This past summer, we posted a story that listed nine great reasons to go topless at the gym (for starters, it gets hot when you work out), and we completely stand by every single point we made.
But one university in California didn’t get the memo.
A freshman at Santa Clara University was recently kicked out of her gym for wearing inappropriate exercise attire.
The offending outfit? A cotton T-shirt that revealed about an inch of her stomach.
When Grace DiChristina spoke to the supervisor of the athletic facility, she received some pretty infuriating feedback for why she was being thrown out. First, she was told that the exposed skin on her stomach was a health hazard, since MRSA (a pretty serious staph infection) can spread through skin contact. And secondly, since her gym was part of a Jesuit institution, her outfit was too scandalous.
Hrmmm, okay. Let’s start with this horrible double standard, which DiChristina took to Facebook to address. “Muscles tees with long armholes are extremely popular for men,” she wrote. “If you walk into Leavey Center, the first thing you see is that the gym is packed with men sweating directly onto the equipment. However, these men feel safe. One of the rules in the gym is to wipe down equipment after use. Why are women being singled out and punished just because other people can’t follow the rules?”
The idea that DiChristina’s outfit wasn’t Jesuit school-approved is pretty sexist, indeed. “I do not go to the gym to be sexualized or looked at by other people — I go to improve my health and my self-confidence,” she wrote. “Being told to leave the facility because my outfit is inappropriate is more than just annoying; it’s humiliating and degrading.”
Secondly, while MRSA can be spread through skin-to-skin contact and spaces where shared equipment is used (like the gym) can up the risk of infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a bare midriff does not pose any greater risk than bare legs, bare arms, or the bare ribcages of men in muscle tees, as DiChristina aptly pointed out in her post.
DiChristina has been getting (mostly) positive feedback for speaking out. After Her Campus SCU caught wind of her Facebook defense, the story was picked up and spread through social media, igniting a chorus of disdain over the gym singling out DiChristina for showing less skin than many men do.
Keeping things clean in the gym is always a priority for public health, but that is not the issue here. The issue is that women’s bodies are still considered “dirty” in the first place.