In two pieces for the Crimson, Lucy Caldwell and Nick Wells tackle the QRAC’s recent decision to block off “women’s-only” hours. In attempting to lacquer over what is clearly some visceral irritation at the prospect, they invoke one of the oddest new arguing incantations available: the conservative paean to “fairness”.

Caldwell:

But to cite a concern for equality while denying it to half the undergraduate population is preposterous.

[…]

Administrators who wish to cling on to this notion that this is an equality issue should, at the very least, make the situation equal by holding men-only hours in another gym at the same time.

and Wells:

Not only are Harvard’s policies harsh on those who live in the Quad, they are unfair to men. It might be possible to make a case for these hours were they actually advantageous for anyone. However, seeing how the policies are of effectively little use to anyone their only real effect is to discriminate against men who keep regular morning or afternoon workout hours. This seems fundamentally unfair to me.

It’s a grossly oversimplified reaction to an extremely complex problem, and it’s even more bizarre coming from these particular mouths. “Fairness” isn’t a mere mathematical quantity except when you’re dividing up a box of cookies with your little brothers; real-world explanations of “fairness” have to go beyond this to offer much explanatory potential. That’s why these conservative appeals to fairness simply come up against the affront of common sense: Harvard’s men, their most privileged sect, are hardly being crimed against in their exclusion from QRAC for a few hours. Conservatives know that any appeal to fairness taken all the way along its logical trajectory will undoubtedly end up at conclusions that are unfavorable to them, and so they keep their appeals petty and reactionary rather than intellectually robust.

For the record, I happen to agree that the QRAC restrictions are a poor idea. But I don’t reject the women’s-only hours because they’re unfair to me as a man—I’ve never set foot in QRAC; I prefer maintaining my famously muscular physique by racing steam-drills. What’s at stake here is, as I’ve timidly begun to argue below, the fundamental assertion that participation in the project of modernity requires sometimes the conscious and designed negation of our special-interest urges. Whoever’s feeling offended by working out in the presence of men needs to confront that first-order feeling of offense with a second-order understanding of integrability into La Plus Grande universal life. When we set up special structures by which we make those assertions of petty difference easy and costless, we exacerbate the lazy slouch into tribalism and tokenism that is in, in my mind, the hallmark of regression.

Of course, in the end, you should read Mark Greif’s “Against Exercise” (in n+1 1) and realize that all of this is more-or-less meaningless due to the fact that gym culture is, in a word, bullshit.