I usually share references to texts and reflections based on content written by others here, but today's article is actually intended to be a free translation of the excellent piece “Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman” written by Jia Tolentino for The Guardian. More than just mentioning it in the newsletter, I believe this is an extremely important article for women, but also for men. You will understand as you read on (and thank you, Murilo, for the tip!).

Athleisure, barre, and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman

How we became addicted to the hard work of self-improvement.

The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can imagine a version of her hosting a show today. She is of indeterminate age, but certainly looks young. She has shiny, clean hair; she is the pure expression of someone who believes she was made to be looked at. She is often luxurious when you see her — on remote beaches, under the stars in the desert, sitting at a carefully styled table, surrounded by beautiful objects or photogenic friends. Showing herself in a moment of leisure is a large part of her job or an essential part of it; in this, she is not so different — for many people today, especially women, packaging and promoting their image is a quick skill for making money. She has a personal brand and probably a boyfriend or husband: she is the physical realization of her constant, invisible audience, which reaffirms her status as an interesting person, an object of value, a self-generated spectacle with an attached public.

Can you already imagine this woman? She looks like an Instagram — which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the market, which are about how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. The process requires maximum obedience on the part of the woman in question, and — ideally — her genuine enthusiasm as well. This woman is sincerely interested in any demand of her market (good looks, the impression of an indefinitely extended youth, advanced skills in presentation and self-control). She is equally interested in anything the market offers her — in the tools that will allow her to be even more attractive, even more presentable, to squeeze as much value as possible out of her particular position.

The ideal woman, in other words, is always improving. She takes advantage of technology, both in the sense of promoting her image and in the meticulous enhancement of her own image. Her hair looks expensive. She spends a lot of money taking care of her skin, a process that has become a sacred aspect of a spiritual ritual and a mundane regularity that begins along with the morning alarm.

The work previously performed by makeup has been incorporated directly into her face: her cheekbones or lips have been grafted, or some lines have been filled; her eyelashes are lengthened every four weeks by a professional who uses individual lashes and glue. The same also applies to her body, which no longer requires traditional improvements like clothing or strategic lingerie; it has been pre-sculpted by exercises that ensure there is little to hide or correct.

Everything about this woman has been preventively controlled to the point that she can guarantee the impression of spontaneity and, more importantly, the feeling of it — she has strived to rid her life of artificial obstacles, and she often feels legitimately carefree. The ideal woman can be whatever she wants — as long as she can pretend to the point of believing that improving herself and simplifying her relationships with the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure, or, in other words, “lifestyle.” The ideal woman drinks a variety of expensive juices, does boutique physical exercises, has skincare routines and vacations, and so she remains happily.

Most women believe they are independent thinkers. Even the glossy covers of women's magazines now feature a model of skepticism regarding top-down narratives about how we look, who and when we should marry, and how we should live. But the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her. If women start to resist an aesthetic, such as the exaggerated use of Photoshop, the aesthetic simply changes to adapt; the power of the ideal image never really diminishes. It is easy enough now to convince women to be skeptical of advertisements and magazine covers, images produced by professionals. It is harder for us to be suspicious of images produced by our peers, and almost impossible to be suspicious of the images we produce of ourselves, for our own pleasure and benefit — even though, in a time when constant social media use has become widely framed as a type of career, many of us are effectively professionals too.

The ideal of the woman today is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly, mainstream form. This type of feminism has organized itself around the issue of being visible and attractive to as many people as possible; it has largely overvalued the ideal success of women. Feminism has not eradicated the tyranny of the ideal woman, but instead, it has become entangled in it and made it more complicated. Nowadays, it is perhaps psychologically more difficult to perceive than it once was for an ordinary woman that she is spending her life moving toward an idealized mirage of her own self-image. She may believe — sufficiently and with the full reinforcement of feminism — that she is the very architect of the incredible, constant, and often pleasurable type of power that this image carries throughout her time, her money, her decisions, her identity, and her soul.

Figuring out how to “improve” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project — a subset of a larger, but equally ridiculous and equally amoral, project of learning how to improve our lives in the context of an accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and all public demands grow perpetually. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.

But the worse things get, the more one is compelled to optimize. I think about this every time I do something that feels particularly efficient and self-interested, like going to a barre class or eating my lunch at a salad chain like Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a refueling station. I eat repulsively fast in most situations — my boyfriend once said I chew as if someone were about to take my food away from me — and, at Sweetgreen, I eat even faster because (as with many things in life) slowing down even for a second can make the machinery give you the creeps. Sweetgreen is a marvel of self-improvement: a line of 40 people — texting, checking their timeline, looking at their screens — can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer buys a kale caesar salad with chicken without even looking at the other line of dark-skinned people with hairnets, who are busy putting chicken on the kale caesar salad, as if that were the purpose of their lives, just as the purpose of their consumers' lives is to send emails 16 hours a day with a brief break to swallow a bowl of nutrients that compensates for the unhealthy aspect of urban professional life.

