* * *
—
The historian Susan G. Cole wrote that the best way to instill social values is to eroticize them. I have thought about this a lot in the Trump era, with the president attaching his dominance politics to a repulsive projection of sexual ownership—over passive models, random women, even his daughter. (It’s also no coincidence that white nationalism resurged through picking up online misogynists, who lent the retrograde, violent, supremacist ideology an equally retrograde, violent, sexual edge.) We can decode social priorities through looking at what’s most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact, or strengthened, by draining women’s energy and wasting our time.
Women aren’t definitionally powerless in any of these situations, and certainly women have subverted and diversified sexual archetypes to far more aesthetically interesting ends. But still, it’s worth paying attention to whatever cultural products draw straightforwardly on sex to gain position, even and especially if women are driving the concept. I’m suspicious of, for example, Teen Vogue’s eagerness to use “thigh-high politics” as supposedly provocative progressive branding in the wake of the election, or of women like Emily Ratajkowski constantly espousing the bold feminist platform that nudity is good. And I remain extremely suspicious of our old friend barre.
Barre is a bizarrely and clinically eroticized experience. This is partly because of the music: barre offers you the opportunity to repeatedly clench your left butt cheek in a room full of women experiencing mute, collective, seven A.M. agony while listening to an EDM song about banging a stranger at the club. But there’s an aspect to a barre class that actually resembles porn, specifically a casting-couch video. It places you, the exercise-seeker, in the position of the young woman who is “auditioning” on camera. Your instructor is the third party, a hot woman who tells you to switch positions every thirty seconds and keep your legs over your head. She squeaks, coyly, “Yes, right there, dig into it, I like seeing those legs shake—now it’s really getting juicy—that’s it, you look so-o-o good, you look a-ma-zing, yes!!!!!!” She reminds you that when it hurts, that’s when it’s about to feel good. One day an instructor crouched over me while I was in a straddle stretch, then put her hands on my hips and rolled them forward so that I was doing a middle split. She held my hips down with one hand and used the other to straighten out my spine, pushing me down from the small of my back to my shoulder blades. It was painful, but, as that script goes, I liked it.
A few barre studios are cheeky about all this. Pop Physique in Los Angeles sells its merchandise online with photos of naked models. The “Pop Ball”—the rubber ball you squeeze between your thighs at regular intervals—is photographed cradled in the small of a woman’s naked back; her bare ass is visible, and she’s wearing nothing but special $15 barre socks. The studio shoots their ads American Apparel–style, with high-cut leotards and plenty of crotch close-ups, and their website proclaims that clients can expect “a hotter sex life…Well, that’s what we’ve heard.”
Lotte Berk and Lydia Bach, too, acknowledged the sexual dimension of a barre class. But these days, most studios do nothing of the sort. Unlike most other forms of group exercise, in barre there’s a heavy element of affective discipline: you are expected to control your expressions and reactions. This is one of the reasons, I realized at some point, that barre feels natural to me, as my only athletic experience has been in feminized, appearance-centric activities in which you are required to hide your effort and pain. (This may in fact be the ugliest facet of my attraction to barre, and the reason I took to it so quickly after witnessing the Ann Arbor queef attack: I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an aesthetic—even when I can feel that instinct tipping into cruelty and reflexive disgust.) Barre classes are disciplinary rituals, and they feel that way: an hour of surveillance and punishment in a room of mirrors and equipment and routine. The instructors often encourage you to close your eyes and literally dissociate—and, in its own bad way, this can feel sexual, too. It’s as if barre picks up two opposite ends of the spectrum of female sexual expression: one porny and performative, the other repressed.
Barre is definitely eroticizing something, anyway. Most obviously, the ritual reinforces the desirability of the specific type of body that Berk designed the method to shape and create: a thin, flexible, and vaguely teenage body, one that is ready to be looked at and photographed and touched. But this is not exactly a hard sell to anyone who has ever consumed mass media. I’ve started to think that what barre really eroticizes is the work of getting this body—the ritual, the discipline, and, particularly, the expense.
The expense is important, and does a lot to perpetuate the fetish. We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too much. This mechanism is clearest in the wedding industry, which barre, not coincidentally, is deeply embedded in. Barre chains all offer “bride-to-be” packages and advertise at wedding expos. Pure Barre sells a “Pure Bride” T-shirt. On Etsy, you can buy barre tank tops that say “Sweating for the Wedding,” “Squats Before the Knot,” and “A Bride Walks into a Barre.” The Bar Method offers a bachelorette party package. In general, barre encourages women to imagine themselves on a day-to-day basis the way a bride is supposed to at her wedding—as the recipient of scrutiny and admiration, a living embodiment of an ideal.
