Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. The ideal chopped-salad customer is himself efficient: he needs to eat his twelve-dollar salad in ten minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular twelve-dollar salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this twelve-dollar salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job. The first, best chronicler of the chopped-salad economy’s accelerationist nightmare was Matt Buchanan, who wrote at The Awl in 2015:

  The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?

  In a later Awl piece, Buchanan described the chopped salad as “the perfect mid-day nutritional replenishment for the mid-level modern knowledge worker” with “neither the time nor the inclination to eat a lunch…which would require more attention than the little needed for the automatic elliptical motion of the arm from bowl to face, jaw swinging open and then clamping shut over and over until the fork comes up empty and the vessel can be deposited in the garbage can under the desk.”

  On today’s terms, what he’s describing—a mechanically efficient salad-feeding session, conducted in such a way that one need not take a break from emails—is the good life. It means progress, individuation. It’s what you do when you’ve gotten ahead a little bit, when you want to get ahead some more. The hamster-wheel aspect has been self-evident for a long time now. (In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “It can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than a lower one….The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”) But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more of what was merely stupid and adaptive has turned stupid and compulsory. Vulnerability, which is ever present, must be warded off at all costs. And so I go to Sweetgreen on days when I need to eat vegetables very quickly because I’ve been working till one A.M. all week and don’t have time to make dinner because I have to work till one A.M. again, and like a chump, I try to make eye contact across the sneeze guard, as if this alleviated anything about the skyrocketing productivity requirements that have forced these two lines of people to scarf and create kale Caesars all day, and then I “grab” my salad and eat it in under ten minutes while looking at email and on the train home remind myself that next time, for points purposes, I should probably buy the salad through the salad’s designated app.

  It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

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  I was a late bloomer in terms of functional physical practices, like eating vegetables and exercising. I didn’t start doing either thing with any conviction—or without the baggage of ambiently disordered female adolescence—until I joined the Peace Corps, when I was twenty-one. I was a gymnast as a kid and then a cheerleader later, but one thing was fun and the second was effectively a requirement: at my school, you had to play a sport, and I lacked the athletic ability or competitive instinct to do anything else. As a teenager, I subsisted on pizza and queso and cinnamon rolls, trying to immunize myself with apathy and pleasure-seeking throughout the long stretch of time when girls, overwhelmed by sudden expectations of beauty, transmit anorexia and bulimia to one another like a virus. In high school, as I recount in my journal, other girls on the cheerleading squad would chastise me for eating carbs after sundown; a guy who had an obvious crush on me often expressed it by telling me I was gaining weight. (“Who cares, I’m going to go downstairs and eat a huge breakfast, bitch,” I wrote to him on AIM one morning.) I had avoided the hang-ups that seemed to be endemic, but anytime my friends talked about diets or exercise, I could still feel a compulsive strain prickling to life within me, a sudden desire to skip a meal and do sit-ups. To avoid it, I avoided the gym, and kept eating like a stoner: I had come to understand health as discipline, discipline as punitive, and punitive as a concept that would send me down a rabbit hole of calorie math and vomit. For the better part of a decade, I figured I was better off being slightly unhealthy and leaving the active pursuit of body-related matters alone.

  This all changed once I joined the Peace Corps, where it was impossible to think too much about my appearance, and where health was of such immediate importance that it was always on my mind. I developed active tuberculosis while volunteering and, for some stress- or nutrition-related reason, started to shed my thick black hair. I realized how much I had taken my functional body for granted. I lived in a mile-long village in the middle of a western province in Kyrgyzstan: there were larch trees on the snowy mountains, flocks of sheep crossing dusty roads, but there was no running water, no grocery store. The resourceful villagers preserved peppers and tomatoes, stockpiled apples and onions, but it was so difficult to get fresh produce otherwise that I regularly fantasized about spinach and oranges, and would spend entire weekends trying to obtain them. As a prophylactic measure against mental breakdown, I started doing yoga in my room every day. Exercise, I thought. What a miracle! After Peace Corps, I kept at it. I was back in Houston, I had a lot of spare time, and I spent it at midday yoga classes at expensive studios to which I would buy discounted first-time packages and never return.

  This period, around 2011, reintroduced me to the world of American abundance. The first time I went into a grocery store and saw how many different fruits there were, I cried. At these yoga classes, I marveled at the fanatic high functionality of the women around me. They carried red totes covered with terrifying slogans (“The perfect tombstone would read ‘All used up’ ”; “Children are the orgasm of life”) and they talked about “luncheons” and microdermabrasion and four-hundred-person wedding guest lists. They purchased $90 leggings in the waiting room after class. I was not, at the time, on their level: I had been taking giardia shits in a backyard outhouse for a year straight, and I was flooded with dread and spiritual uselessness, the sense that I had failed myself and others, the fear that I would never again be useful to another human being. In this context, it felt both bad and wonderfully anesthetizing to do yoga around these women. In the hundred-degree heat I would lie back for corpse pose, sweat soaking my cheap mat from Target, and sometimes, as I fluttered my eyes shut, I would catch the twinkle of enormous diamond rings caught in shafts of sunbeam, blinking at me in the temporary darkness like a fleet of indoor stars.

