Uppity Wimmen

Working out at the gym is deadly dull, earth-shatteringly boring. Nobody wants you to know that. You'll see ads for popular gyms featuring young men and women with impeccable bodies, always glowing and smiling, going about whatever it is they're going about in the best of cheer, the best of health and -- I'm just guessing here -- in the best of cars, usually a BMW. Part of this is actually true for the gym I go to, at least the BMW part, thanks to a huge influx of people who have way more money than I do.

But back to the "working out at the gym is deadly dull" meme. It used to be that the proprietors of the gym showed movies on one of the six televisions at the front of the "aerobic" section, the part of the gym with all the lifecycles, elliptical machines, and treadmills. Sometimes the movie would be good, sometimes bad, but it was at least a change, something that wasn't either network news, ESPN, or... well, network news. Or soaps, depending on the time of day. Then the movies went away, because the people who worked there got tired of dragging out the ladder and sticking a DVD or a tape into the player. I think.

The movies were replaced by Turner Classic Movies, which wasn't really a terrible choice. Some of the time. Instead of a variety of recent movies, we were treated to a variety of mostly old movies, some as thrilling as Hercules and Samson and Some Other Sweaty Guy Versus... I dunno. Some sweaty chick. And it stayed this way for quite a while, at least until the great Public Television Debacle. Someone, and we may never know who, changed the channel one night. To Public Television. Sesame Street. Cute furry puppets and muppets and what-have-you. And it stayed that way for two days.

I don't know who snapped, but someone clearly snapped, and when I went to the gym one morning the channel had been changed to something else. Something that wasn't public television. Something that featured... Chuck Norris. Chuck "I got me a beard that I been growin' for two weeks now" Norris. Chuck "watch me fake a roundhouse kick to this guy's face!" Norris. Every morning, for the next two weeks, I got to watch Chuck Norris beat the crap out of somebody. Several somebodies. Sometimes, he -- or maybe his co-workers -- would shoot a bunch of bad guys. Sometimes, the bad guys would take Nia Peeples, whose character seems to know quite a bit about martial arts, hostage. This would only happen after she had beaten the crap out of two or three or twelve of the bad guys, but they'd manage to overwhelm her in the end, either by force or by deciding that it was probably a good idea to use those guns they had brought along.

And so Chuck Norris and his coworkers, the guys this time, would be called upon to rescue Nia. This might involve gunplay at some point, but it always, always devolved into hand-to-hand combat, with lots of flying kicks and grunts and people spinning through the air and maybe one of the good guys looking like he was just about beaten to a pulp, only to rally and pulverize two or three or twelve bad guys.

And then one day even the Chuck Norris stuff was gone. No more "Walker, Texas Ranger" for me and the rest of my gym-going compatriots. No, the channel had been changed to... FX! I don't know what kind of shows FX has on most of the time, but judging from what I saw in the gym there is a requirement that it include many explosions, much shooting, and many, many people dying. It actually made all the "Walker, Texas Ranger" stuff look mild. I thought about complaining, again, but decided against it. The last time I complained, the owner -- yes, the actual owner -- pleaded that she was "too short" to change the channel. So much for that.

But -- and this is only a guess -- it seems that the women finally got fed up, finally reached the breaking point, and decided on their own revolt. Yesterday, when I went in for my usual morning routine, the channel had been changed to... (drum roll, please!) WE, the Women's Entertainment network. All chick programming, all the time. Few, if any, explosions. Nobody getting shot. Nobody beating the snot out of ten or twenty people at a time. Just touchy-feely stuff, lots of romance, lots of Chick Issues. In the gym. The Manly Gym. (The Manly Gym that, it just so happens, is used by mostly women.)

I guess that did the trick. The next day, the channel had been changed back to Turner Classic Movies, and I was treated to something in black and white wherein Gary Cooper did some truly heroic things. I don't actually know what the heroic things were since I had my iPod plugged in. I don't ever listen to the television audio; that just ruins everything. I looked around the room, though, and I could swear that every woman in the place had the same hint of a smile on her face.