Command and control
Before my hysterectomy, I was fit and active. I’d been exercising regularly—yoga, running, hillwalking—since my late teens. I even had visible stomach muscles.
And yet, I’m not a sporty person. A neighbour calls me ‘Sporty Spice’ when she encounters me running or cycling on the river path. This is a huge joke for me. I loathed sport at school. I was the last to be chosen for a team in PE, the runt who couldn’t catch or hit a ball (I was long-sighted in one eye, but nobody knew or cared). It’s no accident that team sport is presented as a tool of totalitarian society in my first novel, The Inheritors.
What would my PE teachers think now? I still loathe sport, and I’ve achieved my body without doing any.
As a high-achieving teenager, I absorbed the ideas of 1980s career-woman feminism. One of these was that ‘success’ as a woman still meant being physically attractive as well as being a brain surgeon, prime minister, judge, CEO or rocket scientist (a regular job didn’t count as ‘success’). You couldn’t shake off the old standards in exchange for the new. However successful you were in your career or vocation, you could still be brought down by your appearance, on which the world was entitled to pass judgement.
In the course of the decade, the physical standard for women went from merely being thin to being thin and fit. ‘Fit’, at this historical moment, meant ‘toned’: a clean, sharp female outline, no flab or cellulite, but no disturbing musculature either. Your flesh had to be firm without being visibly strong. It wasn’t enough any more to be thin; you had to exercise as well.
This set up a cruel contradiction: to exercise, you need energy, and exercise also generates appetite. (For this reason, some ‘weight loss experts’ of the period advised against it.) In their hubris, anorexics defy their bodily humanity, exercising to burn off calories without taking any in, running (literally) on brute, maniacal willpower rather than food. Over the years, I’ve seen a few of them: sunken-eyed skeletons wrapped in thermals forcing a grim, shuffling jog along city streets or through parks, apparently invisible to everyone but me.
Jane Fonda famously managed the contradiction by being bulimic, which does allow some energy intake, although at the cost of teeth and oesophagus, along with other long-term effects.
In the mid-1980s, aerobics reached country Australia. Like dancing, but easier, aerobics made fitness possible without the tedium and brutality of sport or any engagement with the very male and off-putting rituals of lifting weights. On obligatory school sports afternoons, non-sporty types could go to the local fitness centre, bounce and sweat through a high-impact (there was no other kind) aerobics class and then faff about in the weights enclosure. Back in the day, there was a massage belt for waist slimming, a relic of 1970s ‘passive exercise’.
At first, people—women—did aerobics barefoot. Then those white leather Reeboks came in. The unnatural combination of leotards and trainers took some getting used to. Watching the sublime Rose Byrne in Physical, rocking shiny tights and leotard, the legs cut all the way up to a skinny elastic belt, I had a rare spasm of nostalgia for my formative decade.
The 1990s brought an even greater visual shock, as the standard of female fitness cranked up another notch. I remember my mouth dropping at the first view of Linda Hamilton doing pull-ups in Terminator 2, in the Bourke St Hoyts cinema in Melbourne, followed by the butch female commando in Aliens 2. I’d never seen muscles on a female body, apart from East German shotputters, and we all knew the reason for that. ‘East German shotputter’ was not a compliment. Female bodies warped by steroids into borderline masculinity were unnatural and grotesque.
‘Working out’ was no longer just about jumping up and down in a roughly coordinated, dance-adjacent way and getting sweaty. The next iteration of group classes, ‘pump’, involved switching (low-level) weights on a barbell while keeping up with the music and not dropping the weights on your by-now sneakered toes. By this time, I’d dumped aerobics (‘too easy’) for running and yoga.
Yoga had gone hardcore, from the thin women in tights in my mother’s (unused) copy of Richard Hittleman’s yoga book to the gymnastic contortions of Ashtanga yoga, as practised by Madonna. As a trained dancer, she’d had a massive head start. Gentle ‘hatha’ classes were for grannies who needed a bit of a stretch; serious yoga jacked you up. Serious yoga women had shoulders and arms like teenage boys. One of my yoga teachers, back in my London days, had an obvious eating disorder, which made her twisty exertions hard to watch.