  In 2012, I moved to Ann Arbor for an MFA program. Classes started in the fall, but we packed up in early summer. My boyfriend, who’d just finished grad school, needed to look for a job. In our little blue house in Michigan, I tinkered with some of my somber and ponderous short stories, unsure if this would feel different once I had formal guidance. I met up with my soon-to-be classmates and drank big sour beers and talked about Train Dreams and Lorrie Moore. Mostly I drifted around the lovely college town in what I accurately sensed would be my last stretch of true aimlessness for a long time. I walked my dog, looked at fireflies, went to yoga. One day, I was at a studio on the west side of town when a woman next to me queefed a thick, wet quee
f while sinking deep into Warrior II. I held back my laughter. She kept queefing, and kept queefing, and queefed and queefed and queefed. Over the course of the hour, as she continued queefing, my emotions went fractal—hysterical amusement and unplaceable panic combining and recombining in a kaleidoscopic blur. By the time we hit final resting pose, my heart was racing. I heard the queefing woman get up and leave the room. When she returned, I peeked an eye open to look at her. Clothed, disturbingly, in a different pair of pants, she lay down next to me and sighed, satisfied. Then, with a serene smile on her face, she queefed one more time.

  At that moment, my soul having been flayed by secondhand vaginal exhalation, I wanted nothing more than to jump out of my skin. I wanted to land in a new life where everything—bodies, ambitions—would work seamlessly and efficiently. Trapped in corpse pose, in a motionlessness that was supposed to be relaxing, I felt the specter of stagnation hovering over my existence. I missed, suddenly, the part of me that thrilled to sharpness, harshness, discipline. I had directed these instincts at my mind, kept them away from my body, but why? I needed a break from yoga, which had reminded me, just then, of how I’d felt all throughout Peace Corps—as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and never would.

  So, later that week, after exploring the limitless bounty of Groupon, I printed out a trial offer at a studio called Pure Barre. I was greeted there by an instructor who looked like Jessica Rabbit: ice-green eyes, a physically impossible hourglass figure, honey-colored hair rippling down past her waist. She ushered me into a cave-dark room full of sinewy women gathering mysterious red rubber props. The front wall was mirrored. The women stared at their reflections, stone-faced, preparing.

  Then class started, and it was an immediate state of emergency. Barre is a manic and ritualized activity, often set to deafening music and lighting changes; that day, I felt like a police car was doing donuts in my frontal cortex for fifty-five minutes straight. The rapid-fire series of positions and movements, dictated and enforced by the instructor, resembled what a ballerina might do if you concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills—a fanatical, repetitive routine of arm gestures, leg lifts, and pelvic tilts. Jessica Rabbit strode through the middle of the room, commanding us coyly to “put on our highest heels,” meaning get on our tiptoes, and “tuck,” meaning hump the air. I fumbled with my props: the rubber ball, the latex strap.

  By the end of class, my leg muscles had liquefied. Jessica turned the lights off and chirped that it was time for “back dancing,” a term that I thought, collapsing onto the floor, sounded like what people on a parenting message board might use as a euphemism for sex. It was, in fact, pretend-fucking: we lay on our backs and thrust our hips into the darkness with a sacrificial devotion that I had not applied to actual sex for years. When we were finished, the lights came back on and I realized that the black-clad pelvis I had been staring at in the mirror actually belonged to the woman in front of me. I had the satisfying but gross sense of having successfully conformed to a prototype. “Great job, ladies,” cooed Jessica. Everybody clapped.

  * * *

  —

  Barre was invented in the sixties by Lotte Berk, a Jewish ballerina with an angular bob haircut who fled Germany for England before World War II and soon aged out of her chosen career. She developed an exercise method based on her dance training, and at age forty-six, with her rigidly disciplined body as a walking billboard, she founded a women-only exercise studio in a basement on London’s Manchester Street.

  Berk was a colorful, vicious character, obsessed with sex and addicted to morphine. As a parent, she was, according to her daughter Esther, incredibly abusive: Esther told The Telegraph that Berk brushed it off when Esther’s father sexually propositioned her at age twelve, and that when Esther was fifteen, Berk offered to pay her to give one of Berk’s theater colleagues a blow job. By Esther’s account, Berk instructed her to “forget about it” when one of Berk’s producers raped her the same year. Esther, who has described her relationship to her mother as a “tug of love and war,” is now eighty-three years old. She still teaches the Lotte Berk method in a studio in New York City.

