Is Exercise Right-Wing?
At this year’s Berlin film festival one of the films I saw was a very zeitgeist-y exploration of masculinity. Manodrome stars Jessie Eisenberg as Ralphie, a character emblematic of a generation of lost, vulnerable, angry young men, alienated from an seemingly indifferent “society“. At the beginning of the film, Ralphie’s only space of self-definition is a hardcore gym. Amongst the phalanx musclebound figures, Ralphie cuts a inadequate, risible figure by comparison. But the performance of weight training is symbolic of a will to self-definition: an attempt to live up to a physical ideal of manhood and, through the body, assert an autonomy that the external world denies.
Masculinity, always a nebulous concept, is going through its latest cycle of critique. In an academic context I’ve written about various incarnations of it for 20 years, and most of the formative research I have read incorporates an analysis of male embodiment. Attendant to this, exercise and sports is often seen as a key determinant of how men enact their subjectivity. Exercise today as a mainstream cultural phenomenon is, like everything else, defined through the internet and social media. A bewildering variety of fitness “genres” are associated not only with intended aesthetic and health outcomes but are also asserted as a markers of personal identity and political designation in complex and often contradictory ways. Indeed, one of cultural dichotomies relate to a question I have grappled with personally over the years, and has pointedly reemerged in the context of online culture and the overused yet ill-defined term “toxic” masculinity: that exercise is somehow intrinsically right-wing?
I have been “sporty” all my life. As a kid at school what I looked forward to most was PE (Physical Education). I’d play football for the entire lunch break. I was in all the sports teams. I was not a bad student academically, but in these formative years Maths, English, Geography etc, were of little interest. I was quite a talented kid at most sports. But honestly, in hindsight, never good enough to make it as a pro. I always felt somewhat out of place in a team environment. Introverted and self-conscious, the relentless banter of the changing room was a scrutiny that I looked to avoid. So I gravitated more towards the individual challenges of tennis, cycling and golf. At some point in my teens, I discovered the gym. I was skinny and conscious of it. In the early 90s gyms weren’t on every corner. My local council leisure centre had a “weights room” though, and one day, I gingerly entered. Usually it was empty. I tried to follow the pictorial instructions on the wall charts for each machine.
One afternoon I shared the space with a guy who you would describe as a “bodybuilder”, a big dude, wearing a vest and one of those padded belts (for heavy squatting, I would later learn). I don’t know if he felt a bit sorry for me or recognised an echo of his earlier uninitiated self, but he took me under his wing. He explained the correct form, showed me free weight lifts for each body part, and explained muscle group splits and progressive overload. I even bought a couple of books on weight training and was loaned Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. The blockbuster films of the era, of course, were defined by their musclebound protagonists. So with combination athletes and film stars, the visual ideal of an aesthetic, muscular physique became imprinted on my psyche. It was this desire for a body that might live up to this, rather than a fitness goal for sports, that motivated me.
In my mid-20s I went to university, beginning a journey towards an academic career. Sports faded into the background somewhat, although I kept up working out. There was never a total obsession with bodybuilding or a fully personal philosophy to ground my approach to exercise. Studying a film degree on an arts campus, I was exposed to and influenced by an altogether different conception of male identity. I got into a group of arty, cineaste types who were much more into exercising their existential ennui and debating whether chiaroscuro lighting was passé. I never saw one of my cohort in the uni gym. I also got the sense that the varsity sports teams were much more likely to be populated by business and medical students.
Through my PhD, exercise became less and less of a priority. I became more bookish and felt a sense that working out was attached to a earlier, incarnation of my subjectivity. It was when I got to the point of being part of the teaching faculty that I realised there was quite a significant cadre of academics who disdain of exercise. There are various narrative lines to this aversion I have encountered. There are the academic self abusers, drinkers and/or smokers whose tweedy hedonism is imbued with political liberalism. Tying in with a sense of academic freedom, exercise is thus associated with a social discipline or self-denial that needs to be rejected. Then there are the productivity performers. Those who enact a kind of scholarly martyrdom, reveling in the unrelenting business of academic life. They lament (but perhaps secretly love) a lack of work-life balance leaning into the moral superiority of vocation. These guys have no time for exercise.
But I would argue that the biggest group of academics who display a kind of anti-intentional physical activity are those who fervently believe in “a life of the mind”. Whether aligning specifically to Hannah Arendt’s original thesis or just enacting a personal version, this is a philosophy that separates a vita activa (active life) with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life). I don’t think Arendt was profoundly against going for a jog per se, but proposes a morality associated with thought, reflection with oneself, and one’s place and impact on the world. Yet, in creating this binary opposition it is impossible not to infer a hierarchy where “the physical” in a broad sense, becomes associated with a base sense of being. Instinctual and animalistic perhaps. It’s a short step to imbue this hierarchy between the mental/physical within social attitudes, cultural expressions and work.