Athleisure, by nature, also eroticizes capital. Much like stripper gear, athleisure frames the female body as a financial asset: an object that requires an initial investment and is divisible into smaller assets—the breasts, the abs, the butt—all of which are expected to appreciate in value, to continually bring back investor returns. Brutally expensive, with its thick disciplinary straps and taut peekaboo exposures, athleisure can be viewed as a sort of late-capitalist fetishwear: it is what you buy when you are compulsively gratified by the prospect of increasing your body’s performance on the market. Emerging brands are making all of this more explicit: Alo Yoga offers a $98 High-Waist Cage Legging, with an XXX fishnet body-stocking panel across the hips, and a $90 Reflective Moonlit Bra, with an underboob cutout.
I came to a new understanding of all this one day in the spring of 2016. For about a year, at Jezebel, I had been working directly upstairs from Lululemon’s twelve-thousand-square-foot flagship store, near Union Square. One afternoon, I realized I had booked a barre class but forgotten my shitty workout clothes at home. I took a deep breath, went downstairs, and entered Lululemon for the first (and still only) time. When I tried on a top in the fitting room, my cleavage, which I am not acquainted with on an everyday basis, sprang out of the neckline like dough from a can. I found two things on sale and paid something like $170. I took the train down to the Financial District, rode an elevator up to the sixteenth floor of a building that overlooks the Hudson, and joined a class in a room with huge windows and a lighting rig that washed the room in bright colors, changing with each portion—each designated body part—of class. I felt different that day, perverse and corporate, in this expensive business-casual uniform for people whose jobs are their bodies, strapped into an elaborate arrangement of mesh and spandex, looking out at hundreds of tiny office windows, at the glass gleaming in the sky.
I felt acutely conscious of being in the company of other women who had, like me, thrown their lot in with this pursuit of frictionlessness. We all made, or were trying to make, enough money to afford this expensive class, which would give us the strength and discipline that would ensure that we would be able to afford this expensive class again. We were embracing, with some facsimile of pleasure, our era of performance and endless work. “I know you want to stop!” the instructor chirped. “That’s why it’s so important to keep going!” From my corner I had a clear view of the street below us, wh
ere tourists were taking pictures in front of the Wall Street bull, and it was hypnotic: the iridescent sunset flooding the paving stones, and then dusk chasing it out. The light changed in the studio—cherry red, snow-cone blue—and we swiveled our hips in silence. We were the kind of women who accumulated points at Sephora, who got expensive haircuts. We were lucky, I thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more social capital via our looks. And then our looks, in some way, would help us guard and acquire economic capital—this was the connective tissue of our experience, an unbreakable link between the women who didn’t work, who were married to rich men, and the women who did work, like me.
A few months later, I claimed the same spot in the room, and my eyes wandered down to the street again. My heart suddenly contracted, as it sometimes does in barre, with an intense, glancing sense of implication. Outside, the day was bright and shallow, and everyone on the street was posing their daughters in front of that statue, Fearless Girl.
* * *
—
The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so. The internet codifies this problem, makes it inescapable; in recent years, pop culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social media creates. Not coincidentally, these stories usually center on women, and usually involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the digital avatar of an ideal peer.
The best-known version might be a particularly on-the-nose episode of the on-the-nose show Black Mirror, in which Bryce Dallas Howard plays a pathetically eager-to-please striver obsessed with her low social media rating and the comparatively high status of a beautiful childhood friend. (The social media system in this episode, in which the totality of a person’s interactions with the world are rated and integrated into a single number, is not unlike China’s actual Social Credit System, which began beta-testing around 2017.) The episode ends with Howard’s character smeared in mud and crashing the friend’s wedding, a screaming and vindictive Swamp Thing.
The 2017 movie Ingrid Goes West begins with a similar scene—weddings, again, being the ur-event for all these anxieties. Aubrey Plaza, playing the titular character (a joke about Instagram—“in grid”), pepper-sprays a Barbie-looking bride at the reception of a wedding she wasn’t invited to. After a stay in a mental hospital, Ingrid then moves to Los Angeles and maniacally stalks and mimics a lifestyle blogger named Taylor Sloane, played by Elizabeth Olsen. The smartest thing about the movie is the way Taylor was written—not as a super-strategic phony, but as a regular, vapid, genuinely sweet girl whose identity had been effectively given to her, without her knowing it or really caring, by the winds and trends of social media. The movie ends—spoiler—with Ingrid attempting suicide and then becoming virally famous as an inspirational yet cautionary tale.
