viz. - fitness

Underwear, Public Fitness, and the (Dubious) Progress of #aerieREAL

Aubri Plourde — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 22:06:46 +0000

I’m going to take it as an assumption that in any thorough discussion of fitness, we’re also inevitably going to talk about body image. Lately, when I’m thinking about fitness and body image, I am unsurprisingly (and, perhaps unoriginally) drawn to underwear. I am not the first to write about a connection between underwear advertisement and fitness complexes. There’s even a meme that highlights the absurdity of underwear advertising:

Image Credit: WeKnowMemes

Here, the meme functions as something of a visual critic. Recognizing the gendered disparity in dressing women up as overwrought, overmakeupped angels and men as large grapes allows us to laugh at the ridiculousness of both. Of course, I feel we have to acknowledge the class disparity here, too: there isn’t just a distinction between women’s underwear advertisements and men’s, but between undergarments marketed as luxury items and those sold as a necessary purchase. A men’s Calvin Klein ad, for example, is also a long way from the Fruit of the Loom dudes:

Image Credit: Calvin Klein

This gentleman is still a long way from being trussed up in an angel costume, but there’s certainly more of an association of the CK brand with physical fitness and with luxury—fancy lighting, airbrushed abs, unexplained pose… And, despite the overwhelming majority of body image issues filtered through women’s media, it might be silly to assume that men go unscathed. The Photoshop work done on the Justin Beiber's body suggests as much.

Image Credit: PetaPixel

To be clear, I don’t want to go anywhere near an argument that men’s body images are equally as damaged by underwear advertising as women's are. The Biebs claims that this “before” image isn’t real, negating any argument we might make about the photoshop industry’s effect on his phallus. I don’t care so much whether or not the image is genuine so much as to what degree we invest in the authenticity of underwear images as markers of fitness. Underwear has become somehow integral to body image, despite the fact that it’s hidden. Strangely, there’s this rhetorical move we’re being asked to make in looking at these images, where we imagine the private (underwear) dictating the public perception of our bodies. This is not to suggest that ads for, say, blue jeans, don’t also contribute to body image. Still, it strikes me as strange that photos of other people in their underwear have come to dominate how I see myself in my clothes. Further, they have collapsed the line between lingerie and fitness, as Victoria’s Secret’s obsessive attempts to get me to buy a sports bra attest.

Image Credit: Victoria's Secret

Thinking about Victoria’s Secret lately has led me to consider American Eagle’s campaign @aeriereal. The lingerie and loungewear division of the company, Aerie has recently made a commitment to never photoshop their models.

Image Credit: Buzzfeed

I like that this girl's belly looks like a belly. A healthy one, with clear abdominal shape, and fit. But not plastic. When Aerie first announced this commitment, the company was met with praise and a few tongue-in-cheek sniffs. “They still use models.” And they do still use conventionally beautiful young women. Still, in the spirit of celebrating small successes, they have made a tiny, half, stumbling baby step toward body diversity.

Image Credit: Aerie

In the months since Aerie began this campaign--which, I should acknowledge, is absolutely an advertising campaign and not an altruistic effort to end body negativity--the company has even shifted their rhetoric away from "sexiness" and toward the "real." The girl in this photo may or may not exercise. She appears healthy, happy. Her smile suggests an openness to the “real her.” It seems that investing in authenticity creates beauty. Leaving aside for the moment that in fact, this (beautiful, white, able-bodied) girl is meant to stand in for body diversity and leave us feminists satisfied, I’m interested in Aerie’s divergence from fitness rhetoric. In fact, instead of presenting us with a stunningly photoshopped model and lauding her as “healthy” or “fit,” Aerie goes for the rhetoric of “naturalness.” In fact, this naturalness is figured as under threat by the ad industry. For example, #aeriereal, the brand’s Twitter feed, features actual Aerie employees featuring t-shirts that read, “Love me. Don’t retouch me."

Image Credit: #aeriereal Twitter

These images, more than even the ads themselves, emphasize bodies in various states of physical fitness without completing a link between lingerie, designed for sex appeal, and exercise. Sure, this link isn’t all that hard to make; the diet industry runs on mass obsessions with looking good naked. Still, considering that almost all the people who will ever see me (including almost everyone who will ever gauge my fitness levels) will see me fully clothed, I’m finding myself more drawn to the slogan “Love me. Don’t retouch me” than to the actual images of “normal” girls. Framing retouching as an aggressor to healthy bodies and healthy body images makes this photo do some heavy lifting. A visual image itself, it critiques the ad industry’s violence on young female bodies within its own medium. That is, it turns the gaze of the viewer back onto the myriad of tools and labor that goes into the advertisements.

