Do not mess with angry feminists seeking to do pull-ups

I left a message on the voice mail of the YMCA's executive director, throwing about the phrases "gender discrimination," "totally unacceptable," and "valuable piece of equipment which needs to be made available to ALL members regardless of gender."

I got a call back! He claimed (very unconvincingly) that they had always planned to move the pull-up machine to where it would be accessible to all. He says they require a special crew to take it apart and reassemble it, so it can't be done till January. But come January, it will be in the basement (with other machines) rather than the men's locker room.

The whole affair strikes me as emblematic of how a lot of discrimination, not limited to gender, works: unless you're already in the priveleged group, you have no way of knowing what sort of perks that group is getting, and so don't even have the knowledge that they're getting stuff that your group isn't.

Conversely, sympathetic members of the priveleged group may not know either, and so would have no reason to tip you off: Adrian's first assumption was that I was not aware that the other assisted pull-up machine was in the women's locker room! And he only mentioned it to me at all because we'd had a whole conversation about how I had to use his because my gym didn't have one.

Salary inequities often function exactly like that, abetted by the social taboo against revealing one's salary.

ETA: Mistressing the pull-up

Do not mess with angry feminists seeking to do pull-ups

I left a message on the voice mail of the YMCA's executive director, throwing about the phrases "gender discrimination," "totally unacceptable," and "valuable piece of equipment which needs to be made available to ALL members regardless of gender."

I got a call back! He claimed (very unconvincingly) that they had always planned to move the pull-up machine to where it would be accessible to all. He says they require a special crew to take it apart and reassemble it, so it can't be done till January. But come January, it will be in the basement (with other machines) rather than the men's locker room.

The whole affair strikes me as emblematic of how a lot of discrimination, not limited to gender, works: unless you're already in the priveleged group, you have no way of knowing what sort of perks that group is getting, and so don't even have the knowledge that they're getting stuff that your group isn't.

Conversely, sympathetic members of the priveleged group may not know either, and so would have no reason to tip you off: Adrian's first assumption was that I was not aware that the other assisted pull-up machine was in the women's locker room! And he only mentioned it to me at all because we'd had a whole conversation about how I had to use his because my gym didn't have one.

Salary inequities often function exactly like that, abetted by the social taboo against revealing one's salary.

ETA: Mistressing the pull-up