Stay on Your Mat and Do As You’re Told

There’s a chapter in Butts — a splendid history of the arse by Heather Radke — about the 1980s boom in home fitness videos.

I remember that! My mum had the Cher one. We’d be watching TV in the living room and we’d hear her leaping about upstairs in time to the music. At least, I think that’s what she was doing.

Radke writes that

booms in American fitness culture usually correspond to rises in white-collar labor.

As more people are employed in desk jobs–in the 1920s and 1950s, for example–the people who work those jobs become less active than those who have more physically demanding jobs, a fact that often causes a lot of societal angst.

Anxiety about fitness (and its corollary–fatness) permeates middle-class culture in these eras because fitness isn’t ever only about having a body that is useful or a body that is healthy. Having a fit body seems to almost always mean something more.

Yes indeed. Everything has a symbolic value indexed against a constantly-shifting body of social meaning.

Later, Radke writes that

neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic philosophy; its tentacles would extend into nearly every part of [Western] life. It conflated the free market with individual agency, had no use for collective modes of expression or action, and judged the worth of people primarily in terms of market value–ideas that if taken seriously, would alter how people thought of themselves on nearly every level, including how they perceived their bodies. … A fit body become a symbol of a hearty work ethic.

So as well as being a response to the sedentariness promoted by desk jobs, those fitness tapes evolved out of the hyperindividuality of the time and also hardworkingness as a badge of pride.

The tapes were sold as fantasies of personal transformation and self-betterment but:

they don’t offer techniques that will ultimately lead to artistic interpretation or self-expression. Instead, when you do the moves, you are following someone else’s lead, mimicking them beat by beat in order to become more like them. Aerobics is, by and large, a submissive practice: you stay on your mat, inside your little rectangle, and do as you are told.

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