Moving Together or just moving?

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I’ve finally succumbed to another of the mid-life women clichés: I am taking exercise seriously. I have always moved (cycled around London because it is by far the cheapest, quickest, most fun way to navigate this too big metropolis, done reluctant stretchy stuff whenever my back was sore enough to make me tolerate the boredom), but there comes a point where you have to commit just in order to stand still. I initially tried to go it alone, so dutifully bought a kettle bell and did a few YouTube dance workouts. The ones to anything by Lin Manuel Miranda were the most bearable, but still, funnily enough, I found it tough to sustain. This shouldn’t have been a surprise given how much I bang on about togetherness.

Sadly, the beauty of synchronised collective movement, one of humanities oldest, deepest habits, has become rather ultra processed. It is hard to find instances of it occurring naturally outside the odd wedding dancefloor. I recently rewatched 13 Going on 30 (it’s held up ok, which is a relief) and that moment when one character starts doing the choreographed moves to Thriller and everyone joins in is still pure joy. When did you last feel that?

William McNeill in his book ‘Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History’ writes about the marching drills he learned when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. At first he thought this training was just practical, making them good at obeying orders, but soon it began to effect him deeply:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.

Moving our bodies together is a powerful social technology. It can bond us at a deep level. I long for it, but don’t know quite where to find it. Instead, in London at least, we pay quite obscene amounts of money to move our bodies in a very particular setting: Exercise Class (Class).

In Class, I am finding long buried instincts reemerging. After many (many) Cheap Intro Offers I have landed on reformer pilates at a horrifyingly edgy, brightly coloured Peckham Yoga studio in an old industrial building. It sells matcha. I know. However, the figuring out what to do with all the bloody straps and springs and bits of platform which have a tendency to roll away from under me keeps my mind off the pain of resistance training. I am obediently doing resistance training (which I know is different from cardio though I not entirely sure how) because I have been told that otherwise my bones will crumble like the White Cliffs of Dover. Or something. Women in their forties are fed White Cliff Bones fear (this is my mental shorthand) like women in their thirties are sold fertility horror stories.

However, it is a bit addictive, I find, feeling stronger. I can fling a bag of compost around the garden with more ease, give a large child a piggy back up two flights of stairs to bed without groaning. This doesn’t mean it’s fun. Fun is for rollerblading badly with friends, dancing, paddleboarding, none of which are apparently going to prevent White Cliffs Bones. So I am doing Class. When the absurd complexities of the moves fail to keep my mind busy, I think about how similar it all looks to what I imagine an S&M dungeon is like, or the sociology of matching pastel gym sets. I listen to the soothing voice of the instructor (always in one of those gym sets, usually blonde, never older than 25) and try to squish my inner need for approval.

“Really lovely” she croons “You’ve got a sloooow ten seconds. Keep moving like you’re moving, slow and juicy. In eight, six, four, two and rest. [this last like a benediction, a blessing, like grace] Lovely work everyone, well done.”

The praise is obviously for us all collectively, (the nine beautiful pastel clad girls, the one man sent by their physio and the soft bellied middle aged woman in a paint splattered T shirt (me)). However, she also goes around and corrects angles, encourages flatter backs or more relaxed shoulders. I rarely get corrected. I am still the girl with her hand up in English class. Surrounded by other moving bodies who I do not make eye contact with, I want with all my heart to Do it Properly, to conform. This not being a sensation I feel a lot, nowadays, that is somewhat scary.

The seminal (ovulal?) personal essay on the strange phenomenon of Class is in Trick Mirror, the 2019 collection by Jia Tolentino and is called “Always be Optimizing”. Her Class of choice is something called Barre, a bizarre sounding ballet spin off:

“ I was greeted by an instructor who looked like Jessica Rabbit…She ushered me into a cave-dark room full of sinewy women gathering mysterious red rubber props. The women stared at their reflections, stone-faced, preparing.”

Exercise Class, for many people, is as close as they get to church. SoulCycle, CrossFit, Yoga. Class feels tangibly different from the cheerful aerobics sessions I would sometimes go to with my Mum in village halls when I was a teenager. There, women knew each other, jokingly howled at the instructor over especially challenging exercises, laughed at themselves. It was not army drills, but it did still feel bonding. Class, in the prosperous, fast-paced city sense has none of that. As Tolentino says, in Class

“there’s a heavy element of affective discipline: you are expected to control your expressions and reactions”

(She goes on “This is one of the reasons I realised at some point that Barre felt natural to me, as my only athletic experience has been feminised, appearance-centric activities in which you are required to hide your effort and pain” which could be a whole other essay.)

