Egyptian Scribbles: Strange quirks at the gym

Friday 2 November 2007

Strange quirks at the gym

I've been going to quite a few exercise classes at the gym-- something new for me because I usually workout alone. There are a few features of these classes that always make me laugh. First, there is a great deal of communal groaning and moaning and squealing.... I'm used to being in a serious workout environment where you suffer in silence. Not here. One sit-up too many, and the women are giggling and groaning and crying out for mercy. Sometimes it makes me laugh and I'm relieved to know other people are also suffering. Other times I want to tell them to shut up because it slows the class down and the instructor ends up chatting to them for 5 minutes... This type of group commentary is just one example of the way that Egyptian society is much more vocal and communal than you'd find in the US or UK. It's what makes everyone so friendly - and so interfering!!

Another strange phenomenum is the fact that a number of women wear bin bags (yes, bin bags) under their trendy adidas/ nike sports gear. They rustle through the whole class. And, by the end, there is a line of sweat on the women's trousers where the bin bags end. I guess these women think they are losing weight. I can just see that they are getting sweaty and dehydrated. And I can't help but imagine that they are wearing giant industrial nappies under their clothes... not a sexy image.

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."