M

y favorite part of a Pure Barre
workout is when we go into
bridge lifts — upper back on the
ground, pelvis pushing up toward the ceiling
— because it’s the most overtly sexual thing
we do, and it means class is almost over
Pure Barre was founded by Carrie Dorr
in 2001, just outside of Detroit. Driven by a
results-oriented “lift, tone, burn” mantra,
Pure Barre focuses on low-impact, muscle-
burning movements intended to tighten and
lengthen the body. Pure Barre Classic is the
company’s original workout: Each class is
designed to isolate various muscle groups
using a ballet barre, two sets of light weights
and tomato-colored balls and bands.
Each class is uniform and scary, the lights
turning on, dimming, turning back on and
turning off as a lean woman with hair the
color of a maraschino cherry screams over
the “50 Shades of Grey” soundtrack for you
to “take your seat to your heels, halfway up
and hold.”
I

don’t know if anyone here is a sucker
like me and does those barre classes
where you’re supposed to sculpt your
clit into an ancient arrowhead or whatever
… ” (Jenny Slate said in her Netflix comedy
special “Stage Fright.”)
Barre started as a way for women to
strive toward and successfully experience
better sex. In a piece for The Cut, Danielle
Friedman writes that the woman who
created barre, “Lotte Berk, a free-love
revolutionary who began teaching the
regimen in 1959, specifically wanted to
advance what she called ‘the state of sex’ by
encouraging women to pursue sex for their
own pleasure.”
Berk was a German-Jewish dancer who
sought refuge in London after the Nazis
inhibited her career, and she radicalized a
brand of fitness that was acutely erotic and
prioritized female gratification. “Perhaps
most famously,” Friedman writes, “she is
rumored to have told clients, ‘If you can’t
tuck, you can’t fuck.’ And her clients loved
her for it.”
While modern-day barre isn’t about sex,
there is a promise that it will make you
sexier. This promise is buried in the fantasy
that, one day, you’ll be desirable in the way
that all “Barre Babes” are.
I imagine a Barre Babe as this: She has
healthier hair than you and abs you can see
through her tank top. She has clear skin and
never wears makeup in class, which she
takes every day because she’s tougher than
you. She’s the exercise equivalent to author
Gillian Flynn’s “Cool Girl”:
Being the Cool Girl means I am … hot and
understanding. Cool Girls never get angry;

they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner
and let their men do whatever they want. Go
ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool
Girl.
We barre-goers pelvic thrust in an orbit
around Barre Babe, hating her and the fact
that we’ll never quite be her. She threatens
and tinkers with our self-worth, so we pay
for monthly memberships and $25 socks and
tank tops that say “oh, tuck” because Barre
Babe is toned and sexy, effortless and happy.
We feel good about ourselves after each
hour in the studio and book our next class
from our beds, under a weighted blanket
and a bag of chips.
Barre3, a cardio and strength-based
workout, was designed by Sadie Lincoln in
efforts to defy the Barre Babe mentality.
Each
class
is
similar
without
being
identical: We warm up and hit each major
muscle group, liberated to take or leave
modifications along the way.
Lincoln and her husband Chris started the
company in August 2008, with their flagship
studio in Portland, Ore. There are now 148
franchise studios around the world, all led
by entrepreneurial women. She admits on
National Public Radio’s “How I Built This”
that when she first opened her doors, she
was teaching 19 classes a day. “My body
broke,” she said. “Literally, my back went
out, and I remember my mom saying to me,
‘Honey, you’re embodying your business.’ “
“I learned that to be healthy,” she
continued. “It really is okay to pause, to
not move, to not achieve, and to not have
an outward expression of what exercise
means.”
Barre3 and Pure Barre are not the
same, but they’re clumped together in the
world of boutique fitness, where Lincoln’s
dream of murdering Barre Babe with self-
empowerment is brazenly weakened by
female competition and the collective
mentality that the grass is always greener on
the other side. If only we could drop lower,
if only we could hold a side plank, if only we
could manage heavier weights — she’s doing
it.
The summer of 2016, I started going
to Barre3 in my hometown of St. Louis,
Missouri because I wanted to look better.
It beat the shit out of me, but I kept going
back. My waist was getting smaller, and my
thundering thighs were starting to slim. My
arms were shedding the meat I’ve always
hated about myself, letting muscles ripple to
the surface.
Sumo-squatting once a week turned into
two times, which eventually grew to four
or five, and sometimes even six. I loved
the escalating lightness of early morning