What does this have to do with fitness? Of course, the assumption that body image issues so latent in any female underwear advertising are tied to the fitness complex is a simplistic one. Still, I think it’s worth dwelling on how the fitness industry runs on this strange metric of private/public concern, wherein the intimacy of the naked or barely-clothed body is made public and publicized.

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fitness

body diversity

body image

body positivity

advertising

Marshawn's Mask, Extreme Fitness, and the Economy

Scott Garbacz — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 03:32:19 +0000

Image Credit: SI.com

In a sport known for its trash talk, boastfulness, and elaborately arcane jargon, Marshawn Lynch’s mouth is the exception. Whether wearing a distinctive mask or remaining taciturn in interviews, one of the world’s greatest rushers has made a name for himself precisely be keeping his mouth closed. This reticence—as well as his resultant struggles with the NFL powers-that-be—that makes him a fascinating icon of our current trust in fitness as a source of security in a very economically uncertain time.

Admittedly, Lynch expresses little interest in being representative for anything universal. While internet memes may project his tackling abilities onto the Bible's first bad-boy story, his 2013 E:60 interview begins with a focus on the hometown whose name is tattooed onto his chest. “I’ll be damned,” Lynch says, “if somebody from Oakland say that Marshawn don’t come back here and be in his community, because that’d be a lie, for sure.” Such local loyalties, not just to his city but to those with whom he has a personal connection, are central to his expressions of guilt and repentance. Asked about his early criminal charges of reckless driving and possession of a concealed handgun, he describes his actions in terms of communal expectations rather than absolute morality: “it was a letdown, you know. It was a letdown to my family, it was a letdown to myself, and it was a letdown to the team that was holding me accountable.” Local loyalties, not grand narratives, saturate Lynch’s self-presentation.

Yet local loyalty doesn’t necessarily translate into the creation of a successful clothing line, nor does it necessarily earn one a super bowl advertisement. For that, one has to turn to another element of Lynch’s persona: his unwillingness to toe the NFL party line. Neither Marshawn’s biography nor his work on behalf of youth—work that includes the Fam 1^st Foundation , which teaches such fundamentals as how to balance a checkbook or handle a job interview--has captured the public eye so much as his unwillingness to talk to the media. His iconic PR highlight was not the establishment of his own clothing line, but his letter-of-the-law participation in the Super Bowl Media Day, where he repeated “I’m here so I won’t get fined” 25 times. This same silence drives his super bowl advertisement, where he breaks from his stoic silence only briefly, to gush about Progressive’s automotive insurance. Lynch’s refusal to talk to the media cost him a $100,000 NFL fine, but such fines only add to his brand appeal. “Beast Mode” apparel and super bowl commercials monetize Lynch’s ability to say, or not say, whatever he wants.

Lynch’s famous “Bane-like mask,” pictured at the top of this article, certainly literalizes his silent-man branding: covering his mouth, without words, it nevertheless manages to convey a spirit of rebellion. Yet if the cinematic Bane’s association with Occupy Wall Street rhetoric and armed rebellion allows the mask to carry a certain generalized anti-authoratarianism, Lynch’s mask carries a more prosaic, if still counterintuitive, purpose: it forces Lynch’s lungs to work harder, helping him to develop exceptional long-term and short term lung capacity and endurance.

These two elements of Bane’s mask find a corollary in perhaps the oddest of regions: upper class exercise crazes. Whether through the push-harder excesses of CrossFit coaches or the odd vogue of sledge-hammering tires, extreme fitness has become an immense craze. As a recent New York Times article by Heather Havrilesky puts it, while as late as the 90’s “you still worked out to prepare for the beach or the bedroom,” the upper classes of America now seem to be “preparing for an unforseen natural disaster, or a burning building, or Armageddon.”

It is hard for me not to see a certain commonality between Lynch’s mask—a device intended to make exercise more difficult and reminiscent of a DC super-villain—and the post-apocalyptic overtones present in so many extreme fitness crazes. Both offer participation in a similarly anarchic, individualistic economy: one where sheer personal commitment and hard work can triumph over the impersonal systems that seem to control so many economic destinies. Havrilsky hits on this desire near the end of her essay. She writes, “in these uncertain times, it doesn’t sound so bad to be prepared for some coming disaster—or even for an actual job doing hard labor, if our empire ever falls.” Having a body that seems capable of facing the most extreme of challenges may largely be irrelevant to our economic structure, but it is something solid and real, a comfort in discomforting times. Lynch provides a similar triumph-through-hard-work with a swagger. His mask signifies a mouth beholden to no one, not even the nigh omnipotent NFL system that employs him, even as it signifies the sacrifices required to achieve such a high level of independence. Indeed, as the wealth gap seems to increase uncontrollably and as America’s economy (as well as those of the rest of the world) seems to remain incredibly unstable, Marshawn’s mask seems to signify a modern, optimistic John Henry. Breathing literal thin air, speaking only when and how he pleases, it may be Lynch who fulfills the promise of Batman: not the hero we deserve, but the hero we need.