“The life of the mind” as a principle for day to day life is perhaps less in evidence with today’s academics. Yet there is certainly those who keep the faith. The rejection of material consumption, particularly in terms of outward expressions of identity, continues be a central maxim. This is where you can detect a left-wing/right-wing split. As cite for ideological expression it’s not just the corporeal body through which such perspectives are symbolised. In an online article for Philosopher’s Magazine, Charlotte Wells writes about many academics’ scorn of fashion in this context:
Taking any interest in what you look like supposedly indicates that you’re not really Living the Life of the Mind (hey, that’s the name of the column!) because if you were a true philosopher, you wouldn’t be preoccupied with these earthly matters. It’s a common trope from Plato to Mill that intellectual pleasures are higher than bodily ones, and philosophers seem to have interpreted that as a moral and intellectual duty to look like crap.
I can think of quite a few academics (usually male), whose ostentatious anti-fashion is undoubtedly a marker of intellectual superiority. But as Wells suggests, affecting a “don’t care” approach to the clothes you wear is itself a performative act. Anti-fashion is a still a fashion choice.
In terms of physical appearance, an overt rejection of the vita activa, is an implicit way of telling the world one is above frivolous materiality and shallow consumption. To me, this is imbued even more fundamentally beneath the clothes. Perhaps it goes back to Descartes and the notion of the body as an ontologically necessary, but conceptually redundant vessel. The sinewy inconvenience to which consciousness is grounded but somehow exists beyond. Thought (particularly of the philosophical bent) is defined as transcendent of crude bodily matter.
Perhaps it is also the legacy of the modernist instrumentalisation of the body in fascism that turns off many an academic. Any aim towards physical perfection is haunted by Nazi eugenics, and the notion of a master race. Definitely not to be trusted. For a an acute flavour of this check out the symbolism at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, about the 1936 games in Berlin.
Yet, academic concern with and indeed incorporation of, the embodied self has arguably become more palatable in recent years. This is largely through a social and cultural recoupling of the mind and body in a more holistic view of human experience. Ironically, the cultural opening up of debates regarding mental health, and the commodification of wellbeing, has led to a recognition and extolling of the benefits of exercise on the mind.
The cultural dynamics of exercise as both an practice and an expression of identity is, of course, defined through the internet. Social media offers a bewildering array of advice, motivation, lifestyle philosophies and aesthetic ideals to chose from. Classical fitness genres such as bodybuilding, running, cycling and yoga have many followers. But there are a plethora of hybridised exercise possibilities such as Calisthenics, Cross-fit, HIIT, micro-workouts, walking for fat loss, which are often prosthelytised not only for their specific health or physical image outcomes, but also aligned with philosophical and even psychological narratives around individual personhood.
Again, an allusion of sorts can be towards a political designation of exercise. Individual versus the collective is certainly a grounding principle for the right, left ideological split. But today the political lines are much more blurred than they were. Surely exercise could be a part of a progressive sense of purposeful autonomy? And that the democratisation of information has been much more successful than, say, government campaigns in getting people to understand the benefits of exercise. This, in turn, could help society as whole?
As with everything related to the internet, it’s not that simple.
Fitness has to be aligned with certain other trends that emerge within the digital information infrastructure. For example, the explosion of interest in fitness online is arguably also a part of the cult of productivity. Where every aspect of our lives become instrumentalised in the service of bettering ourselves. This might seem like a utopian principle. However, the parameters of this bettering are usually co-opted as part of the economic determinism. Embodied self-definition practices, whether it’s exercise, diet, or meditation, or even getting up early, too easily become part of a tyrannical regime of self improvement solely in the service of the capitalist machine. Is mainstream fitness culture a ruse to keep us healthy so we can work more?
Yet there is a further stage to this. A certain section of fitness advocacy is led by male voices who both embody fitness and extol its virtues as a lifestyle, often in bombastic or indeed extreme way. Such male figures and the outlook they assert, have been associated with what I would describe as a new masculinism of political autonomy. In this context, fitness is a core part of regime of disciplinary practices adopted in a pseudo-militaristic, hyper-individualisd reaction to perceived social or specific injustices. The trope of “self-discipline”, of rejecting a victim mentality, of rekindling quite traditional values of hard work, can also be read into the pontifications of manosphere favourite Jordan Peterson or the ubiquitous popularity of Joe Rogan. Or indeed the integration of fitness with a resurgence of stoicism as a philosophical principal for life through the writer and online influencer Ryan Holliday. Or the extreme workouts and other practices of actor Mark Wahlberg. The underlying narratives here of a “pick yourself by your bootstraps” embodied self-sufficiency exudes zealotry of a right-wing bent.
