A good sport
In 1978, Chatelaine published its first “I Hate to Exercise” guide to fitness—as though we needed more evidence that women have been trying to cajole and trick themselves into physical activity for decades. As a kid, I loved exercise. I was on the softball and track teams; I practised gymnastics for 16 hours a week and would backflip off anything that would hold my weight. But somewhere along the way (and I’d pin it at age 13), things changed. I stopped trying out for teams. Exercise stopped being fun, and instead it became a chore, something to feel alternately guilty and virtuous about.
I never really thought about why my childhood love of sports evaporated until I read about this exact phenomenon in Katrina Onstad’s excellent book on the decline of leisure time, The Weekend Effect. One theme she explores is the gender divide in fitness. In general, she writes, men are conditioned to combine exercise and play, even into adulthood—be it through a pickup basketball game or an ultimate Frisbee league. In other words, they’re led to associate it with fun. For women, exercise has often been framed as an obligatory slog: a need to “work,” “tone” and “shape” our bodies in pursuit of some combination of thinness, social acceptance and a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes. Not much fun at all.
Onstad traces this divergence back to when most feelings of self-doubt in girls begin: the early teen years. “In adolescence,” she writes, “there’s the gym class feeling of your body changing in public, under scrutiny; the volleyball smashing your periodswollen belly; playing with boys who never passed, or made fun of you for how you ran. Aggression and competitiveness—the stuff of sports—remain lauded traits in men; the same behavior is often deemed ‘bitchiness’ in women.” And so, by the time girls hit 14, the Women’s Sports Foundation tells us, they’re dropping out of sports at twice the rate of boys.
Recently, when the results of our 2017 career survey came in, “How ambitious are you?” (page 109), I couldn’t help but wonder whether the way girls are nudged out of sports spills over into our professional lives too. As with sports, ambition—the desire to lead, create, build, win—is still most often perceived as a male pursuit. Only 17 percent of the women we surveyed describe themselves as “very ambitious” when it comes to their jobs, and 40 percent say what holds them back most is a lack of confidence or a fear of failure. Sure, not everyone dreams of a high-octane career—but the parallels here are kind of undeniable. Maybe some of that fear and insecurity could be thwarted for the next generation just by making sports more welcoming for girls. And maybe we could all get a boost by thinking about fitness as something we do for kicks, rather than to meet a goal. That’s what we tried to accomplish with our fitness package, “Back to Class” (page 75)—a guide to fitness classes that run the gamut of social, competitive, upbeat, relaxing and totally bizarre. This fall, may you forget about your abs and your GI score for a minute, and try exercising the way we all did as kids, for fun.