classes, which I’d take with my mom before
she left for work. The sky blushed, its rosy
fever creeping onto our opening breaths
as the sun rose on our thickening layer of
sweat.
Barre3 made my whole body shake, pain
giving way to a numb and premeditated
quiver which instructors would croon
was “my body changing.” I loved those
changes; I felt powerful in them. Go ahead,
make me pulse, I thought. I don’t mind, I’m
the Barre Babe.
W

ellness is “the state of being
in good health, especially as
an actively pursued goal,” as
stated by Merriam-Webster. Per mainstream
refinement and capitalism, wellness is a
catch-all. An empire has been built around
the concept of “wellness” with various
territories holding stake: boutique fitness,
athleisure, minimalism, diet culture, anti-
diet culture, CBD, yoga. On and on and on.
The paradoxes of the wellness world —
inclusivity and unattainability, envy and
admiration, authenticity and superficiality,
business and recreation — have no bearing
on its ability to turn a profit. Wellness is an
absorptive and active phenomenon, both
in practice and principle, and it’s driven
by results. People are making money, be it
through genuine intention or a preying on
pure anxiety, from other people wanting
to become Barre Babe. The never-ending-
ness of that becoming is what continues to
perpetuate and fund the culture. We can
plank and step-tap and carousel-horse and
squat and tuck and fuck however much we
want, but it’ll never be enough. We’ll never
be done.
A

dear friend and forever muse
recently took up yoga. Jack
Brandon, recent LSA graduate
and Daily Arts King, started in July 2019 for
a few different reasons: “The first is that it
became an easier option than going to the
gym, which had started to become a chore
and stopped being a comfortable way to
exercise,” he said.
“The second reason is that my
boyfriend had been doing it for a
while and that made it a little more
interesting to me. My friends had
been doing it before, but I had
assumed it was too expensive
or too hard. I was fairly
inflexible and wanted
to save myself the
embarrassment
of not being
able to hold
poses. The
third
is

that a yoga instructor I had met once told
me I had a ‘very sexual energy.’ ”
Jack’s approach to yoga is deliberate: He
wanted to be comfortable, he wanted to
work out with his boyfriend and he wanted
to feel sexy. The curiosity driving these
wants — will it work? — is what keeps him
going back.
Every Pure Barre class, after weight-
work and a thigh sprint, we stretch. The
music slows into an acoustic serenade, or
some melancholic electronica, and we’re all
facing ourselves in the mirror, panting and
alive, as we’re told to lean into our version
of the splits, “pushing for equal strength
and flexibility each class.” Sliding into the
stretch, folding into my inner thighs as
they settled on the ground without pain or
force, took months of classes. And then I did
it, and I felt comfortable and sexy and like
something was working. This money I spent
was working, my body was working. Jack,
look, it works.
I

n the past decade, the ability of
good health to serve as a marketing
tool has blossomed, partly thanks to
Gwyneth “I’d Rather Smoke Crack Than Eat
Cheese From A Tin” Paltrow. She started her
lifestyle brand, Goop, in September 2008,
sending the first newsletter out to 10,377
subscribers. The company went on to design
detoxes and recipes, soon expanding their
content to encompass understandings and
anxieties experienced largely by women. A
household
name
herself, Paltrow
recruited
other
divinely
feminine

