Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  Was it health I was investing in? In a very narrow way, it was. Barre has made me stronger and improved my posture. It has given me the luxury—which is off-limits to so many people, for so many stupid reasons—of not having to think about my body, because it mostly feels good, mostly works. But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening commute on an underfunded train. Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony. As a form of exercise, barre is ideal for an era in which everyone has to work constantly—you can be back at the office in five minutes, no shower necessary—and in which women are still expected to look unreasonably good.

  And of course it’s that last part, the looks thing, that makes barre feel so worthwhile to so many people. (This is emphasized by every newspaper piece on the subject; the Observer article from 2005 was headlined “Battle of the Butts.”) Barre is results-driven and appearance-based—it’s got the cultishness of CrossFit or a boot-camp class, but with looks, not strength, as its primary goal. It’s not a pastime, like going to a dance class or taking a lap swim, because the fun you are pursuing mostly comes after the class and not within it. In barre class, I often feel like my body is a race car that I’m servicing dispassionately in the pit—tuning up arms and then legs and then butt and then abs, and then there’s a quick stretch and I’m back on the track, zooming. It is not incidental that barre, unlike hot yoga or SoulCycle or CrossFit, is a near-exclusively female pastime. (On the rare occasions when a man shows up in class, he is either very jacked or very slender, and usually wearing something that borders on clubwear: as Brittany Murphy says in Drop Dead Gorgeous, “You know what, Dad? Peter’s gay.”)

  In practice, the barre method is only vaguely connected to ballet. There are quasi pliés, you point your toes and turn out your hips sometimes, and, as is denoted, you spend a lot of time gripping a barre. That’s it. But conceptually, ballet is essential to the pitch. Among women, ballerinas have a uniquely legitimate reason to look taut and disciplined. There are plenty of other women who are thin and graceful-looking by professional requirement—models, escorts, actresses—but ballerinas meet the beauty standard not just in the name of appearance or performance but also in the name of high athleticism and art. And so an exercise method even nominally drawn from ballet has the subtle effect of giving regular women a sense of serious, artistic, professional purpose in their pursuit of their ideal body. This is a good investment, or more precisely, a pragmatic self-delusion—in the same way that being trained to smile and throw my shoulders back for crowds and judges, ostensibly as a show of genuine cheerfulness, was also “good” for me. Learning how to function more efficiently within an exhausting system: this seems to me to be the thing, with barre, that people pay $40 a class for, the investment that always brings back returns.

  * * *

  —

  When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.

  I like trying to look good, but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate. In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased. It’s as if our culture has mustered an immune-system response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality—as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to make up for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men. One waste of time had been traded for another, Wolf wrote. Where women in mid-century America had been occupied with “inexhaustible but ephemeral” domestic work, beating back disorder with fastidious housekeeping and consumer purchases, they were now occupied by inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts of time, anxiety, and money to adhere to a standard over which they had no control. Beauty constituted a sort of “third shift,” Wolf wrote—an extra obligation in every possible setting.

  Why would smart and ambitious women fall for this? (Why do I have such a personal relationship with my face wash? Why have I sunk thousands of dollars over the past half decade into ensuring that I can abuse my body on the weekends without changing the way it looks?) Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things in order to accept the beauty myth. First, she had to think about beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and sacrifice,” even more.

  In her 2018 book, Perfect Me, the philosopher Heather Widdows argues persuasively that the beauty ideal has more recently taken on an ethical dimension. Where beauty has historically functioned as a symbol for female worth and morality—in fairy tales, evil women are ugly and beautiful princesses are good—beauty is now framed, Widdows writes, as female worth and morality itself. “That we must continually strive for beauty is part of the logic of beauty as an ethical ideal—as it is for other successful ethical ideals,” she writes. “That perfection remains always beyond, something we have to strive for and can never attain, does not diminish the power of the ideal; indeed it may even strengthen it.” Under this ethical ideal, women attribute implicit moral value to the day-to-day efforts of improving their looks, and failing to meet the beauty standard is framed as “not a local or partial failure, but a failure of the self.”

