The Polish Gym – A Homoerotic Conundrum

One of the problems that left leaning people are trying to work on in Poland is the abuse doled out to minorities. This is particularly prevalent in terms of racism and homophobia. I can see, from the conversations I have with my teenage students, that it is getting better and, with race in particular, there is less and less stigma attached to foreigners. This is encouraging. Homophobia though, is still pretty rife and the use of gay as an insult is still pretty common. As you may well correctly imagine, the social group who are the slowest in ridding themselves of abuses of this kind are the no-necks. These generally underwashed, tracksuit-sporting “gentlemen” are often followers of football and their ideal Saturday afternoon begins with racist, antisemitic and homophobic chanting at opposing fans and leads on to a free for all scrap, where they punch each other in the head repeatedly (or sometimes use sticks) to ensure that any brain cells that might tip them over the edge of the “moron” category in the IQ test are abruptly snuffed out.

When I joined my gym, I had anticipated that a lot of these men would be the staple clientele, and so it came to pass that they are. When I started, I still had long hair, so I was slightly worried that they would give me a hard time about it but, quite the opposite, they were very friendly, helpful when I was confused about how to use machines and so forth. Thoroughly confused by this situation, I decided to observe the population of the gym folk. These were the general groups into which Polish gym users fall into:

Bitchy women

Yes, there are lots of women in very good shape at my gym. They come along and do classes, low weights and oodles of cardiological business. Good for them. However, they seem, almost exclusively, to come in groups of 2 or more. Their means of distracting themselves from the pain of the work out, rather than simply listening to the booming music, is to say horrid things about the fatness of other women who are working out. Of course, these target women are also at the gym and are, generally speaking, not fat. But they will pick on anything. I’ve even heard girls saying that another girl has a fat neck. Give it a rest ladies.

 

Regular Joes (and Joannas)

There are, in fact, a number of people who, like myself, just go to the gym, do a little workout and then go home, with little attention paid to others. These come in both genders and are normally around my sort of age – the sort of age where your body impolitely lets you know that this is the last chance you’re ever going to get to get into good shape and fitness and to try to undo some of the damage that a lifetime of night befores have done to your organs. I’d say we make up about 10% of gym goers.

 

Homoerotic Hunks

The vast majority of lads in a Polish gym are, though, bodybuilders. These guys either come to the gym with their mates, or within a very short time of their arrival become mates with all the other bodybuilders anyway. I admire their immense strength as, often, I will sit at a machine and realise that the weight setting that the last person was lifting is something like one and a half of me. Scary. But this is not the remarkable thing about them. Nor, indeed, are the ridiculously tiny shorts that they wear to the gym. No. It’s the interaction between these guys. They walk up to each other and say things like “Your biceps are looking great,” or “have you been working on your hamstrings? They’re looking so much bigger.” And so on and so on. This is all well and good, but the irony, I’m sure, is lost on these “gentlemen” of the fact that their homophobic chants and their positively homoerotic gym behaviour really don’t fit together. 

While writing this post, I thought back to this quite hilarious video (Polish language).