The body as corporeal and symbolic locus of psychological and social narratives associated with masculinity, in not new. Remember the scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) the OG of incels, alone in his room, forging an embodiment of resistance; a hardness of the flesh as a barrier against emotion vulnerability and worthlessness.
Updated versions of this are available through the 80s and 90s, with what Susan Jeffords call the Hard Bodies of Hollywood masculinity: Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme epitomising an inflated hypermasculinity which was political idealised and aesthetically packaged in an ideologically conservative action cinema. By the end of the century, masculinity was in crisis again with mis-read satires such as Fight Club an American Psycho defining an era of men-children, socially and psychologically unable to assume the responsibilities of their fathers. In iconic early scene from the later film, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), takes us through his fitness and beauty regime, symbolising an emasculation born of commodified narcissism.
The film I mentioned at the start, Manodrome, is undoubtedly a part of the is cinematic lineage.
Back in 2018 the ever readable Zoe Williams was writing about this phenomena on her regular fitness column. She decries her own “fitness boasting” recognising that its either uninteresting or irritating to anyone in earshot (probably both). But she goes on to say that “overtime (exercise) makes you more right-wing, as you descend into an aerobics-powered moral universe where only the weak need each other, and all the strong need is a waterpouch in their backpack that pipes straight into their mouths”. In our overly sensitive times, is it the case that professing a desire for that broad goal of staying in shape, is an implicit criticism of anyone who doesn’t? A form of implied politically incorrectness. Stop shaming my fatness with you slim buffness! Clearly Williams is going for playful irreverence here. However, some 5 years later the sense that an interest in fitness, particularly in young, is potentially evidence of a political agenda. Going back to fascism, this click bait article by Mark Townsend reminds us that physical self improvement is a Nazi thing. This article on MSNBC received much attention for suggesting that Pandemic Fitness Trends Have Gone Extreme. As much as there is there has been a cult of masculine embodiment through exercise, it has accompanied with both critical scrutiny and memeified piss-taking (check out Fitness Dude with a Podcast).
It’s fascinating how most forms of exercise can be co-opted in the service of quite opposing ideological standpoints. Cycling is classic example. On the one hand, it’s the forefront of narratives associated with sustainability, urban renewal, and societal nudging toward better general health and fitness. But when enacted by so-called MAMILS (middle-aged men in lycra) it’s becomes the subject of ridicule. It’s not cycling itself, but the adoption of it as a type male performativity, one that reveals fundamental insecurity or a kind of privileged libertarianism that is seen as intrinsically, toxically right-wing.
Golf and (my sport) tennis, are often bemoaned as out and out conservative. The historical barriers to entry are cultural and socio-economic, both sports (but golf in particular) carry huge environmental implications, and at the elite end they are funded by corporations (and nation states) which require the turning of a blind eye to rather inconvenient moral questions.
As someone who exercises, plays sport, and is a man in my 50s, I find the idea that such pursuits possess inherent ideological function to be preposterous. But it’s interesting to think through my own performance of self in the context of these historical contexts and contemporary narratives. For example, my attitude regarding the purpose of my fitness has changed. My compulsion/enjoyment/egotism manifested through exercise continues. I certainly admit to that prevailing narcissism, emerging in my teems, as still a driving force in my motivation to exercise. I like the idea of being one of those sleek looking 60 year olds, unsettling the younger men on the tennis court by counteracting all that power and testosterone with guile and experience. Maybe that’s pathetic. But isn’t all of life about trying to hold onto an idea of the self?
The inevitability of physical decline can undoubtedly be read into my own psychological response to aging. Thus, my objectives, mindset and exercise regime, has changed to reflect a different set of priorities. I read a book some years ago called The Lazarus Strategy: How to Age Well and Wisely, which change my outlook on what exercise is for, how it should be integrated into everyday life. The philosophy extolled is about how to exercise and diet so you are fit, healthy and active for as long as possible. A mantra that stuck with me was, and I’m paraphrasing: the exercise you are doing now is not for the you of tomorrow, it’s for the you of 25 years time. To me this is not a radical or political idea, even though you could extrapolate both individual and social benefits from such a mindset. Yet, am I demonstrating the a comparable ideological outlook as the billionaire tech-bros who are obsessed with longevity?
Maybe the problem, as usual, is capitalism. Even something like wanting to be fit, healthy and live viably into old age, cannot not be incorporated into its mechanistic regime. But the how to get beyond capitalism is something I’ll have think about while I’m running around North London.