Читать книгу The Age of Fitness - Jürgen Martschukat - Страница 11

In the pursuit of fitness, the right amount of exercise goes hand in hand with eating right. Again, the 1970s were a decade of crucial acceleration in North America and Western Europe in this regard. In West Germany, the German Sport Association’s (Deutscher Sportbund or DSB) “Get Fit” (Trimm-Dich) campaign was launched in the spring of 1970, its declared goal being “sport for all” (see figure 3). Rather than competitive sport, the campaign promoted the very practices established in the following years in Germany under the English-language label of “fitness.” Previously, the term had barely been used in the German-speaking countries. The goal was for increased exercise to enable a greater number of people to achieve a fitter body and enjoy life more. In Germany, mass or popular sports (Breitensport) was the name given to this concept. In Austria, the term Fitsport was coined to refer to bodily practices directed solely at one’s own body and its performance (rather than scoring a goal or winning a race). Austrians also took part in fitness marches (Fitmärschen) and fitness runs (Fitläufen) inspired by the “Fit – Be in It!” (Fit-mach-mit) campaign, while keepfit trails were established in German and Swiss forests and parks.⁵¹ In German TV commercials from the middle of the decade onward, what viewers generally saw were average, middle-aged men exercising. The chubby “Karl Gustav” cycles happily through the countryside, while the voiceover explains that “The constant pedaling / keeps heart and circulation young for many years, / because to keep moving, / makes one fit and superior to others.” So, while fitness was not about improving one’s chances of winning sporting competitions, it was an attempt to outdo others in life as a whole, a life that was, more than ever, conceptualized in terms of competition and rivalry. “Mr. Oskar K.” demonstrates one facet of this superiority in another ad. Evidently, jogging is a boon not only to his health and zest for life, but also to his sex appeal. The body language of a statue of a naked woman next to the jogging track, who gazes after him and gives a thumbs-up, along with the mischievous voiceover, leaves us in no doubt about that. The fit body was now considered a beautiful, attractive body.⁵²

Figure 3 Poster, DSB “Endurance” advertising campaign, 1975–1978

Sustained by the enthusiasm for sport that gripped West Germany after the 1972 Munich Olympics, millions of people followed the tips they received from Trimmy, the figurehead of the DSB’s “Get Fit” campaign. After just a few years, virtually every West German knew who he was, and after about a decade three-quarters of West Germans affirmed, at least in theory, that “you have to do sports to stay healthy.”⁵³ The Federal Center for Health Education (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung) also helped spread this message. “Eat well and get fit – you need both” (“Essen und Trimmen – beides muß stimmen”) was the name of another campaign launched soon after.⁵⁴

A similar tone was struck in the United States. “America Shapes Up,” announced TIME Magazine’s cover story in early November 1981. Over the preceding decade, the article contended, America had been gripped by fitness mania. The photo on the cover showed five women and men brimming with strength and joy, evidently having just finished exercising. They are holding up photos to the camera that show them playing tennis, lifting weights, cycling, doing aerobics, or jogging. Another striking aspect of the picture is how white fitness was in the early 1980s.⁵⁵

TIME Magazine characterized the belief in one’s own youthfulness and magnificence as the true American dream. The near-heroic work on one’s fitness, the desire to be slim and toned, the “One! Two!” of the exercise routine, the grunting and sweating in the gym – together they symbolized the attempt to make this dream come true. Other observers in the early 1980s shared TIME’s assessment, sweepingly asserting that virtually everyone in America attached great importance to their body in everyday life, with respect to their job and as an expression of their personality. It is hard not to think of Tom Wolfe and the Me Decade.⁵⁶

One of the drivers of the body and fitness mania that overtook the United States in the 1970s was running. Previously, hardly anyone thought of going for a run after work as a beneficial practice, a way of getting or staying fit. Even running marathons was the preserve of a few fanatics. At the time, the United States lacked even the infrastructure that might have facilitated a marathon as a mass event. In 1970, 126 men and one woman set off on the New York Marathon (43 percent were to be finishers), while in Boston – long the most important of all marathons in the United States – women were officially allowed to compete only in 1972. The Berlin Marathon, now one of the largest running events in the world, has only existed since 1974, when 244 people took part, including 10 women. In 1986, the number of runners in Berlin surpassed the 10,000 mark for the first time, a figure already reached in New York in 1979 (11,533, including 11 percent women, with 91 percent of participants crossing the finish line). Every year since 2013 more than 50,000 people have competed in the New York event, with almost equal numbers of men and women and nearly everyone finishing (99 percent in 2013).⁵⁷

