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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

After actually reading "The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness", I'm not sure how you can honestly think that your two extremely cherry-picked paragraphs are representative. The article is decidedly not anti-fitness (despite the click bait title), and phrasing it as

a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023

seems pretty misleading. I'm going to charitably assume you were Google-search-and-skimming for examples of outrageous outgroup behavior, and not deliberately trying to mislead us.

I think somebody being able to write those two paragraphs and also not condemn exercise goes against your thesis that the wokes are crazy, and is a nice example of somebody not being mind-killed.

I suppose I just disagree. The quoted paragraph is the most egregious example, but the article has quite a few lines that are at least adjacent to the kind of silliness I'm poking fun at:

Until the 1920s or so, to be what would be considered today fat or bigger, was actually desirable and actually signified affluence—which is like the polar opposite of today, when so much of the obesity epidemic discourse is connected to socio-economic inequality and to be fat is often to be seen as to be poor.

I don't want to relitigate this at length, but a quick search of "beautiful women Edwardian era" should disabuse observers of the idea that women who "would be considered today fat" were desirable. Women who would today be considered fat were practically non-existent outside of freak shows in 1910.

Another big turning point is 9/11. You see a boom in the CrossFit mentality of almost like militarized fitness and girding yourself and your body for a fight—not necessarily, by the way, in the 1950s/1960s way of fighting for the U.S. Army—but more like “you need to know how to perform functional fitness to protect yourself if things go wrong.” At the same time, you see [an emphasis on] wellness, self care and healing and being meditative in an increasingly traumatic and unpredictable world.

This isn't silly and the first part doesn't even seem wrong, but referring to the world as "increasingly traumatic" is a decidedly woke perspective.

But it’s important to point out that access was never totally equal, if you lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have safe streets or streets that were not well lit. Women were catcalled. People of color were thought to be committing a crime.

The “running is for everybody” discourse still quite often leaves out the fact that depending on where you live and the body that you live in, it can be a very different kind of experience.

This framing isn't anti-exercise, but it includes the trope that a lot of people aren't exercising because they lack access, which is a distinctly left-wing position. Again, this isn't stupid, it isn't even necessarily wrong, but it's certainly casting a side-eye at jerks like me that think you actually can just put on your shoes, walk out the door, and go for a run.

Sure, I quoted the most ridiculous part and did it in a way to make fun of the interviewee's perspective on fitness. If journalistic outlets don't want to be mocked for referencing the "white supremacist origins of exercise" they shouldn't title their articles "The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise" and quote a guy that says that exercise has white supremacist origins.

I’m not arguing that the author isn’t woke. I’m arguing that the author never says “exercise is bad, don’t do it”, which is what you claimed, and which is not true.

If you think the rest of the article lets you similarly argue that the wokes have lost their minds, then you are welcome to use those other parts in your original post.

I don't want to relitigate this at length, but a quick search of "beautiful women Edwardian era" should disabuse observers of the idea that women who "would be considered today fat" were desirable. Women who would today be considered fat were practically non-existent outside of freak shows in 1910.

Is he says if that fatness was considered beautiful in 1910, or is he saying that it was in general considered to be a good thing, perhaps particularly for older people?

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