The ritualization and cleanliness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is very good) obscure the intense and circular artifice that defines the type of life it was designed to serve. The ideal salad consumer needs to eat their 12-dollar salad in 10 minutes because they need extra time to keep functioning at the job that allows them to pay for a 12-dollar salad in the first place. They feel a physical need for this 12-dollar salad, and it is the most reliable and convenient way to build a vitamin barrier against the generalized malfunction that comes with this salad-making-and-delivering work. As Matt Buchanan wrote in The Awl in 2015, the salad is created to “free a person’s hands and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that their precious attention can be directed to a small screen, which is more urgently required, since it can consume data: the work email or the almost infinite Amazon catalog or the truly infinite Facebook timeline, where someone buys diapers or interacts with an ad that appears between rumors and baby photos, someone who is being productive by generating profit for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least is certainly better than using lunch to read a book at the library, because who is making money from that?”

In current terms, what Buchanan is describing is the good life. It means progress, individuation. It is what you do when you have moved forward a little in life, when you want to move forward a little more. The hamster wheel aspect has been evident for a long time. But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more and more of what is simply stupid and adaptive has become stupid and compulsory. Vulnerability, which has always been present, must be repelled at all costs. And so I go to Sweetgreen on the days when I need to eat vegetables very quickly because I am working until 1 a.m. all week and don't have time to make dinner, because I have to work until 1 a.m. again, and like an idiot, I try to make eye contact with the tired security guard, as if that were going to alleviate something of the increasingly high productivity requirements that are forced on these two lines of people who write down and create kale caesar salads every day, and then I “grab” my salad and eat it in less than 10 minutes while looking at my email.

It is very easy, under the conditions of the artificial but continuously growing condition, to see yourself organizing your life around practices that you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. The women they have known this intimately for a long time.

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I was a late bloomer when it came to functional physical habits, like eating vegetables and exercising. I was a gymnast as a child and a cheerleader later on, but one was fun and the other was effectively a requirement: at my school, you had to play a sport, and I lacked the hand-eye coordination to do anything else. As a teenager, I survived on pizza, cheese, and cinnamon rolls, trying to immunize myself with apathy and pleasure-seeking during the long stretch when girls, suffocated by sudden expectations of beauty, transmitted anorexia and bulimia to one another like a virus. For the better part of a decade, I figured it was better to be a little unhealthy and just stop actively seeking results related to my body.

All that changed when I turned 21 and volunteered for the Peace Corps. In those circumstances, it was impossible to think much about my appearance, while health was a matter of immediate importance and always on my mind. I started doing yoga in my room every day as a prophylactic measure against a mental breakdown. When I returned to the United States in 2011, I kept doing it. Yoga helped me be kind to myself during the readjustment process, when I was constantly drowning in dread and spiritual uselessness, the feeling that I had failed.

And then, in 2012, at the end of a yoga class, I felt something shift. I was in college, immersed in a period of daytime drinking and total self-discovery, and I was letting go, suddenly wondering why inaction should be relaxing. The specter of stagnation was weighing heavier and heavier on my existence. I had suddenly lost a part of myself that had sought sharpness, robustness, discipline. I directed these instincts into my mind, hiding them from my body, but why? At that moment, I needed something stronger than yoga, the unrestricted ease that reminded me that, just then, I didn't know what I was doing, and I probably never would.

So, later that same week, I printed out a Groupon offer for a studio called Pure Barre. I was greeted by an instructor who looked like Jessica Rabbit: light green eyes, a physically impossible hourglass figure, honey-colored hair falling below her waist. She led me into a dark room full of sinuous women grabbing mysterious objects made of red rubber. The front wall was mirrored. The women stared at their reflections, expressionless, bracing themselves.

Then the class started and I immediately entered a state of emergency. Barre is a manic and ritualized activity, often practiced with deafening music and lighting changes. The rapid series of positions and movements, dictated and reinforced by the instructor, made me wonder what a ballerina would do if you gave her a concussion and then made her swallow caffeine pills—a fanatical and repetitive routine of arm gestures, leg lifts, and pelvic exercises.

By the end of the class, my leg muscles had liquefied. Jessica turned off the lights and then remarked that it was time for the “back dancing,” a term that I thought, lying on the floor, sounded like something someone would write on a parenting forum as a euphemism for sex. It was, in fact, pretending to have sex: we lay on our backs and lifted our hips in the dark with a sacrificial devotion I hadn't dedicated to actual sex in years. The lights came on. Jessica said, “Good job, ladies.” Everyone applauded.