While running as a mass sport was still in its infancy in the early 1970s, by the end of the decade about 30 million Americans were claiming to run. Performance- and competition-oriented “runners” strove to distinguish themselves from “joggers.” However, if we peruse Runner’s World, the American running magazine par excellence,⁵⁸ the readers’ letters and the column penned by health consultant Dr George Sheehan (naturally a passionate runner as well as a doctor) reveal how fluid the distinction between “runner” and “jogger” could be. Although Runner’s World described itself as a magazine for real runners, many letters, enquiries, and comments were sent in by middle-aged men struggling more or less desperately with increasing body fat and declining performance, men who were, at best, in the process of becoming joggers. When one has a job and finds oneself growing older, as one reader wrote to Dr Sheehan in March 1975, “a glacier of lard” gradually and inexorably spreads over the body. “Fat starts taking over,” this reader complained, “then and only then do we lose control of our bodies.” More control over one’s body and one’s life, in a society increasingly geared toward the productive use of freedom, was just what fitness promised and demanded. At the same time, fitness was directly linked with the desire, and obligation, to stay young.⁵⁹

The discussions in Runner’s World reinforce the point that fitness meant more than the ability to go for a run after work without collapsing or the setting of personal bests over various distances. Some runners certainly ran for the sport, and debates, for example about proper nutrition (during the training phase, immediately before or even during a race), filled many pages of Runner’s World.⁶⁰ But at least as many if not more runners ran to lose weight, recover from work and enhance their ability to cope with it, gain respite from the stress of everyday life, and to find company, increase their sex appeal, and find themselves. It was the latter imperative that inspired German foreign minister Joschka Fischer in the late 1990s. With his passion for running, he concurrently signaled that he could do anything, even lose 65 pounds and run a marathon. But whatever one’s ultimate reason for running, it was a practice that ought to be more than just a hobby. Running magazines and dozens of books on running published around the time proclaimed that running would change one’s entire life, reorienting it toward health and wellbeing, performance, and success. As a representative example, we might consider an ordinary jogger named Dave Mullens, who hit the sidewalk almost every morning before work with his running group, called “Dawn Patrol,” in and around Palo Alto, California. With the fervor of the religious convert, Mullens emphasized that running had transformed his entire existence. Similarly, Joschka Fischer referred to his “new life as a jogger.”⁶¹ Often, runners reported something akin to a religious awakening, one that put them on the right path. It was a path they had to stick to from then on, because fitness requires permanent work on oneself if one is to avoid losing it again. The crucial thing is “staying the course,” Fischer stressed. “Fitness can’t be stored,” as Runner’s World stated in the same vein, “it must be earned over and over, indefinitely.”⁶²

When Runner’s World writes about running, it reflects the many different and sometimes contradictory forces that shaped the 1970s as a whole.⁶³ On the one hand, the running movement was energized by the counterculture, and running was part of the “alternative” push to find oneself that was so typical of the time. Many runners saw themselves as anti-capitalist activists in search of a better way of life beyond mass and consumer society. On the other hand, running simultaneously propelled a growing market in sports-related products, centered on running clothes and running shoes, Nike and Asics, the Berlin and New York marathons, Gatorade, Body Punch, Power Bars, and much more besides. Perhaps more ambivalent even than the coexistence of the counterculture and the consumption of branded goods is the status of the endurance athlete as the ideal type of the neoliberal self. They are part of a culture and a movement, but feel independent and selfdetermined. They are focused on their own body as they strive to make themself a better person overall. They constantly invest in themself and strive for health, self-optimization and performance.⁶⁴ Last but not least, the fervor with which many practiced running, and talked about their conversion to a new way of life, linked the pursuit of fitness with religious revival and the search for moral leadership, the latter two trends being particularly evident in the United States during this period. Fitness, it might be said, was the ethos of a new era.⁶⁵

This new ethos was preached in television ads such as those of the West German “Get Fit” campaign, specialist magazines such as Runner’s World, and more general publications such as TIME Magazine or Der Spiegel, as well as exercise guides of the kind penned by military doctor Kenneth Cooper on aerobics. This ethos gained new ambassadors in the shape of the many people who now formed running groups, participated in city runs, charity races and marathons, or exercised, in accordance with Cooper’s manual, with a controlled escalation of workouts and a points system, a form of self-monitoring that was not a million miles away from today’s self-tracking.⁶⁶