From the 2000s, advertisements for sportswear featured muscular (but still slim), sweating female bodies and aspirational slogans. ‘Fitness’ was monetised into a cultish pursuit of feelgood endorphins and a near-puritanical lifestyle of minimal-carb ‘clean eating’ and expensive supplements. It wasn’t enough to be merely not fat along with financially and professionally successful; you had to have the body of an athlete. This applied to both sexes. As someone who used to have an eating disorder, I travelled in the margins, avoiding full-blown obsession.
Alongside the rise of ‘workout’ culture, female protagonists in action films no longer needed rescuing. They acquired the close-combat capacities of special forces and fought men on equal terms, despite the obvious size and bulk difference. I could appreciate the feminist sentiment, but the denial of biological reality didn’t seem helpful. Anyone who’s tried to fight off a man or even playfully wrestled one is all too quickly aware of the massive disparity in strength. Why pretend that women, short of having super-powers, are physically the same as men? I could weight-train like an Olympian, but any boy who’s passed through puberty is stronger than me. This crosses my mind whenever I pass a gang of schoolboys in the streets. The 14–15yos sometimes scare me more than 20-something thugs.
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A few years ago, when I suddenly lost my ability to sleep and had a few hot flushes, I went straight to my GP and asked for HRT patches. Several sticky labels later, my sleep was restored, and that annoying, embarrassingly cliched, sweaty sensation went away.
I felt rather pleased with myself, to be honest. I’d taken the Pill most of my life to get around crippling periods, eventually stopping them altogether with the progesterone-only pill, so I had no issue with hormonal intervention. Female biology was a bitch. Thank God for science. I had little sympathy for women who complained about their periods but didn’t think skipping them was ‘natural’. Travelling in planes and cars isn’t natural. Mobile phones aren’t natural. Having ten kids, seeing most of them die, and dying yourself at 30, completely clapped out (if you’d survived childbirth), is completely natural.
Screw natural. Men have always identified women with ‘nature’—the opposite being, naturally, ‘man-made’—but being a modern woman, in control of your own life, existing as a mind as well as an animal body, mere breeding stock, means defying nature.
Around this time, I also took up weights, a modest dumbbell routine. Running and yoga, which I had used to manage my bodily self for decades, were no longer quite cutting it. I could feel—or I imagined—my body softening and decaying, an inevitable progression to old ladyhood. It’s considered normal for women to put on weight in midlife, fittingly, around the middle. Some women acquire barrel torsos and slack, wasted legs and buttocks, as if their bodily substance is migrating north. That wasn’t going to happen to me.
I’ve read all the feminist literature on how society despises middle-aged and old women as hags and crones: a woman who is no longer shaggable or fertile has no further reason to exist, other than to care for grandchildren. She is an annoyance, an eyesore, waste of resources. Many women fear the loss of male attention as they age. I don’t need male attention to validate my existence, but I don’t want to be an old woman either. Not yet. Not for a long time. There’s so much I want to do, and I need a strong, fit body and sharp mind to do it.
And my upgraded command-and-control system worked. Before the cancer diagnosis, I felt as fit as I’d ever been. Being trim—not physically middle-aged—was part of my identity. I was proud of having avoided, so far, the flesh-swamp of female decline. (Full disclosure: not having children helped.) Being active kept my mind clear, regulated my appetite and sleep, kept the dark clouds at bay and made me generally happier, as much as temperamentally possible.
I was the rarest of creatures, a woman who actually liked her body. I was reconciled, long ago, to being short-waisted, under-tall and not having a delicate, Barbie-doll nose. If I were given the option to change anything, I’d offload headaches and acquire the ability to sleep on planes.
As soon as the biopsy results came through, I was told to stop HRT immediately. I haven’t slept through the night since, except on sleeping pills.
At the pre-op consultation, I asked if I could go back on HRT once I was cleared of cancer. The oncologist looked at me as if I’d asked to resume smoking crack.
I imagined myself turning into a crone, like the fire god priestess Melisandre in Game of Thrones, who takes off her magic necklace and immediately shrivels, collapsing into a dusty skeleton in the middle distance.
‘No high-impact exercise for at least 12 weeks,’ said the oncologist. ‘And don’t lift anything heavier than a handbag.’
Twelve weeks! That was more than enough time to lose muscle mass, put on weight and go bat-shit crazy. To be afflicted, in short, by female middle age.
(To be continued)