Barre was invented in the 60s by Lotte Berk, a Jewish ballerina who developed an exercise method based on her dance training and, at 45, with her body as rigidly disciplined as a walking billboard, founded a women-only exercise studio in a basement on Manchester Street in London. It is now a fixture in the United States. The popularity of barre is unprecedented in some respects: while exercise trends come and go, nothing this expensive and this uniform has expanded at the level of individual studios rather than national franchises. (Yoga classes usually cost $20 or less, while barre, if you pay full price, usually costs double.) Among hundreds of thousands of women in dramatically different political and cultural settings, there seems to be an easy consensus that barre is worth it.

In college, I became a believer. I was instructed, first in my feminine regimen of physical training—dance, gymnastics, cheerleading—and then yoga, my therapy, which I slowly began to understand that it is possible, without obvious negative consequences, to control the way your body feels on the inside and functions on the outside by paying people to give you orders in small, mirrored rooms. Barre was too expensive for my college student budget, but I kept paying. It felt more like an investment in a more functional life.

But was it health I was invested in? In a very reductionist way, yes. Barre made me stronger and improved my posture. It gave me the luxury—denied to so many people, for so many stupid reasons—of not having to think about my body, because it was usually good, it usually worked.

But the resilience that barre provides is possibly more psychological than physical. What is really good about it is that it gets you in shape for a fast-paced capitalist life. Barre prepares you less for a half-marathon than for a 12-hour workday, or a week alone with a child and no nanny, or a night commute on a low-quality train. Barre felt like exercise in the way that Sweetgreen felt like eating: both were better categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary and prolonged agony. As a form of exercise, barre was ideal for an era in which everyone has to work constantly—you can go back to the office in five minutes, without needing to shower—and in which women are still expected to be able to look reasonably good.

And, of course, it is this last part, the appearance, that makes barre seem so worth it to so many people. Barre is focused on results and appearance—it has the cult style of CrossFit or a boot camp class, but with appearance, not strength, as the primary goal. It is vaguely connected to ballet in terms of movements, but conceptually, ballet is essential to the inspiration. Among women, ballerinas have a legitimate reason to look tense and disciplined. There are many other women who are thin and graceful for professional reasons—models, escorts, actresses—but ballerinas achieve a standard of beauty not just in the name of appearance or performance, but also in the name of high athleticism and art. And so the exercise method itself, even if nominally taken from ballet, has this subtle effect of giving women a sense that it is something serious, artistic, and of professional purpose regarding their pursuit of the ideal body. It is a good investment or, more precisely, a pragmatic self-sabotage. Learning how to function more efficiently in an exhausting system: that to me seems to be the point of barre, which makes people pay $40 per class, an investment that always pays off.

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The term “optimization” was first used in the way we use it today in economics, in the mid-19th century. “To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort—to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable with the least cost of what 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 the best of what we have.

Today, the principle of optimization—the process of making something, as the dictionary says, “as perfect, functional, or effective as possible”—reaches the extreme. An entire industry has been born to give optimization a uniform: athleisure, the type of clothing you wear when you are acting out or signaling your desire to have an optimized life. I define athleisure as exercise clothes that you pay too much for, but defining it more broadly, athleisure became a category valued at $95 billion in 2016.

Since its emergence about a decade ago, athleisure has gone through a few aesthetic iterations. First, it was black leggings and colorful t-shirts—a spandex version of the preferred uniforms of women who might have, at the time of the rise of athleisure, changed their daily social interactions for yoga and coffee shop meetings. More recently, athleisure has expanded and been resigned into permutations. There is a kind of cosmic hippie look (elaborate prints, galaxy patterns), a kind of monochromatic LA look (sheer fabrics, neutral colors, baseball caps), a minimalist and polished aesthetic from Outdoor Voices, and a stream of terrible slogans like “See you at the Barre.” The brands are Lululemon (“Wunder Under High-Rise Tights,” described as “stylish,” costing $98), Athleta (“Pacifica Contoured Hoodie Tank,” a hoodie tank top, costing $59), Sweaty Betty (“Power Wetlook Mesh Crop Leggings,” which are “bum-sculpting,” for $120), the haunting brand Spiritual Gangster (leggings with “Namaste” on the butt, $88; cotton t-shirt with a print saying “I’ll see it when I believe it,” $56).

Men wear athleisure, but the idea, and the vast majority of the category, belongs to women. It was created from the habit of stay-at-home moms, college students, fitness professionals, off-duty models—women who wear exercise clothes outside of an exercise context and who, like ballerinas, have superior motives to monitor the market value of their appearance. This deep incentive is hidden by a bunch of other more obvious things: these clothes are easy to put on, can be machine-washed, don't wrinkle. Athleisure—like all optimization experiences and their products—is reliably comfortable and supportive in a world that is not. In 2016, Moira Weigel wrote, in Real Life magazine, “Lululemons announce that for the consumer, life has become less frictionless.” She remembers putting on a pair of Spanx for the first time: “The word for how that cocoon made me feel was optimized.”

