the 1980s, more and more men have also begun to make great efforts to shape their own appearance, once again confirming how flexible gender boundaries, norms, and practices are.71
These tensions, contradictions, and reciprocal effects of feminism and fitness converge in the history of aerobics. The roots of this practice lie in the 1960s, when military doctor Kenneth Cooper developed aerobics as a special form of endurance training for astronauts. Cooper’s approach to exercise first achieved broader popularity in the shape of Jacki Sorensen’s “aerobic dancing” and Judi Sheppard Missett’s “jazzercise,” both of them winning women over to fitness training by combining endurance training with elements of dance.
It was Jane Fonda who then rose to become the queen of aerobics in the early 1980s. She had already become famous as an actress and political activist. Now, more than anyone else, she triggered a craze that swept across both the United States and Europe, attracting vast numbers of women. Through aerobics, all women (and not just competitive sportswomen) were supposed to learn to control their bodies, get them fit, and act with self-confidence toward them. Hence, aerobics was an important force in the feminist project, the latter being propelled in part by the pleasure and joy of movement. Yet at the same time aerobics was anything but feminist, in that it created and presented sexualized and standardized female bodies that fit a new ideal of beauty. The ideal female body of the 1980s was muscular and slim, toned and sexy. This dual movement – on the one hand self-empowerment, on the other adaptation to certain systems of norms and values – is fundamental to subject formation in liberal societies in general and thus to the recognition we can receive as their productive members. In American English, many of the new fitness practices ended in “-cize” – aerobicize, jazzercize, dancercize, powercize, and even nutricize. This is another sign that bodies and subjects were now assumed to be in a process of constant becoming. Fonda was an important ambassador for the fit female subject and for female fitness as a new ethos.72
Like no one else, Fonda also helped boost demand for special aerobics outfits. In the 1980s, aerobics – at least as much as running – was part of a new cult of fitness and consumer market. In the United States alone, about 25 million people practiced aerobics during this era, while around 70 million, half the adult population, worked on their fitness in one way or another. Many of them bore the “fit look” and were part of a new everyday culture of fitness. No matter if they were working out or not, they wore sneakers, legwarmers, leggings, leotards, and sweatbands. Spandex was the material that best emphasized shapely bodies, while laying bare the merest hint of a midriff bulge. The new Fitness Barbie, meanwhile, wore a close-fitting leotard, in addition to legwarmers and a headband, when working out in her Barbie Fitness Center. And, of course, in the burgeoning genre of the music video, fitness and toned-up, conventionally beautiful bodies were extremely popular and constantly repeated motifs.73
Workout videos were also part of the new fitness market, and Jane Fonda may be considered the inventor of this genre. At the time, the VCR was a new technology. Although manufacturers had developed various devices in the 1970s, it was not until around 1980 that the VCR began to appear in American and European households, after which it spread like wildfire. In 1982, Fonda launched her first workout video, at just the right time. Original Workout – with a beginner’s and advanced aerobics program – sold 17 million copies and is one of the bestselling video cassettes of all time. Many more tapes, later CDs, and most recently online videos followed, produced and modeled by Fonda herself, but also by many others who followed in her wake. Styling became more and more important as time went by, and the market seemed limitless. In significant part, the attractiveness of workout videos lay in the sweating, mostly female bodies that romped about in them; scantily clad in tight-fitting garments, they performed sometimes lascivious movements, while emitting moaning sounds.74 In addition, Jane Fonda supplemented the images of exercising, “beautiful” women (and a few men in the back rows) with medical- and sports science-style digressions on cardiovascular health. Another important reason for the success of such videotapes was that the video recorder opened up new fitness training options. It enabled people to exercise at home whenever time allowed, and there was no requirement to look good while doing so. They could watch the exercise guide while working on themselves, skip certain exercises by hitting the fast-forward button, and repeat or go over them again by rewinding. They could also stop the tape to slake their thirst – all on their own terms, in their own living rooms.75
Those who did not exercise at home went to a gym. Gyms had existed since the nineteenth century, and even in the early days they were meeting places whose importance went beyond physical exercise.76 So-called health clubs had also become increasingly popular since the 1950s, though exercising the body was not necessarily their patrons’ primary focus. It was not until the 1980s that gyms proliferated. In West Germany too, musty “muscle factories” in cellars, backyard shacks, or old industrial buildings – where shady types dedicated themselves to swaggering displays of strength on homemade devices – morphed into key settings for a new urban lifestyle. There were still only a few hundred gyms in West Germany in the early 1980s (compared with 8,700 in 2016, with over 10 million members). But these had begun to transform into the oases of workouts and wellness we know today, featuring an array of exercise machines, endurance, heart, and circulatory exercises, health advice, aerobics and other classes, as well as a sauna, pool, and bar. By the early 1980s, contemporaries were already referring to the new gyms as “secular cathedrals for the worship of the body.” In much the same way as running and cycling, gyms gave people the opportunity to work out beyond schools and universities, leagues, clubs, and associations – even in Germany, where the latter two institutions were deeply entrenched in the traditional sports system. The gym, moreover, was about much more than rattling through an exercise program. People met their friends there instead of at a restaurant or movie theater. As places where patrons showed a lot of body while wearing scant and tight-fitting clothes, where they sweated and moaned together, gyms created an atmosphere of intimacy that could be conducive to one’s success when flirting at the bar later on.77
Working out at a gym had long entailed an emphasis on bodybuilding, but in the course of the 1980s, this increasingly took a back seat. Like few other bodily practices, bodybuilding illustrates the designability of the body, but – despite fluid boundaries – it is not part of the realm of fitness. The bodies of bodybuilders are about transgressing limits; they are dysfunctional pieces of art, serving only to embody a certain aesthetic, which does not equate with fitness in the sense of everyday performance. On the contrary, in everyday life the bodybuilder’s bulky frame tends to get in their way. Bodybuilders, according to art theorist Jörg Scheller, are artists. As early as 1977, Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed this very status, as he revealed in an interview in the documentary Pumping Iron. He is doing the work of a sculptor, Schwarzenegger rhapsodizes, though one who must chisel thousands of tons of iron to create his masterpiece.78
“Fit or fat?”
Many of the threads of this chapter on fitness in recent history are woven together in a slim volume from 1977 by Covert Bailey, a soldier, nutritionist, author, television presenter, and apostle of fitness. Fit or Fat? is its both simple and suggestive title, a leading question that captures the ethos of neoliberal subjectivity. Bailey’s guide to bodies and exercise is full of observations on the body-as-machine, weight measurements and body fat percentages, exercise intervals and recovery periods, exercise intensity and pulse rates, “good” nutrition, protein, sugar, and fat. At the end of the book there is a log for a 12-month exercise program. Here the reader finds pre-printed forms designed to help keep them on track and, as the Quantified Self community would put it today, to make “more informed decisions” about their fitness and life, and even to become “a better human.” “Join those of us who are proud,” Bailey’s book concludes by exhorting readers, “to be getting the most out of the bodies we are given. Start now!”79
Bailey’s book articulates the performance and body fetish that took hold of the Western world in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to this day – in an accelerated form, in fact. Fitness enthusiasts were