When it came to running, women certainly appeared in magazines and books from time to time, for example in photo spreads, as the subject of an article, and sometimes as authors. Ultimately, however, the discourse of running and the early practice of running were primarily masculine in character. Men were the main actors and the main target group, and the questions, problems, and strategies around which running revolved were male-oriented as well. Even the heart problems that endurance sports were supposed to prevent had masculine connotations. In particular, middle-aged men were exhorted to live like endurance athletes so they could make the most of their potential for many years to come and, as it was often expressed, achieve “true fitness.” They had to keep moving, eat a balanced diet, forgo cigarettes and alcohol, and get enough sleep. The idea was that this would enable them to maintain their health, live longer, and achieve a greater and lasting productive capacity.⁶⁷

If one looks back over the history of modern societies, it is apparent that this gendering of physical activity has never been entirely watertight. But it seemed to come undone more than ever in the 1970s. Crucial here is the feminist movement, which made the female body one of its key issues. When it came to the right to one’s body and its health, Second Wave Feminism fused the personal and political.⁶⁸ Three aspects formed a highly productive mélange here. First, control over body and health was a core concern of women in their struggle for full recognition as political subjects. Second, such recognition is intertwined with the importance of fitness as the hallmark of a productive existence in a liberal society. For feminists to demand a right to fitness, then, was an obvious step. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pioneers of the first women’s movement were already doing so.⁶⁹ Third, according to political scientist Nancy Fraser, feminism has embarked on a “liaison” with neoliberalism. Fraser points out that feminists have built not only on sisterhood and female solidarity, but also on autonomy and self-responsibility. Elements that are still important and productive in the fight against male privileges and an encrusted gender and social order, Fraser contends, have simultaneously promoted neoliberal values and patterns of sociopolitical order that were already gaining traction in the 1970s and 1980s. And concern for one’s body is intimately bound up with these patterns.⁷⁰

Thus, knowledge of the formability of the body, generated not least by the academic study of gender, may mutate from a source of liberation into a demand. Such knowledge not only opens up the possibility of altering bodies and thus undoing the traditionally static categories of sexuality, gender, and “race.” In a liberal, competitive order, it also introduces a kind of obligation to make the best possible use of the potential to shape the body. The boom in cosmetic surgery, for example, may be described as the neoliberal offspring of the feminist ideal of the right of disposal over one’s body. This is a disposability that demands investment if one wants to achieve success in an environment of now omnipresent competition. Since the 1980s, more and more men have also begun to make great efforts to shape their own appearance, once again confirming how flexible gender boundaries, norms, and practices are.⁷¹

These tensions, contradictions, and reciprocal effects of feminism and fitness converge in the history of aerobics. The roots of this practice lie in the 1960s, when military doctor Kenneth Cooper developed aerobics as a special form of endurance training for astronauts. Cooper’s approach to exercise first achieved broader popularity in the shape of Jacki Sorensen’s “aerobic dancing” and Judi Sheppard Missett’s “jazzercise,” both of them winning women over to fitness training by combining endurance training with elements of dance.

It was Jane Fonda who then rose to become the queen of aerobics in the early 1980s. She had already become famous as an actress and political activist. Now, more than anyone else, she triggered a craze that swept across both the United States and Europe, attracting vast numbers of women. Through aerobics, all women (and not just competitive sportswomen) were supposed to learn to control their bodies, get them fit, and act with self-confidence toward them. Hence, aerobics was an important force in the feminist project, the latter being propelled in part by the pleasure and joy of movement. Yet at the same time aerobics was anything but feminist, in that it created and presented sexualized and standardized female bodies that fit a new ideal of beauty. The ideal female body of the 1980s was muscular and slim, toned and sexy. This dual movement – on the one hand self-empowerment, on the other adaptation to certain systems of norms and values – is fundamental to subject formation in liberal societies in general and thus to the recognition we can receive as their productive members. In American English, many of the new fitness practices ended in “-cize” – aerobicize, jazzercize, dancercize, powercize, and even nutricize. This is another sign that bodies and subjects were now assumed to be in a process of constant becoming. Fonda was an important ambassador for the fit female subject and for female fitness as a new ethos.⁷²

