mib: men in barre
On Fridays at 9:30 you can find me in the basement of the YMCA getting my ass whipped by Margaret in Barre class.
I am officially one of the regulars and it’s hard to express how much that idea freaks me out. You’re looking at a girl who stops going to the coffee shop once the barista knows her order. You’re looking at a girl who, like, doesn’t love intimacy, actually. I’m not much of a joiner.
I like yoga for the same reason I love walking the streets of New York with earbuds in. I love to be alone in a crowd. Nothing pleases me more than to be with others, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of sound, or marooned on my mat, happily silenced by strict no-talking rules.
But group fitness? No. Not for me. Except Barre.
The first time I went to Barre, Margaret asked me, in front of the whole class, if I was a ballet dancer. I blushed, looked down at the ground, and smiled in a way I hoped was both affirming and mysterious.
“I knew it!” She said, adjusting her headset mic. “Her posture is terrific.” The other students watched me. The space around me became sacred. I grew about an inch and a half and surreptitiously scraped my hair back into a tight little bun.
Okay, confession: my last ballet class was in 1989. I’m just a praise junkie, and junkies sometimes lie to score a fix. So now every week I go back, braving the unbearable familiarity of the other women in the class, because YOU GUYS, I found a place where people might think I’m a ballerina! That’s a tough drug to quit, people. I’ll be chasing that high the rest of my life. Bury me in leg-warmers and make sure they prop my legs up in first position, not second, in the casket. I might be dead but I’m still a lady, for God’s sake.
As much as I jones for Margaret’s praise, it isn’t really the thing that keeps me coming back to Barre. I love being in a room full of women who are all doing a workout that feels made for women without being reductive of women.
Barre is hard, women’s work.
A twenty-two-year-old blonde built like a brick shit house sweats next to a seventy-year-old Pakistani woman whose head scarf comes untucked from her collar and swirls over her shoulder when she jetes. Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Nicaraguan, Black, white. The regulars are from everywhere and look all ways, dress all ways, and we all meet each other in a room on Friday morning, when we are united in our goal of surviving 75 minutes at the hands of merciless Margaret, who lies to our faces every time she says “just one more set.”
It makes me understand why all-women gyms are a thing. I love this place where, sure, people still check out each other’s asses, but without the threat of sexual predation or the stink of territoriality.
I love that nobody in this room is going to pull out my earbuds to get my attention, or compliment me inappropriately on my form. Oh, the glorious freedom of exercising in a room where I can sweat, squat, and rock my pelvic tilts without squaring my jaw and avoiding eye contact.
I’ve had strangers stand behind my elliptical machine and watch me. Like, for awhile. Hey, pal, my mace is UP HERE.
I’ve had strangers give me advice on how to set up my machines correctly, despite the fact that my shit was already locked and loaded. I recently looked up from my leg presses to see a stranger motioning for me to remove my earbuds. He mouthed, “Can I spot you.”
On a Nautilus machine?
I left my earbuds in and yelled at him, “DO YOU WANT TO WORK IN? I’M DOING MAX WEIGHT TO MUSCLE FAILURE SO I’LL BE DONE SOON. PROBABLY SEVEN OR EIGHT REPS.”
He backed away, embarrassed by the volume of my voice. He probably thought I was stupid for misunderstanding his gentlemanly overture. But look, I could have stripped off my earbud shield and grimaced through an excruciating no, no thank you, not at all, literally never, can I have a toenail removed instead please and thank you. Or I could have bellowed at him, pretending to misunderstand, until he retreated. Reader, I chose bellowing, and I’d choose it again and again. Did I mention I was leg-pressing to failure? For fuck’s sake, dude! Read the room.
I often feel surly and hyper-vigilant when I see guys counting my reps, clocking my weights. Two bros in their mid-twenties once laughed at their buddy when he got on the leg press machine after me, and he needed to reduce the weight to do his sets. My earbuds were in but I wish I’d thought to pause my music, look steadily into their eyes, and say, “Please explain why that’s funny.” As I walked away, I knew even if the joke was him, it was still me, too.
