Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Fitness Discrimination and Loving Our Oppressors


As enlightened as we like to think we are in the ultra-progressive 21st century; making homosexuality kind of legal and allowing racial minorities access to education and sometimes jobs, I was disheartened when, on a brief trip back to the Florida suburb in which I grew up, I came upon an egregious instance of fitness-discrimination. Of course, the first thing I do when visiting my mother is con myself a free pass to the local gym. “I just moved back to start my own taxidermy business” or some ridiculous shit like that, I say. I like to have fun with the lie, get creative. Once I said: “My boyfriend said he won’t do it in certain positions with me unless I am in better shape.” The awkward laugh that got was classic! But before the fun lying, you usually have to suffer a tour of the facility with some brainless fitness-baboon.
In scoring myself a free pass to my mom’s new local gym, LEVEL FIVE FITNESS (“But I’m barely a Level 3!” I said, pulling up in the car), I capitulated to just such a tour conducted by a completely awe-worthy though completely interchangeable “jock pretty boy” (gorgeous blue eyes, tattooed calf, tanned athlete’s body). “JPB” showed me the group fitness center where “Level 5” conducted it’s pilates classes. I asked if they had pilates towers in the studio. The fitness professional didn’t know to what I was referring, so I explained. They are the contraptions with tracked seats on which you lie and manipulate your own bodyweight by way of pulleys. It adds resistance to pilates practice.
“Oh, yeah, we have pilates towers.” He says using the term as if he coined it. And then starts to murmur: “in the “ladies fitness section.”
“Wow. Burn.” I thought. “You work at a gym with a ‘ladies fitness section,’ you white-trash-animal. Who do you think you’re playing?”
But being a much more circumspect kind of prick, I actually asked laughing: “So, am I allowed to use the towers or not?”
“Uh, I guess,” He said awkwardly. “But maybe you should ask first.”
“I’ll do that.” I said kind of smugly.
When I got home, I felt obliged to make my masturbation fantasy starring JPB a violent parable (Think “SAW” meets “TITAN MEDIA”) where I forcibly teach him the gender neutral value of pilates, how much I adore him and, best of all, humility.
A Kind-of-Related, Pseudo-Intellectual Side-Bar/Foot-Note Discourse on Beauty.
Above I manage to describe JPB as both “awe-worthy” and “interchangeable.” At first glance, this appears incongruous. But I think it is the singular condition (perhaps “ontological structure”) of “lust” that we are held in awe by that which we have learned to expect. Individuals are turned on by their particular “types.” Cultures are turned on by their “archetypes.” The psychoanalytic subject is turned on by their parent (and that parent’s likeness) All this amounts to the same thing; beauty is a sameness. Just as babies are most attracted to those faces they find familiar though slightly different, adults are best turned on by individuals (always “slightly different” even in so far as they occupy different space and time) that nonetheless fit categories. In other words, nobody wants to fuck a mutant; that which breaks continuity and defies category. They want to fuck a well-bred quintessence. JPB, who definitely had me feeling some kind of way, was just that; an amazing example of a ubiquitous type.   

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