The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is it wrong to look at girls in the gym?
If it’s wrong then why do the all wear form fitting clothing or even more like a sporty bra? Why do some of their workout moves look a little like sexual movements (though they do have a legit exercise component)?
It is wrong to do this in roughly the same measure, and in the same way, as it is wrong for a trim young woman to stare/giggle contemptuously at a sloppy, unattractive male nerd at the gym.
In both cases, you're taking advantage of an innocent person's body to give yourself a secret little jolt of power and pleasant superiority. They're just trying to get stronger, you're taking this moment to intrude visually into their space and steal yourself a fun lust/schadenfreude break.
In both cases, you could easily rationalize by victim-blaming: well, why did this person come out looking like this if they didn't want other people to note the spectacle? But the fact is, you're disrespecting another person by treating their body as an object, and if you lean into this for long enough it will eat away at your capacity to relate to others as human beings. According to Kipling it will eat away at your "reason and faith," even, and that seems plausible to me.
In both cases, if the other person found out they would likely be sad, and some part of their freedom to use the common space would be taken away from them. (Go ahead, tell yourself that the woman should be flattered to be the object of someone's lust and the man should be proud that the woman is noticing him at all, lol.)
Only one set of these temptations applies to me, but I personally try to avoid yielding to it.
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