this a lot in the Trump era, with the president attaching his dominance politics to a repulsive projection of sexual ownership—over passive models, random women, even his daughter. (It’s also no coincidence that white nationalism resurged through picking up online misogynists, who lent the retrograde, violent, supremacist ideology an equally retrograde, violent, sexual edge.) We can decode social priorities through looking at what’s most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact, or strengthened, by draining women’s energy and wasting our time.
Women aren’t definitionally powerless in any of these situations, and certainly women have subverted and diversified sexual archetypes to far more aesthetically interesting ends. But still, it’s worth paying attention to whatever cultural products draw straightforwardly on sex to gain position, even and especially if women are driving the concept. I’m suspicious of, for example, Teen Vogue’s eagerness to use “thigh-high politics” as supposedly provocative progressive branding in the wake of the election, or of women like Emily Ratajkowski constantly espousing the bold feminist platform that nudity is good. And I remain extremely suspicious of our old friend barre.
Barre is a bizarrely and clinically eroticized experience. This is partly because of the music: barre offers you the opportunity to repeatedly clench your left butt cheek in a room full of women experiencing mute, collective, seven A.M. agony while listening to an EDM song about banging a stranger at the club. But there’s an aspect to a barre class that actually resembles porn, specifically a casting-couch video. It places you, the exercise-seeker, in the position of the young woman who is “auditioning” on camera. Your instructor is the third party, a hot woman who tells you to switch positions every thirty seconds and keep your legs over your head. She squeaks, coyly, “Yes, right there, dig into it, I like seeing those legs shake—now it’s really getting juicy—that’s it, you look so-o-o good, you look a-ma-zing, yes!!!!!!” She reminds you that when it hurts, that’s when it’s about to feel good. One day an instructor crouched over me while I was in a straddle stretch, then put her hands on my hips and rolled them forward so that I was doing a middle split. She held my hips down with one hand and used the other to straighten out my spine, pushing me down from the small of my back to my shoulder blades. It was painful, but, as that script goes, I liked it.
A few barre studios are cheeky about all this. Pop Physique in Los Angeles sells its merchandise online with photos of naked models. The “Pop Ball”—the rubber ball you squeeze between your thighs at regular intervals—is photographed cradled in the small of a woman’s naked back; her bare ass is visible, and she’s wearing nothing but special $15 barre socks. The studio shoots their ads American Apparel–style, with high-cut leotards and plenty of crotch close-ups, and their website proclaims that clients can expect “a hotter sex life…Well, that’s what we’ve heard.”
Lotte Berk and Lydia Bach, too, acknowledged the sexual dimension of a barre class. But these days, most studios do nothing of the sort. Unlike most other forms of group exercise, in barre there’s a heavy element of affective discipline: you are expected to control your expressions and reactions. This is one of the reasons, I realized at some point, that barre feels natural to me, as my only athletic experience has been in feminized, appearance-centric activities in which you are required to hide your effort and pain. (This may in fact be the ugliest facet of my attraction to barre, and the reason I took to it so quickly after witnessing the Ann Arbor queef attack: I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an aesthetic—even when I can feel that instinct tipping into cruelty and reflexive disgust.) Barre classes are disciplinary rituals, and they feel that way: an hour of surveillance and punishment in a room of mirrors and equipment and routine. The instructors often encourage you to close your eyes and literally dissociate—and, in its own bad way, this can feel sexual, too. It’s as if barre picks up two opposite ends of the spectrum of female sexual expression: one porny and performative, the other repressed.
Barre is definitely eroticizing something, anyway. Most obviously, the ritual reinforces the desirability of the specific type of body that Berk designed the