Brings to mind an amusing bit in a book by the mountaineer, Joe Simpson. Speaking of attending a gym:
"There is a peculiar contradiction of signals in some of these establishments which I have never been able to resolve. On the one hand, everyone is there to train, to work up a sweat, tone those muscles and get fit; on the other hand, sometimes it seems more akin to a fashion parade than a no-pain no-gain routine. I know it's rude to stare. Naturally it's politically incorrect to display the slightest attraction for your fellow devotees of agony, but it is also well nigh impossible. If everyone wore baggy, loose fitting tops and tracksuit trousers, there wouldn't be much of a problem, but life isn't so easy. The trend of ladies gym wear makes it hard, so to speak. There seems to be an obsession with leotards, body suits, buttock-splitting Lycra thingies, swim suits worn over swim suits, countless variations of attire that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination.
From a practical point of view, I can't think of anything sweatier and more uncomfortable to wear during training sessions. Performing squats while wearing a cord-thin G-string that threatens to split your cheeks up level with your shoulders looks unspeakably painful. And if you are wearing, say, a black leotard, why then put a skin-tight swim suit on top of it with the legs cut so high that they seem to go up to your armpits? Or pull on what looks like a scarlet pair of bikini bottoms so lacking in material that they merely create a vivid red triangle which for the average man has the effect of a hypnotist swinging a fob-watch?
"Some of the leg machines found in gyms today place the athlete in the most undignified and vulnerable positions imaginable. To wear such luridly revealing clothes and then climb onto a machine that threatens to spread your legs so wide that you're in real danger of having your ankles meet behind your back seems to me absurdly illogical. The more so when some unfortunate male, already plagued by mirrors, happens to look up at the wrong moment and finds himself helplessly transfixed by an overtly sexual vision in red and black who glares back in ferocious condemnation of his lechery.
"I'm not sure it is lechery in fact. When the very style of clothing is screaming out 'look at this body', and the design makes the legs look twice their length, the buttocks split and lifted, the breasts outlined perfectly in fluorescent colour, what are you supposed to look at? Nine times out of ten, looking away simply brings another colour-isolated part of a woman's body squeezing and thrusting and spreading in front of you. Short of staring fixedly at the ground and finding the exercise machines by feel, it is impossible not to look.
"I was once accosted in the gym by an irate lady who angrily demanded to know what I was staring at. Since I was struggling to release myself at the time from an over-weighted pecs machine that was threatening to dislocate both my shoulders, I found it hard to gather my thoughts.
" 'You', I said bluntly. 'Your scantily dressed body that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, that keeps leaping into view wherever I go. What did you think I was staring at?'
"Well, that's what I would have liked to have said instead of spluttering a mortified apology, feeling my face blush with shame.
"It seems that the prim and proper message is that such garments are worn not to be sexy but because they make the wearer feel good. They simply display the wearer's confidence in herself. Well, that's as may be, but it strikes me they display a damn sight more than that, and to deny it is plain self-delusion. I'm not easily offended or prudish in any way, far from it, but I do resent being the victim of a dishonest conspiracy. If these clothes are the uniform of the post-feminist woman, as I've heard said, and are about women's empowerment and not men's desire, then I'm a wildebeest.
"To wear outrageously enticing apparel and at the same time profess the sensibilities of a sentimentalised Victorian spinster is shamelessly deceitful. Sure, I'm not allowed to touch. I know that. But faced with spread-eagled semi-nakedness, can't I just leer a little?"
From "Storms of Silence". (hope I don't get done for infringement of copyright, so I'll say here that Joe Simpson's works are well worth buying, highly recommended!