After a fifteen-year break, I’m back to lifting weights. A little thing called “osteopenia” was the catalyst. I used to love the gym back in the day when I lived in Pennsylvania, so I’m no stranger to the scene.
Nothing’s changed much, especially the clientele.
The gym has always been a bit of a meat market, with plenty of muscle-y meatheads hogging the machines and tanned girls in sports bras with abs to die for.
Despite numerous signs to clean the equipment after you’re done, only a handful of people actually do. None of them are men.
I don’t speak a word to anyone while I’m there. I don’t want to. People wear headphones or look down at their phones anyway. For the hour that I’m there, I’m very goal-focused to get in and out.
I was on my last set on the leg extension machine when, out of the corner of my eye, a 70ish man made a beeline towards me.
Oh no.
“I make it a point to say hello to all the attractive women,” he gushed as the corners of his smile met swinging earlobes.
What the actual fuck.
I am 63 years old and I don’t want this. I never wanted this. Anger swelled up as my words leaped out.
“So you don’t say hi to unattractive women?”
For one moment, he was speechless. Flabbergasted.
He recovered and suggested that he was just a silly man.
I didn’t disabuse him. He was correct.
Maybe I’d been watching too much of the hot summer series “Furious” but something in me wasn’t interested in being nice about men’s behavior anymore.
The younger me would have been glad to have been chosen. To be noticed. To be called pretty.
That girl has left the building.
I wonder—where is that cloak of invisibility which older women complain about? I don’t want to be noticed that way, just like I never enjoyed the leering looks, the catcalling, or the handsy guy friends.
Just leave me alone.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to completely disappear because I did that, too, and not in a good way. But I want that cloak available for when I choose to stay an observer, or just be a person who is finishing a workout.
I don’t want to be noticed by a man on his terms, because he likes what he sees. I want to be treated with respect, like every other person in that gym.
Down the road from the gym is a book cafe with a T-shirt on a clearance table that said “Strong female protagonist.” I know what it costs to disappear—I’ve done it before. I picked up the shirt to remind me— never again. I write my own story now. I come up with my own script.
What about you?
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