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

