Female Soft-Bro

Naomi Kutin is 14 years old, and she is stronger than me.

I am a six foot tall, 210-pound, 25 year old man, and Naomi Kutin is considerably stronger than I am in every lift except for the bench press. Even in that, I don’t tower over her: I bench 140 right now, and when I was her age I wouldn’t have even come close to 110. You’ll notice that she is small— you know, about the size of a 14 year old girl.

The fitness industry does not want women to be strong. I go to a scruffy black iron gym that overlooks some elevated train tracks. A few blocks away, there is a Lucille Roberts: The Women’s Gym. From the street, looking up, all I see are rows of cardio machines against the windows. I went online to look up information about Lucille Roberts, because obviously it is not the kind of place where I, a large bearded man, would be allowed to barge in and demand information about their facilities without the police being alerted to my presence. So I googled for information about strength training at Lucille Roberts, and instead I got this:

How to Lose Ten Pounds in Ten Days

I looked up some reviews of the local Lucille Roberts and apparently they have no squat racks or free weights heavier than 30 pounds. Now, I totally understand the need for a women’s-only gym, because even as a man my predominantly male gym was intimidating to me, and also because masculine strength has an unfortunate history of being used to do awful things to women. It just seems terrible that the alternative’s message seems to be “shrink rapidly without concern for the actual composition of your body.” I wish I could offer any solution to this.

Cardio exercises are not bad, but most cardio is inapplicable to daily life outside of sporting activities. Yes, running around is great practice for running around, and biking is great practice for biking, but strength training makes you more capable of interacting with the world around you in the simplest ways. I am almost never called on to actually run, and the few times that come to mind all involve trying to catch a train. On a day to day basis I am required to pick things up and carry them around. I can’t tell you how good it feels to do something as simple as loading suitcases into the trunk of a car and finding it far easier than it used to be.

One of the most pervasive reasons I’ve heard discouraging women from strength training is the myth of “getting bulky.” This is where I point to Naomi Kutin, who is a very tiny person. The fact of the matter is that it’s extraordinarily difficult for most women to become “bulky” without dramatically modifying their body chemistry. Ironically, the kind of strength training that is most often recommended to women— lower weights, higher reps— is better for sheer muscle growth than strength. However, when the weight goes below a certain threshold, it just becomes an endurance exercise. That threshold is crossed by these weird pink dumbbells that weigh so little as to be useless outside of the early stages of rehabilitating someone who has recently awoken from a long coma.

These weights will not make you stronger, these weights will waste your time. Yet these are the only weights people want women to be handling. I asked women on twitter to tell me if they’d ever been explicitly discouraged from becoming physically strong because it would make them “too masculine.” Some responses:

“Yes. I’ve had several boyfriends I’ve been stronger than, and they were perpetually butthurt about it. I’ve also made more money than pretty much every boyfriend I’ve ever had, which bothered them more than the strength thing. Men are so fragile.”

“Yes, in little ways, but I have a friend whose ex literally said he’d break up with her if she got too buff.”

“Less discouraged & more open fear/ disgust b/c of myths about ‘getting bulky’