness for the third year in a row. Just 9% of Canada’s children between the ages of 9 and 15 meet the recommended guideline of one hour of activity per day.

• Fewer girls than boys achieve the recommended number of hours of physical activity per day

Why is that? We might need to examine the role of gender socialization in early childhood physical fitness.Girls even sit more than boys. 507 minutes of sitting a day for boys on average and 524 minutes for girls.

In the United States physical activity among girls drops dramatically during the teen years, and many don't do any by the time they reach 18 or 19, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. More than half of black girls and a third of white girls do no regular leisure physical activity at 16 and 17. (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2002-09-04-unfitgirls_x.htm)

• A study by the government of Canada published in 2013 reports that Canadians are less active in sport than they were in previous iterations of the same study and that participation rates have declined across age and gender but that women continue to participate at much lower rates than men in every age bracket.

Intersectional injustice and physical fitness

Gender is not disconnected from poverty. The data on sports participation mirrors data on public health and is related to increased risk of morbidity and mortality for women, especially those from poorer households. Reduced access to health services through lack of income but also through lack of time disproportionately affects women because they are more likely than men to be poor.

If we look at health in the broadest terms possible then surely this outlook must include leisure time, and access to recreational facilities given the impact on well being and the maintenance of health.

Barrier 4: Gender and the (un)just division of time for work and play

• Inequality and number of hours available to women for fitness and leisure activities. We tend to think of this as a private matter but insofar as it affects health it’s a matter of public concern.

• Just as we care about a fair distribution of work in the home, if we care about women’s health we ought also to care about time for women to pursue physical activity. Matters for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons.

Barrier 5: Feelings of exclusion and not belonging

Newsflash: women are working out on their treadmills in sheds so as not to be seen in public.

Why? “fear of being judged”

This is a very sad state of affairs.

Other reasons people feel excluded

• Media representations of gyms and of sport in general are dominated by young, “fit-looking” people.

• Gyms and other fitness activities can be intimidating for newbies who don’t yet know how to use the equipment, play the sport, or keep up with the more experienced people.

• Form-fitting clothing, which is an expectation especially for women in lots of fitness activities, can scare people away (“no way I’m wearing that!”) but if they don’t wear it they feel out of place.

Feminist context

• We talk about social attitudes that create barriers for women’s participation in physical activities (e.g. boys are encouraged to be more active than girls, women’s fitness focuses on weight loss and thinness, etc.)

• We talk about the social and cultural expectations and values that get in women’s way of pursuing fitness activities (e.g. obligations to put “family first,” gendered division of labor in the home shrinks available time, etc.)

• We shift the focus from fatness to fitness, from the aesthetic of normative femininity to what the body can do

Recommendations• Inclusive fitness• Starting small is okay• Find things people enjoy • Make fitness a family thing• Everyday exercise• Stop focusing on weight loss as a measure of success• Use your influence as MDs to shift to a message that works for

more people

Thank you!

Samantha Brennan sbrennan@uwo.ca, http://publish.uwo.ca/~sbrennan

Tracy Isaacs tisaacs@uwo.ca http://publish.uwo.ca/~tisaacs Wordpress: http://fitisafeministissue.com

Facebook: Fit Is a Feminist Issue, https://www.facebook.com/feministfitness

Twitter: @FitFeminists