  Feminism has faithfully adhered to this idea of beauty as goodness, if often in very convoluted ways. Part of what brought Jezebel into the center of online feminist discourse was its outcry against Photoshop use in ads and on magazine covers, which on the one hand instantly exposed the artificiality and dishonesty of the contemporary beauty standard, and on the other showed enough of a powerful, lingering desire for “real” beauty that it cleared space for ever-heightened expectations. Today, as demonstrated by the cult success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural ways.

  Mainstream feminism has also driven the movement toward what’s called “body acceptance,” which is the practice of valuing women’s beauty at every size and in every iteration, as well as the movement to diversify the beauty ideal. These changes are overdue and positive, but they’re also double-edged. A more expansive idea of beauty is a good thing—I have appreciated it personally—and yet it depends on the precept, formalized by a culture where ordinary faces are routinely photographed for quantified approval, that beauty is still of paramount importance. The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.

  But, then again, nothing today ever de-escalates. And feminism has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on individual success, so much empha
sis on individual choice, that it is seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to make herself more successful—even in situations like this, in which women’s choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not “make an unjust or exploitative practice or act, somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.” The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.

  The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive. In 2017, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about the new vocabulary of weight loss, noting the way women’s magazines replaced cover lines like “Get lean! Control your eating!” with “Be your healthiest! GET STRONG!” People started “fasting and eating clean and cleansing and making lifestyle changes,” Brodesser-Akner wrote, “which, by all available evidence, is exactly like dieting.” It sometimes seems that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress than this current situation—one in which, instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.

  There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-improvement. “That the beauty ideal is pleasurable and demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature,” Widdows writes. The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any case, mostly exacerbated the situation. If Wolf in 1990 criticized a paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all the time, we have something deeper burrowing now—not a beauty myth but a lifestyle myth, a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to become that idealized self, and where she can understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—or just, without question, the best way to live.

  * * *

  —

  The question of optimization dates back to antiquity, though it wasn’t called “optimization” back then. In the Aeneid, Virgil describes what’s come to be known as Dido’s Problem, in which the queen Dido strikes a bargain in founding the city of Carthage: she will be allowed as much land as she can enclose with a bull’s hide. The question of what shape will allow you to maximize a given perimeter was answered by Zenodorus in the second century B.C., in the math of his era—the answer is a circle. In 1842, the Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner established the modern answer to the isoperimetric problem with a proof that I truly couldn’t even begin to understand.

  In 1844, “optimize” was used as a verb for the first time, meaning “to act like an optimist.” In 1857, it was used for the first time in the way we currently use it—“to make the most of.” The next decade brought a wave of optimization to economics, with the Marginal Revolution: economists argued that human choice is based in calculating the marginal utility of our various options. (A given product’s marginal utility is whatever increase in benefits we get from consuming or using it.) “To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort—to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable—in other words, to maximize pleasure, is the problem of economics,” wrote William Stanley Jevons in The Theory of Political Economy. We all want to get the most out of what we have.

  Today, the principle of optimization—the process of making something, as the dictionary puts it, “as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible”—thrives in extremity. An entire industry has even sprung up to give optimization a uniform: athleisure, the type of clothing you wear when you are either acting on or signaling your desire to have an optimized life. I define athleisure as exercise gear that you pay too much money for, but defined more broadly, athleisure was a $97 billion category by 2016. Since its emergence around a decade ago, athleisure has gone through a few aesthetic iterations. At first, it was black leggings and colorful tank tops—a spandex version of an early-aughts going-out uniform favored by women who might have, by the time of athleisure’s rise, shifted their daily social interactions to yoga and coffee dates. More recently, athleisure has branched off and re-converged in permutations. There is a sort of cosmic hippie look (elaborate prints, webbed galaxy patterns), a sort of monochrome LA look (mesh, neutrals, baseball hats), a minimalist and heathered Outdoor Voices aesthetic, and an influx of awful slogans like “I’ll See You at the Barre.” Brands include Lululemon (a pair of “edgy” Wunder Under leggings, slashed with mesh, costs $98), Athleta (“Pacifica Contoured Hoodie Tank,” a hooded tank top, is $59), Sweaty Betty (“Power Wetlook Mesh Crop Leggings,” which are “Bum Sculpting? You Bet Your Ass,” $120), the ghoulish brand Spiritual Gangster (leggings with “Namaste” across the ass, $88; cotton tank top screen-printed with “I’ll see it when I believe it,” $56). And these, I would say, are now the mid-market offerings—real designers have started offering athleisure, too.