One morning, two men walked -- nay, sauntered -- into Barre class just a few minutes before 9:30. They were 90’s-teen-movie-level man-slabs, tall and cute and muscular, fresh from the basketball court. They jostled each other and giggled baritone giggles as they picked up 10-pound hand weights off the rack, walked back to their yoga mats, and slipped off their shoes. One of the guys pretended to grimace and sweat while bicep-curling the comically light hand weight.
A quick glance around the room confirmed the grim, icy vibe among all the regulars. We made silent eye contact and agreed to enjoy the coming slaughter.
Yuk it up while you can, punkins.
You’re gonna wish you asked somebody.
I’d get good with Jesus if I were you.
Margaret watched them, cool and uncharacteristically quiet.
She was going to punish them, and by extension, us, and I nodded imperceptibly. Destroy them.
Margaret, the angel of death by plie, would make them pay for their hubris. And if I had to ask a stranger to give me a piggyback ride out to my car later, so be it.
I took a quick sip of water and mentally prepared to do the hardest Barre class of my (or anyone’s) life. I slipped on my coolest, most collected, most “this is whatever, it’s fine,” face. Barre class isn’t a competitive sport, but I was going to wipe the floor with those overconfident yokels and I’d look as whatever as a cucumber while I did it.
Margaret slipped on her mic and pulled her hair into a bun as tight as her smile.
“Everybody ready?”
Now, if you’ve been here longer than a hot minute you know I have a firm rule about only punching up, never down. That’s why I have no problem punching up at smug bros who saunter into a Barre class chortling at this chick workout and all the chicks doing it. No problem at all. In fact, I’m having an OUTSTANDING time right now. I’m practically clapping my hands in front of the laptop remembering the icy shot of cruel rage that electrified my limbs as we started the warm-up that day.
“I can’t wait to watch you fail,” I thought.
Not in so many words. I’m pretty sure all the blood drained out of the “words” section of my brain and flowed into my squatting muscles. I was basically a ball of burning glutes and cold-blooded laughter.
Margaret brought us into a standard warm-up combination with a fifth-position releve, tendu, into a pulsing curtsy on our tiptoes, to warm up our quads.
The guys stopped laughing.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
AND THIS IS JUST THE WARM-UP!
They could barely turn their feet out. Their hips were locked like Ken dolls whose legs only moved front and back. Releve was beyond them - as soon as they raised onto their toes they teetered and looked around the room at the women who stood on their toes like trees, both embarrassed and baffled. How are they doing that?
I could have told them to tighten their pelvic floors to help with balance.
Instead, I didn’t.
I watched them fall off their own feet and lifted my chin. Not so funny now, are we?
Their hamstrings popped out like guitar strings when they tried to touch their toes. They clenched their teeth and held their breath and their faces turned almost purple. Their hands curled into unconscious claws when they tried to sweep their arms into second position. They struggled to force their limbs and joints into something resembling ease and grace while coiling their necks and shoulders against the pressure of forty eyes delighting in their struggle.
And suddenly I knew how they felt. I knew just how they felt.
I knew they wished they had earbuds in.
Look, I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t enjoy the Great Humbling of the Hoop Boys at the Hands of Margaret the Destroyer. It felt good to see the smiles drop off of their faces during the first dancey warm-up moves that left them stumbling, always on the wrong foot.
It felt outstanding to witness their expressions of smug amusement dissolve into those of baffled appreciation for the 80-year-old Chinese woman in front of them who jetes like a cricket.
You’re goddamn right she’s impressive! Fall on your knees and bow to Barbara Jean.
NOW.
It takes more strength to land silently than to thunder to the ground like a human bookshelf, fellas. Cultivate some ease before you snap a tendon, mmkay?
But I also recognized them. I saw the way their bodies had been trained for hardness, for rigidity, for force, size and volume. Mine has been trained to be small, lean, long, and bendy. We were trains on different tracks: them to Swoll Station, me to Willowy Depot. Today, they were the ones pulling into an unfamiliar station.
