women’s magazines replaced cover lines like “Get lean! Control your eating!” with “Be your healthiest! GET STRONG!” People started “fasting and eating clean and cleansing and making lifestyle changes,” Brodesser-Akner wrote, “which, by all available evidence, is exactly like dieting.” It sometimes seems that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress than this current situation—one in which, instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.
There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-improvement. “That the beauty ideal is pleasurable and demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature,” Widdows writes. The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any case, mostly exacerbated the situation. If Wolf in 1990 criticized a paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all the time, we have something deeper burrowing now—not a beauty myth but a lifestyle myth, 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.
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The question of optimization dates back to antiquity, though it wasn’t called “optimization” back then. In the Aeneid, Virgil describes what’s come to be known as Dido’s Problem, in which the queen Dido strikes a bargain in founding the city of Carthage: she will be allowed as much land as she can enclose with a bull’s hide. The question of what shape will allow you to maximize a given perimeter was answered by Zenodorus in the second century B.C., in the math of his era—the answer is a circle. In 1842, the Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner established the modern answer to the isoperimetric problem with a proof that I truly couldn’t even begin to understand.
In 1844, “optimize” was used as a verb for the first time, meaning “to act like an optimist.” In 1857, it was used for the first time in the way we currently use it—“to make the most of.” The next decade brought a wave of optimization to economics, with the Marginal Revolution: economists argued that human choice is based in calculating the marginal utility of our various options. (A given product’s marginal utility is whatever increase in benefits we get from consuming or using it.) “To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort—to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable—in other words, to maximize pleasure, is the problem of economics,” wrote William Stanley Jevons in The Theory of Political Economy. We all want to get the most out of what we have.
Today, the principle of optimization—the process of making something, as the dictionary puts it, “as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible”—thrives in extremity. An entire industry has even sprung up to give optimization a uniform: athleisure, the type of clothing you wear when you are either acting on or signaling your desire to have an optimized life. I define athleisure as exercise gear that you pay too much money for, but defined more broadly, athleisure was a $97 billion category by 2016. Since its emergence around a decade ago, athleisure has gone through a few aesthetic iterations. At first, it was black leggings and colorful tank tops—a spandex version of an early-aughts going-out uniform favored by women who might have, by the time of athleisure’s rise, shifted their daily social interactions to yoga and coffee dates. More recently, athleisure has branched off and re-converged in permutations. There is a sort of cosmic hippie look (elaborate prints, webbed galaxy patterns), a sort of monochrome LA look (mesh, neutrals, baseball hats), a minimalist and heathered Outdoor Voices aesthetic, and an influx of awful slogans like “I’ll See You at the Barre.” Brands include Lululemon (a pair of “edgy” Wunder Under leggings, slashed with mesh, costs $98), Athleta (“Pacifica Contoured Hoodie Tank,” a hooded tank top, is $59), Sweaty