Spandex—the material present in both Spanx and expensive leggings—was invented during World War II, when the military was trying to develop new parachute fabrics. It is incredibly flexible, resilient, and strong. It feels comfortable to wear good-quality spandex, but this sense of reassurance is combined with an undercurrent demand. Shapewear controls the body under clothes; athleisure highlights our commitment to controlling our body through physical exercise. And even to acquire a pair of Lululemons, you have to have a body with a disciplined appearance. (The company's founders once said that “certain women” should not wear this brand.) “Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a vicious cycle,” wrote Weigel. “Because these pants only ‘work’ on a specific type of body, wearing them makes you remember to leave the house and conquer that body.”

This is how athleisure found space between gym clothes and fashion: the first category optimizes performance, the second optimizes your appearance, and athleisure does both simultaneously. It is tailored for a time when work is packaged as pleasure so that we can accept it more—a time when, for women, improving appearance is a job you should believe is fun. And the great trick of athleisure is the way it physically suggests that you were made for this—that you are the type of person who thinks you are giving your best to an existence as a highly functional and extremely attractive consumer, and how that is a good thing to be the way you spend your time here on Earth.

I recently bought my first pair of Spanx in preparation for a wedding. My older friend was getting married in Texas, and the bridesmaids' dresses—there were thirteen of us—were pale pink, floor-length, and as tight as wrapping paper from collar to knee. When I tried the dress on for the first time, I could see inside my own belly button in the mirror. Sulking, I went online and bought a $98 “Haute Contour High-Waisted Thong.” The shapewear arrived a few days later, and I tried it on with the dress: I couldn't breathe properly, so I immediately started sweating, and everything felt even worse. “What the hell,” I said, staring at my reflection. I looked like a bad imitation of a woman whose deepest goal was to look hot in photos. And, of course, in that moment, wearing $98 torture underwear and a dress designed for an Instagram model, that was exactly what I was.

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The ideal woman appears beautiful, happy, effortless, and perfectly competent. Or does she? Looking a certain way and actually being that way are separate concepts, and struggling to appear effortless and happy can interfere with your ability to actually feel that way. The internet encodes this problem, making it inescapable; in recent years, pop culture has begun to reflect the fractures in identity that social media creates. Not coincidentally, these stories often focus on women, and frequently involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the digital avatar of an ideal peer. There is an exaggerated binary fatalism in these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that feels even more real in life. If you cannot escape the market, then why stop following its terms?

Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality. And yet, there is enormous pleasure in individual success. There seems to be a license and agency in approaching the ideal, finding yourself—in a good photo, on your wedding day, in an identical movement—exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for achieving success under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being open to functioning on these terms. There is nothing but rewards, on the surface. The trap looks beautiful. It is well-lit. It welcomes you.

There is a case, as highlighted by Donna Haraway in her controversial 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” that understands the human condition as essentially and fundamentally adulterated and in search of a kind of freedom compatible with that state. “At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg,” she wrote. The cyborg was a “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” The end of the 20th century “made us even more ambiguous about the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-development and external change, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.”

Haraway imagined that women, formed in a way that makes us inextricable from social and technological machinery, could become fluid and radical and resistant. We could become cyborgs—shaped from an image we did not choose for ourselves, and disloyal and disobedient as a result. “Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential,” wrote Haraway. The cyborg was “oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” She could understand that the terms of her life were always artificial. She could—and what an incredible possibility!—feel no respect for any of those rules by which her life was guided.

In real life, women are much more obedient. Our rebellions are so trivial and small. Lately, the ideal Instagram woman has begun to oppose the structures around her just a little bit. The anti-Instagram argument is now a predictable part of the social media model/influencer life cycle: a beautiful young woman who goes to great lengths to maintain and perform her own beauty for an audience will eventually post a note on Instagram revealing that Instagram has become a bottomless pit of personal insecurity and anxiety. She will take a week-long break from social media and then, almost always, she will do exactly what she was doing before. Resistance to the system is almost always presented in the system's terms. It is much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.

Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: when it comes to beauty, we use technology not just to meet the system's demands, but actually to expand those demands. The realm of possibilities for women has expanded exponentially in all capacities related to beauty—think of the extent to which the Kardashians experiment with body modifications, or young models who have gained completely new faces from their plastic surgeons—and remained stagnant in many other ways. We do not “optimize” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly think of parity as something realistic in these spaces, let alone achieving perfection. We amplify our capacity as elements of the market. That is all.

To get out of this, we must follow the cyborg. We have to want to be disloyal, to weaken this culture. The cyborg is powerful because she reaches her potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is interwoven into her. It is possible that we want this. But what do we want? What would you want—what desires, what types of insubordination, would you be able to access—if you had become an ideal woman, gratified and loved, proof of the efficiency of a system that amplifies and diminishes you every day?