Book Review: Locker Room Diaries

Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth about Women, Body Image, and Re-Imagining the „Perfect“ Body by Leslie Goldman

ISBN: 978-0-7382-1042-1

Publisher: Da Capo ~ Lifelong Books

We women check out ourselves, and each other, more than men do. In other words, men don’t look at us the same way we look at ourselves. We scorn the pockets of cottage cheese clinging to our outer thighs; we pine for the rail-thin look of a runway model. We spank the treadmill with our Nikes in hopes of burning an adequate number of calories to feel even halfway human again after that bite of brownie at lunch. In our collective self-hatred, we perpetuate the negative mind talk for yet another generation of women with our locker room banter and our fitness club despair.

Negative body image is deeply rooted in US society. From T-shirts that read: “Does my butt look big?” to billboards of airbrushed models with unattainable figures, we seek approval from the body gods as if they were real.

Leslie Goldman warns us that they are not only not real, but they also reside strictly in our minds. Beware of those who lend voice to those gods, for they are false, harmful, and in some cases, lethal.

Locker Room Diaries is a witty, yet deeply poignant look inside the halls and walls of a Chicagoland fitness center locker room. We learn to sympathize with the author, whose own battle with anorexia and distorted perception of self, has marred her self-image in ways she powerfully handles throughout the book. Never sinking in self-pity, Ms. Goldman selects humor and self-reflection when treating the issue of fab versus flab.

“…from breast implants and mastectomy scars to bellies swollen from pregnancy and asses sagging from old age, every body part and every owner has a story to tell – and a lesson we can learn.” (page xv)

She traces the landscape of 36DD’s and, in her funniest moments, the shadow of “Southern hair” in various stages of removal. From Brazilian bikini waxes to ‘just the sideburns, please’, Ms. Goldman’s treatment of female vanity will leave you rolling on the floor for more.

Not all stories are funny, however. There is the fifty-six year-old exercise maniac whose ‘piano legs’ will never find the slimmness she desires; or the dinosaurian anorexic in her mid-thirties whose lengthy spinal cord resembles gum balls. Women are mostly portrayed as disliking some aspect of their physical appearance; but there are a resfreshing few sprinkled throughout the book who could care less. Most of the latter are immigrant women who work at the gym and do not actually work out there. I was left to wonder if the locker room only offers a one-sided view of women’s corporeal understanding. Most women who go to gyms want to improve some aspect of their physical selves.

Nonetheless, this book provided a wonderful shift into a more positive view of my own body image. I joined the gym while reading it. Each time I go, I thank myself for the love I am giving my body, which is indeed merely the house of our higher, more spiritual selves.