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Fitness Trackers and Carrot-and-Stick Motivation

Aubri Plourde — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 16:50:23 +0000

This is not an ad.

It is, however, a shameless account of my fixation on the Jawbone UP24 fitness app. I'll admit, I love data, especially highly specific digital data. Admittedly, some of my organizational tendencies are old-school. Every day, I make a note card filled with every single thing I'll do in the next twenty-four hours, including "drink 3/4 gallon of water" and "exercise." I'm not sure why I like the note cards in spite of my plethora of technology--all of which is capable of organizing and replicating my to-do lists. I think maybe I fetishize the documentation of it. I really like running a nice line through each of my tasks. The actual exercise from the list, though, I need to be as techy as possible. I want records of my heart rate, my sleep cycles, my weight training routines. And I want them to be pretty.

So a little over a year ago, while recovering from spinal surgery, I bought an UP24. For anyone who isn't familiar with fitness wearables, I give you the UP:

Image Credit: Jawbone

Here's how it works: you wear this little band, which looks a little like a medical bracelet or a runner's ID band. It sort of marks you out as a fitness enthusiast, but only for people who recognize it. It can lead to little small-talks of solidarity. I wear one too! and whatnot. The band then connects to a smartphone app, like so:

Image Credit: Jawbone

Meant to visually display motivation--both carrot and stick--for the user, the app uses smiley faces, color schemes, and more graphs than one could possibly need to display the fitness data. When you succeed, you get nice congratulations, with little two-toned spinning wheels:

Image Credit: Jawbone

Failure, though, is also dramatized. Having missed my sleep goal for a few days, I get this little chastisement:

Image Credit: Jawbone

"Even more fantastic." Hmmph. The food tracking feature, too, gets a little heavy-handed with the dour motivation. It separates food into three categories, according to how healthy each food is. The categories, though, get a little extreme. For example, a hard-boiled egg, one of my current not-filling-but-portable snacks, gets a "yellow" food rating (not so good), because of the cholesterol in the egg. It also drives up my cholesterol percentage on the review page:

Image Credit: Jawbone App

This strikes me as a little extreme. On one hand, the fact that the app encourages me to continue stepping, incorporating different kinds of workouts, and pay attention to my nutrition makes me focus on health more than body image. Each of the visual features is meant to focus on maintaining a healthy lifestyle--no fitness models, action shots, or oiled-up six-packs in sight. So we're getting visual fitness motivation without the advertisement-laden, Victoria's Secret-inspired "fitsperation" like we might find on Pinterest:

Image Credit: Pinterest

On the other hand, though, I've noticed that the visual organization of my shortcomings, like this comparison between my calories burned and calories eaten, tends to exacerbate my unhealthy perfectionism. Instead of drilling unhealthy bikini shots into my head, then, I'm sometimes guilty of turning my fitness into a stringent obligation, where the pretty colors and frankly gorgeous design lay out just how lazy I've been on those at-home "working on my prospectus" days. This is the purpose of the app, of course, but I'm wondering if the visual coding of guilt is all that much better than ads like this one:

Image Credit: Maria Kang

Okay, so I don't really think any fitness app is anywhere near as horrendous as this "you can have it all" bit of fat-shaming. In fact, I also suspect that my investment in the negative feedback has way more to do with disliking unmet goals than with the way Jawbone has designed the app. The way that mundane failures like racking up 8,000 steps instead of 10,000 is worse, though, because the app also allows you to add "teammates" for encouragement. The Teammates feature attempts to bring the very private system of graphs and numbers into a limited public forum. Teammates can (with permission), view each other's food intake, steps, exercise goals, even sleep cycles. This has led to my share of good-natured leers (Can they see you have sex?) as well as some actual motivation. My mother and I comment on each other's meals, tease each other about lapsing into our favorite workouts rather than switching it up, and generally feed each other bits of affirmation. None of my teammates (because I'm not teammates with assholes) ever comment on my lack of stepping or my consumption of gin and ice cream (which no amount of red percentage signs will make me give up). But, yes, because I know my stats will show up on their apps in a news-feed-like interface, I do feel a stronger sense of obligation to meet my goals.

Still, I guess that's what I signed up for. Healthy peer pressure, mobilized my aesthetically-pleasing charts and pictures of the quinoa I can never actually cook correctly.

Footnote: No, they can't actually see you have sex. I'm told.

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smartphones

fitness

Visual Rhetoric