Portmarnock Golf Club doesn’t want women, so why should they want it?

IT’S not often a man becomes a billionaire because his mother died young.

But that’s the story behind the phenomenally successful fitness franchise called Curves. The founder’s mother died in her forties of heart disease due to bad diet and lack of exercise.

Devastated, he resolved to provide a means for women to exercise several times a week in pleasant surroundings with a low boredom factor.

It started in the States, but in the last couple of years has been cropping up all over Ireland, filled with women obeying taped instructions between music tracks advising them to “move to the next station and resume exercising”. Three circuits done within half an hour with a mixture of resistance and aerobic training and that’s it. Off to the day job.

I first encountered Curves in the United States several years ago, when a friend dragged me to one in Florida. The majority of the exercising women were in their sixties, with a sprinkling of 70 and 80-year-olds and one woman who reputedly was 93.

It was all very easy and pleasant, despite the mathematics of old age, which dictate that if you put three people over 60 together, within five minutes they’ll be discussing the recent hospital stay of themselves, their spouses, their children or their grandchildren. The other disadvantage in the American Curves is a determined jollification directed at the self-esteem of customers, taking the form of small posters decorated with daisies strongly encouraging each person to be proud of who they are because they are like nobody else.

Anybody with half a business brain could see that Curves was a franchise worth picking up, and indeed it proved to be precisely that. The maps showing the spread of Curves began to be measled with branches everywhere. Then the measles spread to Europe and in no time at all the red dots on Ireland were overlapping. This success establishes Curves as one of the fastest growing franchises in history.

If the street door of a Curves is accidentally opened by a man, it creates a stir on the inside. Because this is a no fly zone, you should pardon the expression. No male, junk or otherwise, need apply.

Objectively, this makes no sense. Circuit training is as good for men as it is for women. Lads who are bigger, stronger and want a more intensive workout can achieve just that in Curves by pushing themselves further on the machines and leaping up and down more vigorously on the intervening platforms. In the early days, it was possible to jump on and off the platforms as well as up and down. Until the air became thick with the sound of snapping ankle bones and customers were instructed to bounce or dance on the platform - about the size of a padded delivery pallet - but never to leave it. Insurance premia payouts can have a marvellously instructive effect on corporate policies, even when it comes to a particular exercise in an all-girl gym.

Asking why no men are present is something of a gaffe in Curves. No men is a given, like Tuesday following Monday.

“You couldn’t have a man on the next machine to you,” Curves members will tell you. “You just couldn’t You’d be SO self-conscious.”

Maybe my self-consciousness nerve has atrophied, but I can’t see why one would be more self-conscious in front of a fella than a female. Women criticise each other much more than men criticise them.

THOSE opposed to male involvement accept that point before swiftly changing the goalposts of the argument: men, they say, would be so focused on building up their muscles and working up a sweat that there’d be no talking to them. Oh, so you don’t go to Curves to exercise, you go to Curves to chat? No, they say, but chat is pleasant and the fact that the atmosphere and ease of talk within one gender would be inhibited by the presence of a scattering of the other gender is not an inconsiderable issue.

The rationale for the exclusion of men from Curves is not a million miles away from the argument advanced to explain Portmarnock Golf Club’s rules, which lay down that the club should consist of “members and associate members who shall be gentlemen properly elected and who shall conform with the rules of amateur status”.

Putting the amateur status bit to one side, Portmarnock has held to the ‘gentlemen properly elected’ requirement since 1894, and in the light of last week’s decision in the High Court, looks set to hang on to it for some time to come. Niall Crowley, chief executive of the Equality Authority, which had initiated proceedings against Portmarnock two years ago, has indicated that he may very well appeal the High Court judgment, describing the result as “disappointing”.

Disappointing it may be, but it’s arguable how significant it is. The law, at this point, is less effective than commerce in keeping sports clubs and associations on the straight and narrow.

The law didn’t touch golf clubs in the US which chose to demonstrate exclusivity by exclusion. But when the TV crews were moving in to transmit major tournaments, all it took was a few placards yelling RACISM! to make big corporations sponsoring those tournaments threaten to pull out their money. And the removal of big money can be amazingly effective in moving its recipients onto higher moral ground.

This pressure does not, however, serve in relation to Portmarnock Golf Club, which is not amenable to commercial persuasion. The course could long ago have become the natural home for the Irish Open, had a majority of members not taken exception to the incursion into their playing rights which would be caused by the preparation for and the management of such a major event.

The possession of substantial money, most of it ‘old money’, has allowed Portmarnock members, since its inception, to create for themselves a club of ‘like-minded and like-monied’ associates. The considerable cachet associated with membership of Portmarnock is defined less by the kind of people permitted to be involved than by the people who are not permitted to be involved.

Which raises a number of questions. If this club has more than a century of self-definition by being anti-women, why would women want to join it? To convert a few hundred men pickled in prejudice and good brandy? To reward decades of discrimination by donating fee money to those who have excluded your mother, grandmother and great grandmother?

Portmarnock Golf Club has fewer than 700 members, all male. Curves has hundreds of thousands of members all over Ireland. All female. But the Equality Authority isn’t pursuing Curves in the courts, despite the fact that its exclusion policy affects much more men than the number of women affected by Portmarnock’s.

Meanwhile, I’ve stopped going to Curves. I feel I shouldn’t pay money to any organisation that excludes another gender. Even if the other gender doesn’t want to get in. How pathetic is that?