By: Randa Nabil
13/12/2020
It all started 6 years ago at the fitness center, the locker room in particular, Randa a teenage girl who was forming her personality at this time, met a strong muscled lady in her mid-30s and three other women witnessing her first tough experience from life.
Supposedly, we –as women- are supporting each other to reach our dreams and goals. The ironic here is we destruct each other instead!
The three women mentioned started to look at the muscled woman in a very rude and disgusted way in silence, few moments later, one of them finally came out of her silence saying “ugh! U look like men!!!” “How long have you been training?” the other two found the golden chance to speak up. They agreed on her opinion with their eyes are full of judgments and sarcasm.
I was about to get out of my silence to defend her. Yet, she interrupted me replying calmly “4 years of playing weight-lifting”. In no time one of them decided to express her hate by saying in a sarcastic tone “you’d better be married or else who will marry a woman stronger than him!”
I was too angry to see and hear such hateful words from females, who supposed to encourage and defend each other! But unfortunately, it’s only found in stories, novels, and movies.
There was a young innocent girl, after hearing all these negative comments her mind was blown. She had many confused thoughts; of being impressed by the muscled lady’s strength, power and unique body shape, and her auto-defensive technique of refusing such thing so as not to be odd, rejected, or stigmatized by the society like her.
All her impress turned into an immediate disappointment. Yet her innocence and purity took the full control and She asked politely “if I trained well, can I be strong like you?” the beautiful muscled lady replied in happiness “off course you can! And you will be even stronger”.
Unfortunately, the judging women didn’t stop here! They kept tackling how unfeminine to be muscled or playing those “manly sports” like karate, kung Fu, taekwondo, weight-lifting, cross-fit, etc. defending her closed point of view by saying “I will never let my daughters play such sports” “they are girls, they should look feminine and be presentable.”
The strong lady wanted to leave the place as soon as possible and she looked quite stressed and nervous finally she replied “Don’t worry your daughters won’t look like this from just training, it takes years of training and supplements to look like this. We are unlike men”.
Witnessing such situation in an early age, seeing how that beautiful lady got judged and bullied by the society with no rights resulted in planting a seed of hate inside me for “women” and how they can poison each other with just a word.
I wished she could defend her passion, dream sport that she loves. Instead she left in hurry to avoid the stupid comments from females like her! She even got embarrassed to encourage the little girl who saw her as a goal to be achieved and a “role model”.
Comments