Peter Lloyd is upset with his gym over the hours scheme that he feels is an example of sexism towards men.
The Kentish Town Sports Centre in North London currently bans men and boys from working out for 442 hours every year. According to Lloyd, who wrote an editorial in the Daily Mail on the subject recently, these hours are not only sexist for being exclusionary, but they also create an unjust system where men are paying the same full price for a membership that is inactive for 442 hours a year.
Lloyd suggests that the gym should offer men only hours to balance out the exclusion, to abolish the women only hours, or to charge men less for their membership to make up for the hours they cannot use.
“But, finances aside, the Kentish Town Sports Centre has a social responsibility to encourage equality as well as physical health. Forcing men – whether 70 year-old pensioners or 13 year-old boys who attend with their mothers – to leave a room because of their gender, rather than their behaviour, is degrading. It’s also eerily reminiscent of when African Americans were separated from their caucasian peers in 1940s America.”
What do you think. While it is obviously unfair for men to be paying the same price as women for less time, is canceling women’s hour the best way to correct this? Should men also be afforded their own time, free of women?