  Men wear athleisure—Outdoor Voices, the cult-favorite millennial activewear brand that calls itself “human, not superhuman,” has cultivated a loyal male fan base—but the idea, and the vast majority of the category, belongs to women. It was built around the habits of stay-at-home moms, college students, fitness professionals, off-duty models—women who wear exercise clothing outside an exercise setting and who, like ballerinas, have heightened reasons to monitor the market value of their looks. This deep incentive is hidden by a bunch of more obvious ones: these clothes are easy to wear, machine-washable, wrinkle-proof. As with all optimization experiences and products, athleisure is reliably comfortable and supportive in a world that is not. In 2016, Moira Weigel wrote, at Real Life magazine, “Lululemons announce that for the wearer, life has become frictionless.” She recalls putting on a pair of Spanx shapewear for the first time: “The word for how my casing made me feel was optimized.”

  Spandex—the material in both Spanx and expensive leggings—was invented during World War II, when the military was trying to develop new parachute fabrics. It is uniquely flexible, resilient, and strong. (“Just like us, ladies!” I might scream, onstage at an empowerment conference, blood streaming from my eyes.) It feels comforting to wear high-quality spandex—I imagine it’s what a dog feels like in a ThunderShirt—but this sense of reassurance is paired with an undercurrent of demand. Shapewear, essentially twenty-first-century corseting, controls the body under clothing; athleisure broadcasts your commitment to controlling your body through working out. And to even get into a pair of Lululemons, you have to have a disciplined-looking body. (The founder of the company once said that “certain women” aren’t meant to wear his brand.) “Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop,” Weigel wrote. “Because these pants only ‘work’ on a certain kind of body, wearing them reminds you to go out and get that body. They encourage you to produce yourself as the body that they ideally display.”

  This is how athleisure has carved out the space between exercise apparel and fashion: the former category optimizes your performance, the latter optimizes your appearance, and athleisure does both simultaneously. It is tailor-made for a time when work is rebranded as pleasure so that we will accept more of it—a time when, for women, improving your looks is a job that you’re supp
osed to believe is fun. And the real trick of athleisure is the way it can physically suggest that you were made to do this—that you’re the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is about as good a way to pass your time on earth as there is. There’s a phenomenon, Weigel noted, called “enclothed cognition,” in which clothes that come with cultural scripts can actually alter cognitive function. In one experiment, test subjects were given white coats to wear. If they were told it was a lab coat, they became more attentive. If they were told it was a painter’s coat, they became less attentive. They felt like the person their clothes said they were.

  I recently bought my first pair of Spanx in preparation for a wedding. My oldest friend was getting married in Texas, and the bridesmaids’ dresses—for all thirteen of us—were pale pink, floor-length, and as tight as shrink-wrap from the strapless neckline to the knees. When I first tried the dress on, I could see the inside of my belly button in the mirror. Frowning, I went online and bought a $98 “Haute Contour® High-Waisted Thong.” It arrived a few days later, and I tried it on with the dress: I couldn’t breathe properly, I immediately started sweating, and everything looked even worse. “What the fuck,” I said, staring at my reflection. I looked like a bad imitation of a woman whose most deeply held personal goal was to look hot in pictures. And of course, in that moment, in a $98 punishment thong and a dress designed for an Instagram model, that’s exactly what I was.