I need to start this by saying that LA Fitness is my gym. Okay, not *that* LA Fitness, the now-infamous one, but *a* LA Fitness. (Three of 'em, actually - the one near my workplace, the one near my home, and the one I use on the weekends because it's next to my preferred grocery store.) And maybe it's a function of where I live - suburbia central - or maybe it's a function of living in a climate that pretty much demands we all spend the winter getting fluffy and pale in semi-hibernation, but even in my fat-ish body, I've mostly felt okay in my gym. At least, I've never felt as if I stuck out enough to provoke someone to Snapchat me to hordes of followers with a nasty caption.
But.
I've seen the looks when I approach the free weights section or the Smith machine. I've heard the tone in the voice of the elfin 20-something behind the desk when I asked her about when spin class started and she took it upon herself to "warn" me that it was "like, really hard." I've felt the lithe instructor's pointed stare at me specifically when she asked if "anyone here is new to yoga," even though I'd clearly been doing warm-up sun salutations before class started. And I get it - I don't look like a weightlifter, a cyclist, a yogi. But here's the thing - how our bodies look at any given point in time has very, very little to do with what our bodies can actually do, and it's inordinately frustrating to me to have to deal with size-ist b/s in the VERY place dedicated to improving physical ability. It's bad enough to get the eyebrow pop from a coworker when I mention a seven mile training run I did over the weekend - I don't need to see it in the one place where I spend three to five days a week actively demonstrating what I'm capable of physically achieving.
I don't know her, but I'd bet that Dani Mathers is, as so many bullies are, a profoundly damaged person at heart, one who for some reason doesn't know or never learned that we are all so much more than just what our bodies look like. But the bigger question for everyone active in the fitness community to ask ourselves is whether and to what extent our own thoughts and words and actions feed and grow the Dani Matherses of the world. It's easy to decry the heinous invasion of privacy she committed against an unsuspecting and innocent person, but smaller, subtler versions of this kind of body-shaming happen in gyms across the country every. single. day. The patronizing stares when women approach the free weights or "heavy duty" weight machines. The eye roll when an overweight person hops on the treadmill next to yours. The comments designed to "subtly"* imply to someone that they don't belong in a particular part of the gym or a particular kind of class or event because their body doesn't match your stereotype of what a person doing a particular activity "should" look like. We can't, as a community, commit (or stand by while others commit) endless micro- (and not-so-micro-) aggressions against people with non-conforming bodies and then act shocked and horrified when someone like Dani Mathers comes along and makes public our community's worst face.
Fitness should not be an elite and exclusive club - in fact, achieving fitness is arguably one of the few goals available to literally every body. Dani Mathers either forgot that or never learned it, and that failing falls squarely on the shoulders of the wider fitness community. There is a reason Dani Mathers didn't realize that what she was doing was wrong, and while it would be easy and comforting to write it off as a function of her own uniquely bad character, it would also be false (or, at least, partly false). Because until we all acknowledge and internalize how deeply wrong it is to assume we know anything at all about another person solely from looking at his or her body, we're going to continue to create Danis, and continue to frustrate and discourage people with non-conforming bodies from reaching their fitness goals (whatever those goals may be). Is that who and what we want to be? As someone with a non-conforming body who also loves the fitness world, I can only hope the answer is no.
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