celebrities to contribute to Goop’s operation:
Bryce Dallas Howard wrote a personal
essay on her journey through postpartum
depression and Beyoncé donated a pair of
shoes to Goop’s “annual charity closet sale.”
Goop’s mission is simple. They want to
create change, whether that be in your or
for you: “We don’t mind being the tip of the
spear — in short, we go first so you don’t
have to.”
The current culture of the wellness
industry offers the control that Goop is
advocating for, straddling a marketable line
between the choices we’re currently making
and the choices we could make, if only we
had the right guidance. You have to buy into
the ethos that Goop proposes, which isn’t
hard to do when you’re burdened by the
deeply human struggle of trying to navigate
who you are and who you want to be. The
wellness industry sells the merging of the
two, monetizing the possibility of being at
peace with yourself while capitalizing on
the potential that you might have to be even
better.
Writer Jia Tolentino talks about the
phenomenon of self-improvement in her
recent collection of essays, “Trick Mirror.”
In a chapter titled “Always Be Optimizing,”
she acknowledges the “real pleasures”
available in self-improvement, like the
ability “to understand your physical body as
a source of potential and control.” She also
asserts that the beauty ideal promoted by
the endless search for a best-self can drag
women into “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.”
What happens when
you find your “best
self,”
only
to
realize
that
this
self
isn’t
who

you thought it might be? Where do you
turn when you’ve exhausted the avenues you
believed to be in your best interest, avenues
you invested in under the impression that
you were investing in yourself? What now,
Barre Babe?
P

ure
Barre
tracks
your
class
milestones: 100, 250, 500, 740,
1,000, 1,250. There are barres
outside of the studio room, nailed to the wall
for people to autograph at each mark. When
I hit 100 classes, I signed the barre closest
to the ground and got a free pair of sticky
socks, fresh with a silvery “100” circled in
glitter.
I started Pure Barre when I started
college, and only because there’s not a
Barre3 in Michigan. I grew to crave it —
maybe I have an addictive personality,
maybe I just like mindlessly air-humping to
a club remix of “Losing My Religion.”
Nearing my 250 mark, my socks are still
impressively sticky and beginning to thread.
They catch the light that’s always dimming
and keep my toes from betraying me during
the plank at the beginning of class and the
end of class and sometimes the middle, if
I have the pretty instructor with the foot
tattoo. Once I hit 250, I’ll get new socks, and
then I’ll get another pair at 500. The stakes
keep rising and I keep going and paying and
lifting and toning and burning in the name
of self-improvement. For a workout that’s
supposed to slow me down, I feel like I’m
moving faster, racing no one and competing
against everyone for the next milestone
that I have to have, even if no one but me
cares that I have it. You got me, Jia — I’m
relentless.
A

fter my 229th class at Pure Barre,
I walked home to make dinner.
Stirring my layman’s version of
Goop’s Vegan Cashew Tomato Soup recipe
next to a poster of the man Gwyneth Paltrow
consciously uncoupled from in 2016 (Here’s
looking at you, Chris Martin), I asked Jack
to take me to yoga. He said yes and we made
a date for the following night, when I fed
him the soup and we walked to his regular
studio together.
Like Barre, yoga is sexy, especially in
dim rooms that pulse with a warm glow
and boast temperatures over 90 degrees.
The practice bloomed from India, the
word “yoga” derived from “yuj,” which
is Sanskrit for “to unite” or “to
join.” India is also home to the
Kama Sutra, or
“Teachings
on Desire,”
which
is
an
ancient

Sanskrit manual for emotional and erotic
fulfillment. Google “yoga” and “Kama
Sutra” together, and you’ll find headlines
like “Kama Sutra or Sex-Yoga?” and “The
Yoga of Pure Sex.” You won’t believe what
you can do with your body, we’re told, and we
want to know.
We put our mats down and Jack
immediately took off his shirt, laying on his
back with the soles of his feet pressed into
one another and his knees spread wide. I
looked down at my covered chest and leaned
back to copy him.
Yoga was hard and hot, and I sweat more
than I was ever allowed to at Pure Barre,
where fans tirelessly thrum in the hopes
of keeping everyone’s hair comely enough
for life outside of the studio. The men in
the room kept peeling whatever fabric
they could from themselves as the women
flowed in their damp sports bras. There was
a liberation in moving however I wanted
to move. I left loose and warm, a feeling I
haven’t had since my sunrises at Barre3.
F