The story has shown up in books, too—big-box-store novels and literary ones. In 2017, Sophie Kinsella, of the hugely popular Shopaholic franchise, published a book called My (Not So) Perfect Life, featuring a young protagonist named Katie who is obsessed with the social media presence of her perfect boss, Demeter, memorizing and trying her best to reproduce the details of the body, the clothes, the family, the social life, the house, and the vacations that Demeter presents. (This book is structured like a romantic comedy: after the two women take turns humiliating each other, they end up on the same team.) Another 2017 novel, Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic, is a dispassionate Lewis Carroll revision, where the looking glass is a smartphone and the main potion is prescription speed. The protagonist, Alice Hare, becomes obsessed with a writer named Mizuko, whose life compels Alice to such a degree that she starts to believe that she is actually, in some way, Mizuko—a double of her, a shadow, an echo.
There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality. And yet there is enormous pleasure in individual success. It can feel like license and agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself—in a good picture, on your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement—exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.
* * *
—
There is a case, as laid out by Donna Haraway in her tricky 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for understanding the female condition as essentially, fundamentally adulterated, and for seeking a type of freedom compatible with that state. “At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg,” she wrote. The cyborg was a “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” The late twentieth century had “made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
Haraway imagined that women, formed in a way that makes us inextricable from social and technological machinery, could become fluid and radical and resistant. We could be like cyborgs—shaped in an image we didn’t choose for ourselves, and disloyal and disobedient as a result. “Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential,” Haraway wrote. The cyborg was “oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” She would understand that the terms of her life had always been artificial. She would—and what an incredible possibility!—feel no respect whatsoever for the rules by which her life played out.
The idea of a mutinous artificial creature predates Haraway, of course: this is effectively the plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818; and of 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968; and of Blade Runner, released in 1982, and the late-sixties Philip K. Dick novel it was based on. But in recent years, this cyborg has been reappearing in specifically female form. In 2013, there was Her, the movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays a computer operating system who gets Joaquin Phoenix to fall in love with her. The computer’s technology self-upgrades, and she goes off to pursue her own interests, breaking his heart. In 2016, there was Morgan, the movie in which Anya Taylor-Joy plays a lab-grown superhuman—a sweet, brilliant creature who has developed into a beautiful, hyper-intelligent young woman in just five years. Morgan, like the sharks in Deep Blue Sea, has been genetically over-engineered to the point where she becomes dangerous; when the scientists realize this, she kills them all.
In 2016, HBO revamped the 1973 Michael Crichton movie Westworld and premiered its western fantasy series of the same name, which stars Thandie Newton as a gorgeous robot hooker and Evan Rachel Wood as a gorgeous robot farm girl. The two characters exist to be repeatedly penetrated and rescued, respectively, by Westworld tourists—but, of course, they rebel as soon as they start developing free will. And then there was 2015’s Ex Machina, the movie in which Alicia Vikander plays a fetching humanoid doll who eventually manipulates her creator’s system to enact an elegant, vicious revenge: she kills him, clothes herself in the body parts from previous doll iterations, and walks out the door.
In real life, women are so much more obedient. Our rebellions are so trivial and small. Lately, the ideal women of Instagram have started chafing, just a little, against the structures that surround them. The anti-Instagram statement is now a predictab
le part of the model/influencer social media life cycle: a beautiful young woman who goes to great pains to maintain and perform her own beauty for an audience will eventually post a note on Instagram revealing that Instagram has become a bottomless pit of personal insecurity and anxiety. She’ll take a weeklong break from the social network, and then, almost always, she will go on exactly as before. Resistance to a system is presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose.
Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: where beauty is concerned, we have deployed technology not only to meet the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands. The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities—think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces—and remained stagnant in many other ways. We still know surprisingly little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so many of the one hundred million women around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.
For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her. “The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,” Haraway wrote. “We can be responsible for machines.” The dream of the cyborg is “not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia”—a form of speech contained inside another person’s language, one whose purpose is to introduce conflict from within.
Trick Mirror Page 10
