Читать книгу The Age of Fitness - Jürgen Martschukat - Страница 12

Many of the threads of this chapter on fitness in recent history are woven together in a slim volume from 1977 by Covert Bailey, a soldier, nutritionist, author, television presenter, and apostle of fitness. Fit or Fat? is its both simple and suggestive title, a leading question that captures the ethos of neoliberal subjectivity. Bailey’s guide to bodies and exercise is full of observations on the body-as-machine, weight measurements and body fat percentages, exercise intervals and recovery periods, exercise intensity and pulse rates, “good” nutrition, protein, sugar, and fat. At the end of the book there is a log for a 12-month exercise program. Here the reader finds pre-printed forms designed to help keep them on track and, as the Quantified Self community would put it today, to make “more informed decisions” about their fitness and life, and even to become “a better human.” “Join those of us who are proud,” Bailey’s book concludes by exhorting readers, “to be getting the most out of the bodies we are given. Start now!”⁷⁹

Bailey’s book articulates the performance and body fetish that took hold of the Western world in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to this day – in an accelerated form, in fact. Fitness enthusiasts were not only keen to produce a toned and powerful body, but also wanted to present it in the best possible way. They now wore figure-hugging, sleeveless T-shirts or skin-tight leotards that left little to the imagination, not only while working out but also outside the gym. The mania for fitness and the body was focused entirely on oneself, one’s success, on having control over one’s life and happiness. Contemporary critics such as historian Benjamin Rader were already referring to a “new strenuosity” and the “strenuous life,” that is, an industrious and relentless lifestyle, one that Americans were once again being exhorted to embrace and that was subject to a new round of evangelization.⁸⁰ Here Rader was alluding to one of the most famous speeches in US history, one that dates back more than a century. In 1899, New York governor and future president Theodore Roosevelt had called on Americans to embrace such a “strenuous life”: an indefatigable, industrious, physically active way of life that would equip them to survive in a globally competitive environment and the Darwinian struggle for existence. In Europe as well, achievement through physical training and healthy eating are not inventions of the 1970s, even if it was then that they entered a boom phase and ushered in the age of fitness. The history of fitness dates to the nineteenth century, and in fact we can trace it still further back.⁸¹