crushing the body

Barbara Ehrenreich writes of her experience in the gym during the initial boom of the modern fitness industry:

I may not be able to do much about grievous injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order, but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks. The gym, which once looked so alien and forbidding to me, became one of the few sites where I could reliably exert control.

To men of the Left, she continues,

fitness culture may have looked like a “retreat.” But for women, “control over one’s body” could be understood as a serious political goal. While you didn’t have to be a feminist to take up physical fitness, most women pouring into gyms had been through the punishing culture of female dieting and thinness, with its purging and fasts. They knew that women were supposed to focus on shrinking their bodies and becoming, as near as possible, invisible.

But,

… if women are in a way “masculinized” by the fitness culture, one might equally well say that men are “feminized” by it. Before the 1970s, only women were obsessed with their bodies, although in a morbid, anorectic way. But in the brightly lit gyms, where walls are typically lined by mirrors, both sexes are invited to inspect their body images for any unwanted bulges or loose bits of flesh and plan their workouts accordingly.

These observations, and others, on wellness culture culminate in a wider discussion of class in the final pages of her chapter “Crushing the Body” in Natural Causes:

Fitness, or the efforts to achieve it, quickly took on another function for the middle class — as an identifying signal or “class cue.” Unfit behavior like smoking or reclining in front of the TV with a beer signified lower-class status, while a dedication to health, even if evidenced only by carrying a gym bag or yoga mat, advertised a loftier rank. … Working out is another form of conspicuous consumption: Affluent people do it and, especially if muscular exertion is already part of their job, lower-class people tend to avoid it.

She continues,

Many gym-goers will tell you cheerfully that it makes them feel better, at least when the workout is over. But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do. We are talking here about a relative elite of people who are more likely to give orders than to take them — managers and professionals. In this class, there are steep penalties for being overweight or in any other way apparently unhealthy.

While the larger chapter is more meditation than structured argument, I understand her central worry to be the generalization, or spillover, of a culture of combat and control to domains where it is either inappropriate or directly harmful to the basic task of living well. Her warnings are largely well-taken, but they downplay a healthy ambivalence that I see in my own experiences. Mirrors and scales and heart-rate monitors need not be part of a panoptic regime of self-surveillance that dominates and immiserates. Nor does ‘combat’ have to be at the center of one’s gym experiences. Though, of course, they can. On a social level, gyms can also function as a third-place in a world that increasingly lacks them. And on an individual level, moving through space with confidence — whether a flight of stairs or a cliff face — is a privilege that many, myself included, would like to enjoy for as long as possible. It’s a mistake to reduce the confidence that strength training facilitates to a mere desire for control.

To stick with the combat metaphor… I’d like to think that the various pathological features of modern fitness culture highlighted by Ehrenreich are sites of active struggle, not simply conquered territory.