Part of conforming in Class involves keeping my groans quiet, not making eye contact, pretending the body sweating six inches away isn’t even there. When I first started going to Class in London I tried bringing some of my jolly-aerobics, weapons-grade-extravert energy. Asking people’s names, attempting to commiserate after about how much our muscles were shaking. I was indeed met with stone faces. Now, when a lost visitor from jolly-aerobics-land wanders in (never younger than 40) and tries chatting with the instructor, I inwardly tut with everyone else. You might smile briefly as you hold open a door, but that is as far as it goes. Class, in this form, is not joyful movement intended to bond us. It is not for meeting people, building community. It is for keeping our individual bodies ready to produce more:

“The endurance [Class] builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What its really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life….In [Class] I often feel like my body is a race car that I’m servicing dispassionately in the pit - tuning up arms and legs and then butt and then abs, and then there’s a quick stretch and I’m back on the track, zooming”

I know I am not selling it. So why do I seem to need it? Class is effective at making me do the exercise I know I need for health precisely because it exploits my hyper-social instincts in a targeted way. Regular readers will know I am an increasingly fundamentalist communitarian, that I think being together more in our bodies is the medicine for many, many of our ills. We are pack animals, or made in the image of a trinitarian, relational deity: whatever language you are comfortable with. We need each other. However, for all my anti-individualism, I want to keep an eye on how our hyper-sociality makes us easy to manipulate.

This is because we are most easy to persuade (or coerce) into behaviours if everyone around us is performing them. We are entangled, and that can lead us towards the good, towards Love, or it can dull our ability to orientate towards our values. Those who find the call to move towards each others slightly sinister, who have an inbuilt suspicion of groups have often experienced this dark side.

I was talking to my philosopher friend Erin Plunkett about all this. Erin was raised in a “high control religious group” (you can read her astonishing essay about it here) and she said, “I know. This is why I can only tolerate the smallest of gyms.” She is also a woman in her forties with potential White Cliff Bones so of course she also goes to Class (weight lifting, she is more hardcore than me) but says she starts to feel twitchy if the group gets bigger than about five. She is very tolerant of all my togetherness chat, but I see how hard it is for her to feel safe anywhere where people do the same thing at the same time. Church is of course one of those.

William McNeill, as he traced the history of synchronised movement, acknowledged many ways its power can be directed towards nefarious ends. The army, one might argue, can be one of those cases, in so much that drilling trains soldiers to be willing to die for each other. The beauty of that and the brutality are impossible to fully separate. In the end though, he wants to defend the practice:

The shared euphoria aroused by keeping together in time is intrinsically diffuse, without definite external object or significance. Ideas and words can therefore turn the warm sentiments of group solidarity it arouses in many different directions. Hitler's brutal, suicidal path is not the only way to go, nor does the enormous variety of existing religious groups exhaust possible meanings assignable to this human capability. Benign, humane, and secular ideals can also be nourished by muscular bonding within human groups, large and small.”

I am not of course comparing Reformer Pilates to the Nazis. The link is that Class uses the power of “keeping together in time” to help a group of people tolerate what they couldn’t alone. There is literally no way I would repeatedly choose to do something so uncomfortable for an hour, otherwise. I bemoan the absence of deeper connection, the way all that power has been harnessed by the machine of modernity solely for individualised ends. I am usually glad to have gone to Class, though. Like the social media “like” which feeds the deep human need for affirmation, Class is a simulacra of something we crave. Class does not have most of the benefits of togetherness (we are not actually connecting, just synchronising) but you can suppress a lot of appetites with simulacra. They are often easier to swallow than the messiness of the real.

I am left wondering what to do. Maybe I need to take out another mortgage and buy a bunch of reformer machines and start a Class +, when we move together and actually connect. Maybe I’ll join Good Gym, or just hunt out a jolly aerobics (Zumba now, probably) session in a church hall for a fiver. There must be some still, surely, even here. Or maybe it’s ok to use hyper-sociality as a tool, sometimes, for the instrumental end of strengthen my bones, despite the implicit deal with a largely disconnecting system? (and the insane amount of money). Thoughts in the comments, please.