On any given afternoon, the Student Rec Center is filled with people of both sexes getting down with their sweaty selves. Yet the areas are as clearly divided by sex as if they were separated by walls.
Women stick to the aerobics equipment and the machines upstairs.

Men use almost exclusively the treadmills and take over the free weight area and downstairs machines.
The few women I’ve seen wander into the free weight area are nearly always accompanied by a man — usually, so it would appear, a boyfriend. Sometimes the woman leans against a wall, “out of the way,” waiting for the man to finish his routine. Sometimes the man shows the woman things she can do with the weights.

Only once have I seen any unaccompanied female other than myself in these male-dominated areas.

One reason for this might be that women still struggle with the notion of “bulking up” if they work with too much weight. According to current research, that’s not true. Women just aren’t built to look like men. Female bodybuilders have to work really hard and specialize their diets to look like they do.

Why any woman would do that to herself is another topic for another column.

Women also don’t seem to know what to do with free weights. Free weights aren’t that hard to use and, in my experience, can actually be easier than working with a machine because your body doesn’t have to fit a preformed bit of metal.

But that still doesn’t explain why women don’t populate the downstairs machines at the Rec Center. No, the answer must be a simpler one.

Men are intimidating, especially in groups.

One female staff member at The Collegian told me a few weeks ago that the Rec Center had a machine she really liked but hardly used. It happened to be located downstairs.

“There are always guys all over it,” she said with a grimace.

As a former student-athlete, I’m certainly used to jockeying with large men for gym space. A few years back, my slotted workout time in the student-athlete’s gym coincided with the time half the football team came in to work out. To give you an idea of size, the student-athlete gym is about half the size of the downstairs portion of the rec center. There I was, a single white female with usually only one or two teammates, lost in a sea of shouting, sweaty guys who would get Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” piped at them over and over through the PA system if they didn’t finish on time. I constantly had to remind myself that I had as much right to be there as they did.

Ladies, I know how intimidating guys in the gym can be, often through no fault of their own. They’re benching 150 pounds and you can hardly press the 40-pound bar by itself. They’re over there in groups, sweating and grunting and popping veins out of their necks. You feel like Sprout next to the Jolly Green Giant.

We won’t even get into the sexist remarks some of them make about girls they’ve seen working out.
We need to infiltrate those areas en masse. You don’t need to spend half an hour figuring out creative things to do with free weights. Just walk over and do a few bicep curls or bench presses. Who knows? Your presence might encourage another woman to try it, too.

And guys, don’t ogle.