Walking into the Scot Center on another Monday night, I swipe my COW card and head straight towards the treadmill, figuring out how much time I want to spend running before I lift. I set down my water bottle in the cupholder while I increase the volume on my workout playlist, and it’s just another normal day for me at the gym — until two miles on the treadmill later.
Completely zoned out while running, a tap on the treadmill from the hand of the student working the front desk startles me. “Can you put a shirt on?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. I press quick stop during my run so that she can further explain that this is the new dress code policy, and that if I want to continue my workout I have to put on a shirt.
Even though I have been showing up to the gym in sports bras and athletic leggings every time so far this whole semester, this is the first time someone ever asked me to cover myself up; needless to say I was shocked and confused. The Scot Center implemented a new policy this school year stating that, “All facility users who engage in a recreational activity must be properly dressed for that activity. Shoes and shirts must be worn at all times.”
I’m not trying to find a loophole in this rule like a lawyer, but I am trying to point out the flaw in the Scot Center’s lack of definition of the word “proper.” Scrolling up and down repeatedly on their website’s general rules and guidelines page, I failed to find any definition of what it means to be “properly dressed.” Besides this rule’s following line of asking students to wear shoes and a shirt at all times, the website gave no other mention of dress code do’s and don’ts.
I find it almost unprofessional for the Scot Center to not provide any elaboration on what they mean by “proper,” considering this word clearly has a very broad interpretation. If the Scot Center believes that “proper” means wearing a shirt at all times regardless of the activity you are doing, then they have a very narrow meaning of the word “proper” in context of a gym.
A very plausible counterpoint to my argument is that the Scot Center is enforcing this regulation for sanitary issues and concerns — an issue that I fully understand to be important, especially at a place where germs thrive. When students and staff are working out, sweat and saliva easily comes into contact with gym equipment, which is disgusting but true. Because this college is practically a cesspool of germs, diseases and sources of infection, ensuring the cleanliness of the facility and equipment is important and vital to the health and wellbeing of gym-goers!
However, tackling the degrees of sanitation at the Scot Center is not defeated by asking me to cover my abdomen and lower back. The Scot Center has multiple sets of paper towels and bottles of sanitizing spray dispersed throughout the gym for equipment users to take and clean with, a ubiquitous rule known to almost all gym goers and regulated by all workers by the Scot Center.
I find it hard to understand why I can have the entirety of my arms and legs — the parts of my body that actually touch gym equipment — bare at the gym, but not my abdomen or lower back. My gym outfit often parallels outfits I wear to class or just on a regular day; my athletic leggings come up past my navel, while my sports bra is a mere two to three inch gap from those leggings — often times my sports bras even come all the way up to my collarbone.
The point of describing my everyday gym outfit is to reveal how it shows the same amount of skin when I wear a crop top with high-waisted jeans to class. Not once during my three semesters at Wooster have I had a professor or teaching assistant pull me aside to tell me that my outfit was not a form of “proper dress” for the classroom.
My ultimate reason for voicing my experience at the Scot Center is that we should not be enforcing such vaguely defined rules and then target gym goers in the middle of their workouts. I believe the Scot Center should clarify their reasoning behind this dress code and their poorly constructed set of rules.
Students like myself should not have to worry about being forced to leave the gym because of what they are wearing, the gym should be a productive environment for students — it is not productive at all to have these vague rules that single out students.
Sally Kershner, a Features Editor for the Voice, can be reached for comment at SKershner19@wooster.edu.