Girls Just Like Me
Whenever I come home to the US, I always find that one of the venues where I encounter the most reverse culture shock is my parents’ gym in Nashville. (And not just because people assume I’m a missionary… although that’s def part of it.)
Last night was no exception. My sister and I headed over around 6 PM, right in time for the after-work rush, and as soon as I stepped out into the workout area, I was in shock…
There are other women who work out here.
Let me be slightly more precise: women who are actual athletes. Chicks with bulky quads and sinewy delts who lift more than 5 lbs. and have good form and sweat and grunt and crank the music on their iPods so loud you can hear it leaking out through their headphones, blocking any possible verbal advances from flirtatious guys who somehow didn’t get the message: I’m here to kick my own ass, not chat up yours.
Girls just like me!
This may not seem like a shock. But in Dubai - save for a God-given fellow American expat runner friend - my female counterparts in the gym are, ahem… somewhat less compelling. There’s the pouty, over made-up Lebanese girl in a padded bra who interrupts her boyfriend’s squash game every time she completes a set to get a new assignment, and cries when he tells her to figure out her own workout. There’s the saggy fifty-something Russian woman who does weird interpretative dance moves splayed out on the Swiss ball in a crop top and see-through leggings. There’s the occasional chubby, pasty British gal who spends more time wiping the treadmill down with disinfectant than she does running walking on it. And most memorably, at the illicit women’s gym I go to in Riyadh when I’m in Saudi Arabia for work (illicit because, of course, women’s sports are “satanic”), there are whole gaggles of Saudi women who sit on the ellipticals - as though they were benches! - idly gabbing, sending text messages, and filing their fingernails. Way to get those endorphins flowing, girls.
So it was against this backdrop that tonight I found myself wanting to run up to all of these American girls - all these strong women, out there pushing themselves like it ain’t no thang - and be like, “Your triceps look great! I really like the kind of squat you’re doing! Are you training for a race? DO YOU WANT TO BE FRIENDS?!”
I didn’t, of course. Because while I am awkward, I am not that awkward. And because regardless, I can’t bring them back to Dubai with me. But it did make me thankful, once again (I can see Alex’s eyes starting to roll from 8,000 miles away as I climb onto my well-worn soapbox about women’s sports) that I grew up in a country where gender equality is enshrined on the playing field and off; where little girls are put into P.E. class alongside little boys; where Title IX gives us all the opportunity to compete; and where our First Lady is ogled not for her cleavage, but for her arm muscles.
And as I walked out of the gym an hour later, glistening and panting and kinda crushed from my workout, I thought to myself: it’s good to be in a place, at least a couple weeks a year, where the girls are just like me.
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The (mis)adventures of an All-American girl in the Middle East.