  “Sex came into everything she did,” Esther told The Cut in 2017. “You know, you felt sex from her.” In her studio, Berk invited clients to imagine a lover as they engaged their pelvis. She used a riding crop on women who weren’t trying hard enough. The poses she invented looked suggestive and were named accordingly: the French Lavatory, the Prostitute, the Peeing Dog, Fucking a Bidet. The studio’s clientele included Joan Collins, Edna O’Brien, Yasmin Le Bon, and, just once, Barbra Streisand, who submitted to Berk’s methods but refused to take off her hat. Berk became a guru for women with an intense, often professional desire to improve their appearances. She ran a one-stop shop: after class, clients could go see her studio partners Vidal Sassoon and Mary Quant.

  One of Berk’s students, Lydia Bach, adapted Berk’s routine and brought it stateside, and in 1970, Bach opened the first barre studio in New York City, on Sixty-seventh Street. It was called the Lotte Berk Method. A 1972 New York Times article about the studio quotes a first-time client saying, “I’m aching inside. But I liked it.” Another woman pats her newly flat stomach and says that barre kept her from having to get plastic surgery. “Lydia Bach says the method is a combination of modern ballet, yoga, orthopedic exercise, and sex,” wrote the Times. “Sex? Well, the windup of each class is a sort of belly dance done from a kneeling position. It looks like the undulations of a snake charmer’s cobra and is said to do wonders for the waistline.” Classes were small and expensive. On Saturdays, the Times wrote, the fashion models came in.

  This first New York barre studio was wildly popular and remained so for years—devotees included Mary Tyler Moore, Ivana Trump, the Olsen twins, and Tom Wolfe. Bach turned down franchise opportunities: she liked being exclusive. She did, however, write a book about barre, which mostly consists of photos of her in a sheer white leotard modeling various poses. Her sandy hair is loose, her nipples slightly visible, and her body pristine. In a few photos, she spreads her legs wide to the camera, holding the soles of her feet in her hands. Her expression is blank and confident; there’s a diamond on her left ring finger. One chapter of the book is called, simply, “Sex.”

  It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Bach’s instructors started defecting. By that point, the Lotte Berk Method had gotten fusty. A 2005 piece in The Observer called it the “35-year-old Margo Channing of New York City fitness programs,” and observed that it was “under siege by a fresh young Eve Harrington of exercise called Core Fusion, founded in 2002 by two former Berk instructors.” Core Fusion, the offshoot, had adapted to the demands of the market. It was fancier, prettier, and more welcoming. The facilities were brighter, and everything smelled good. Hundreds of Bach’s customers made the switch. Soon afterward, more Lotte Berk instructors left and founded their own studios, including Physique 57 and the Bar Method, which became two popular chains.

  Around 2010, barre hit a boom period. A Times trend piece noted that the classes had developed a cult following for helping women “replicate the dancer’s enviable body: long and lean, svelte but not bulky.” Another Times trend piece, from 2011, began with the same angle, which is barre’s primary sales pitch—giving you a body that gets its own results. “Women have long coveted sinewy arms, high and tight derrieres, lean legs and a regal posture. Now, in search of this shape, many of them are ditching yoga and Pilates and lining up at the ballet barre.” One woman testified: “Every single inch of me has changed.” One got to the point, jokingly, by saying, “Everything is engaged. Except me. Yet.”

  Today, barre has become a nationwide fixture. Sprinkled all across our sprawling land are thousands of basically identical mirrored rooms containing identically dressed women doing the exact same movements on the exact same hourly timer in pursuit of their own particular genetic inflection of the exact same “ballet body.” T
he biggest franchise, Pure Barre, operates more than five hundred locations, with studios in Henderson, Nevada, and Rochester, Minnesota, and Owensboro, Kentucky; there are twelve Pure Barre studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone.

  The rise of barre is unparalleled in a few aspects: as far as exercise methods go, nothing this expensive and this uniform has gone this big. Hot yoga and Pilates are both ubiquitous, but the pursuits have expanded at the level of individual studios rather than nationwide chains. (Yoga classes also mostly hover around $20 or less, where barre, if you pay full price, often costs double that.) Boutique spin classes are comparable—they got popular when barre did, and they are similarly expensive. But SoulCycle, the biggest chain, operates just seventy-five locations nationwide, and you won’t find it in Owensboro. Among hundreds of thousands of women in dramatically different political and cultural environments, there seems to be an easy agreement that barre is worth it—that spending sixty cents per minute to have an instructor tell you to move your leg around in one-inch increments is a self-evidently worthwhile pursuit.

  In grad school, driving out past the Chili’s to the Pure Barre, I became a believer. I had been primed, first with my girlishly regimented physical training—dance, gymnastics, cheerleading—and then with yoga, my therapeutic on-ramp to the thing I was slowly realizing, which was that you could, without obvious negative consequences, control the way your body felt on the inside and worked on the outside by paying people to give you orders in a small, mirrored room. Barre was much too expensive for my grad school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed, very obviously, like an investment in a more functional life.