Like no one else, Fonda also helped boost demand for special aerobics outfits. In the 1980s, aerobics – at least as much as running – was part of a new cult of fitness and consumer market. In the United States alone, about 25 million people practiced aerobics during this era, while around 70 million, half the adult population, worked on their fitness in one way or another. Many of them bore the “fit look” and were part of a new everyday culture of fitness. No matter if they were working out or not, they wore sneakers, legwarmers, leggings, leotards, and sweatbands. Spandex was the material that best emphasized shapely bodies, while laying bare the merest hint of a midriff bulge. The new Fitness Barbie, meanwhile, wore a close-fitting leotard, in addition to legwarmers and a headband, when working out in her Barbie Fitness Center. And, of course, in the burgeoning genre of the music video, fitness and toned-up, conventionally beautiful bodies were extremely popular and constantly repeated motifs.⁷³

Workout videos were also part of the new fitness market, and Jane Fonda may be considered the inventor of this genre. At the time, the VCR was a new technology. Although manufacturers had developed various devices in the 1970s, it was not until around 1980 that the VCR began to appear in American and European households, after which it spread like wildfire. In 1982, Fonda launched her first workout video, at just the right time. Original Workout – with a beginner’s and advanced aerobics program – sold 17 million copies and is one of the bestselling video cassettes of all time. Many more tapes, later CDs, and most recently online videos followed, produced and modeled by Fonda herself, but also by many others who followed in her wake. Styling became more and more important as time went by, and the market seemed limitless. In significant part, the attractiveness of workout videos lay in the sweating, mostly female bodies that romped about in them; scantily clad in tight-fitting garments, they performed sometimes lascivious movements, while emitting moaning sounds.⁷⁴ In addition, Jane Fonda supplemented the images of exercising, “beautiful” women (and a few men in the back rows) with medical- and sports science-style digressions on cardiovascular health. Another important reason for the success of such videotapes was that the video recorder opened up new fitness training options. It enabled people to exercise at home whenever time allowed, and there was no requirement to look good while doing so. They could watch the exercise guide while working on themselves, skip certain exercises by hitting the fast-forward button, and repeat or go over them again by rewinding. They could also stop the tape to slake their thirst – all on their own terms, in their own living rooms.⁷⁵

Those who did not exercise at home went to a gym. Gyms had existed since the nineteenth century, and even in the early days they were meeting places whose importance went beyond physical exercise.⁷⁶ So-called health clubs had also become increasingly popular since the 1950s, though exercising the body was not necessarily their patrons’ primary focus. It was not until the 1980s that gyms proliferated. In West Germany too, musty “muscle factories” in cellars, backyard shacks, or old industrial buildings – where shady types dedicated themselves to swaggering displays of strength on homemade devices – morphed into key settings for a new urban lifestyle. There were still only a few hundred gyms in West Germany in the early 1980s (compared with 8,700 in 2016, with over 10 million members). But these had begun to transform into the oases of workouts and wellness we know today, featuring an array of exercise machines, endurance, heart, and circulatory exercises, health advice, aerobics and other classes, as well as a sauna, pool, and bar. By the early 1980s, contemporaries were already referring to the new gyms as “secular cathedrals for the worship of the body.” In much the same way as running and cycling, gyms gave people the opportunity to work out beyond schools and universities, leagues, clubs, and associations – even in Germany, where the latter two institutions were deeply entrenched in the traditional sports system. The gym, moreover, was about much more than rattling through an exercise program. People met their friends there instead of at a restaurant or movie theater. As places where patrons showed a lot of body while wearing scant and tight-fitting clothes, where they sweated and moaned together, gyms created an atmosphere of intimacy that could be conducive to one’s success when flirting at the bar later on.⁷⁷

Working out at a gym had long entailed an emphasis on bodybuilding, but in the course of the 1980s, this increasingly took a back seat. Like few other bodily practices, bodybuilding illustrates the designability of the body, but – despite fluid boundaries – it is not part of the realm of fitness. The bodies of bodybuilders are about transgressing limits; they are dysfunctional pieces of art, serving only to embody a certain aesthetic, which does not equate with fitness in the sense of everyday performance. On the contrary, in everyday life the bodybuilder’s bulky frame tends to get in their way. Bodybuilders, according to art theorist Jörg Scheller, are artists. As early as 1977, Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed this very status, as he revealed in an interview in the documentary Pumping Iron. He is doing the work of a sculptor, Schwarzenegger rhapsodizes, though one who must chisel thousands of tons of iron to create his masterpiece.⁷⁸