our months into his yoga practice,
Jack can now fold over his legs,
hold a bridge pose, and kick up
into a handstand (I saw this last triumph
confidently and drunkenly executed against
the string-lighted, cotton candy blue walls of
a friend’s Kerrytown apartment. Very cool.).
“I keep going back because I like feeling
that strong, graceful feeling,” he said. “(It’s)
like holding two things I thought were in
opposition together in one. It feels very yin
and yang.”
And I guess the merging of this dichotomy,

the “yin and yang” Jack feels when he’s
doing something he thought his body might
never be able to do, is what “optimizing
yourself” feels like, as Tolentino would put
it. I feel this whenever I go to Pure Barre,
and still, the grass could be greener, my
body could do more, my mind could rest
easier. That’s why Pure Barre will never be
Barre3 and why Barre3 will never be yoga
and why yoga will always make me crave the
former of the two even more. I can be tough
enough to tuck and strong enough to squat
and balanced enough to breathe through a
backbend, but to what end?
S

oftness is critical to success in
yoga — and barre and breath and
sex, even. You have to abandon the
mentality that failure looks or feels a certain
way and surrender to the experience. I’m a
sensitive person; I always have been, and
surrender doesn’t come easy. I was often
told to “toughen up” and “be less delicate”
and these demands had consequences,
devilishly redefining the facets of a gentle
person into fears: soft mind, soft heart, soft
stomach.

In the summer of 2017, I was diagnosed
with celiac disease, a lifelong autoimmune
condition in which the intake of gluten
attacks my small intestine. Celiac is a result
of a genetic predisposition and can be
developed at any age. My gastroenterologist
— one of the three women who I’m pretty
sure saved my life — thinks I had celiac for
roughly two years before being diagnosed.
At the end of those two years, I spent eight
hours in the emergency room getting a
stranger’s B+ blood pumped into my left
forearm.
When
someone
with
celiac
eats
enough gluten, they’ll eventually become
malnourished. I needed iron infusions
and two units of blood and a bronzer
that would distinguish me from a ghost
(something I hope another South Indian
woman never has to say).
My body no longer operated under
the agreed upon terms and conditions
of the organized fitness I was actively
participating in, but that didn’t stop me from
trying. I made deals with myself: If I had the
extra drink or ate the extra chocolate, I had
to book a workout. I wasn’t soft, and I wasn’t
going to stop just because I didn’t feel well.
I hauled myself to Pure Barre through the
snow, during dusky, undiagnosed February
mornings — the same month I started
getting charley horses in my calves from
just walking to class. After the night in the
emergency room, I took four days off before
returning to barre. I pushed myself until I
broke, and then I kept going.
I started toeing a fine and fragile line once
barre became a habit: Barre Babe is cute, but
at what cost? Was I going because I needed to
do something that made me feel like myself,
or was I going because I was worried about
what would happen to my body if I stopped?
D

ownward Dog in the back of
the room, I glanced over at Jack,
who was dripping sweat as he
shifted his body’s weight to rest on one leg,
leveling his waist for balance as he lowered
his chest to the floor. I was jealous — not that
he could move his body this way, but that he
was brave enough to move fearlessly. After
I got diagnosed with celiac, I showed my
body no mercy. Soft mind, soft heart, soft
stomach. I’d remind myself what to resist
— not pausing, still moving, forcing myself
to achieve, as though there was glamour
to be won in being strong enough to suffer.
“Health” became an empty word. I forgot,
either tenaciously or in a blind rage, what
the woman behind Barre3 wanted her
community to know: Taking a break is okay,
failing is okay.
Seeing Jack’s sweat slip down the new
contours of his back as he lost and gained

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement
4B
5B
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement

BY ARYA NAIDU, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

ILLUSTRATION BY WIEBE

The pulse of perfection