Massachusetts is light-years behind the rest of the country when it comes to gym culture. The first gym I ever joined here, in Cambridge, was a huge cold dirty warehouse crammed with universal weights and treadmills. The locker room was unspeakable. I’ve worked in inner-city schools with more ambiance.

The next gym I joined, near my office, was in the bottom floor of another office park, and felt like the health club version of a cube farm. The rooms were about six and a half feet high and the whole thing was fluorescently lit. Whenever I climbed up onto the treadmill, I felt like I was about to burst right through the drop ceiling.

When we moved to Port City, I joined the local gym. It was cozier than the warehouse and roomier than the cube farm. But the treadmills on the first floor only went up to 6 miles an hour (!). There were limited entertainment options in the cardio room, just two big-screen TVs with the audio blaring through an antiquated PA system. The water pressure in the showers was flaccid. Every class I took was off somehow; one time, someone left a yoga class early, and the instructor bitched, “I always knew she didn’t like me.” Namaste to you, too.

This year, I was motivated by the extended renovations to and subsequent closure of the YWCA pool to check out a gym across the river. Swimming is one of the best ways for the kids to get exercise in the winter months, and I was dreading a season without a pool. And the new gym was much nicer, although not anywhere near the amenity levels of the health clubs I belonged to in Chicago almost a decade ago. There are enough parking spots, though, and the treadmills go up to 7.5 miles an hour (maybe higher; that’s as far as I go). The locker room is comfortable. The workout rooms are nice. And there are TVs everywhere, although I’m not sure if that’s a plus or minus. Almost all of the cardio machines have individual TVs, with personal audio hook-ups, and there are additional screens in all the rooms with closed-captioning, if you prefer to listen to music while you watch/read television, like I do. Sometimes I feel the information overload is a little much, but then again, running indoors is boring, and a little trash TV really helps to pass the time.

Unfortunately, as I recently discovered, the TV reception in the club is confined to six channels: The NFL network, ESPN 1, ESPN2, the Sci-Fi channel, CNN, and some kind of advertising channel for the club that also has videos on it. Why would anyone assume that just because someone wants to play sports, that they like to watch them on TV? I certainly don’t, and since “Battlestar Galactica” was not playing on the Sci-Fi channel, I was forced to watch Christine Amanpour’s depressing report on orphans in Africa. I believe my feelings about watching CNN on the treadmill have been well-documented here, so I won’t elaborate, except to say that I would prefer some more diverting entertainment. Since about 80% of the population of the cardio room was female, I don’t know why the programming was so skewed to the male demographic.

As I was leaving, I noticed another room off the main cardio room. It had some cardio machines, a few weight machines, free weights, and (of course) five televisions mounted on the wall. It was separated from the cardio area from a glass wall, and I wondered what was special about this collection of equipment. Then I saw the plaque:

Women Only.

Hmmm. Women Only. How do I feel about that?

On one hand, I have a few female friends who say they don’t like working out in the same room with men, and most of them have joined a women-only gym as a result. Some say they feel intimidated by men who seem to know more about weight machines or exercises than they do. Some have complained about the unsightliness or unsoundliness (”all the grunting!”) of men at workout. Personally none of these things bothers me, and it is also quite a while since I have had to worry about men hitting on me at the gym. But I suppose I can see their point, and it does seem like a savvy marketing ploy on the part of this health club to compete with Curves.

On the other hand, at this crucial juncture in feminist history, is it really the time to start re-segregating? Today’s amenity is tomorrow’s ghetto, and once the gyms start instituting purdah, we’re on the slippery slope to A Handmaid’s Tale. And I think it might be hard to run in a burqa. If you’re intimidated by men at the gym, shouldn’t you just do a few more push-ups and get over it? And the gym doesn’t escape responsibility, either: shouldn’t they take pains to make the whole place welcoming to both sexes? (I suppose we won’t have really arrived at gender equality until not only the workout rooms but also the locker rooms are unisex, like on “Battlestar Galactica.” Speaking of…we’ve just started the third season, and, whoa! Starbuck wouldn’t ask for a women’s only room; she would just kill any man who looked sideways at her during a workout. But I digress.)

On the third hand (as my students used to say)…to what channels are the TVs in the “women only” room tuned? I’ll report back.