They’ve learned their whole lives that masculine athleticism looks like a particular kind of bulldozing, forward-moving, snarling strength. Meanwhile, I’ve learned my whole life that feminine athleticism looks like ballet, no matter the sport: cool and weightless and above all, beautiful.
Not that grace came to me naturally.
As a kid, I was far more intense and competitive than I was coordinated, which made me a human wall on the soccer team and the volleyball player most likely to run into a pole in order to bring back a shanked pass. One time I threw myself to the ground with such unladylike, murderous focus that I concussed myself on the net pole, then continued to slide across the gym floor, off the court, under a courtside table until my limp, sweaty body collided with the scorekeeper’s shins.
Coach chastised my beastliness without explicitly calling me a beast. “You don’t have to… you know. Come on, Katie.” I tell this story not to make myself sound like I’m “different from the other girls,” but to debunk right off the bat the idea that there’s some biological imperative that locks girls into grace and boys into brutality. I had no talent for grace and badly wanted to be brutal, until I found out I really, really shouldn’t.
Years before I started playing volleyball, my cousin learned Judo and our parents pitted us against each other for living room sparring sessions at the beach house in North Carolina. It felt great to get to really use my muscles because my cousin was bigger and stronger. I was proud of myself for beating him and our parents all laughed. I never thought about how it must have felt to lose to his littler girl cousin over and over again, in front of an audience.
I’d imagined those men watched a class through the door one day and thought, “That looks easy. LOL look, their legs are shaking.” They thought Barre was silly because it looks dancey, and because the women of Barre class had learned their whole lives to bear discomfort with the appearance of ease and even delight.
At the core of my rage that day was a screaming plea: It’s not easy! And if we make it look easy, it’s because we worked hard to look easy. We sweated to look effortless. We’re not jokes. We’re strong, and our legs are shaking because we are making them stronger.
Every time they grimaced and grunted and furrowed their eyebrows, I grew lighter and more delicate, all the way to my ballerina fingertips.
I was so focused on defending the dignity of my space that I hadn’t taken the time to recognize that they bore discomfort with the appearance of fury not because they were furious, but because it was the only way they knew how. They learned to front their discomfort with brutality while I learned to front mine with fluid grace.
Now I can’t help but notice, every time I go to the gym, the way our expressions of effort reflect so much about what the world will permit us to be. Them: big, hard, brittle, explosive. Me: small, smaller, flexible, expressionless.
All this to say I understood, I think, the things these guys were feeling in barre class -- watched, out of place, unwelcome, the focal point of mean-spirited amusement and unspoken hostility -- and I have never thought of myself as a person who would be that particular shape of dick.
They learned that strength is a push; I learned that strength is a bend. Within the four walls of Barre class, if not in the broader gym ecosystem, I was the one at home. My brand of strength was the one that would carry me through these 75 minutes. My body was the one most like the others in the room, for fucking once.
I knew I’d be the interloper, the stranger made to feel strange, if we ever found ourselves together on the weight floor. But we weren’t in their house. We were in my house. I remembered the line about why men are afraid of powerful women: because they’re afraid of being treated the way they’ve treated us.
Unexpectedly, even to me, I murmured “You got this, guys,” as I passed them on my way to switch out my hand weights.
My sons do gymnastics, a gracefully brutal sport, and I wonder how many years they have left before they start to feel like they’re not supposed to be doing this anymore. Baby gymnastics is for everybody, but youth gymnastics is overwhelmingly a girl’s game, and the uniforms all have glitter on them.
I want them to stick with it as long as they love it, for several reasons. First, I want my sons to know how it feels to be the odd person out, so they know to keep their mouths shut and be fucking nice and not creepy when they pass a woman in the weight room. I also want to raise them to say “but fuck it, I love trampolines” and cultivate fearless faithfulness to their own hearts. Also, it wouldn’t kill them to learn that grace takes strength, too.
I really love Barre. Don’t laugh. It’s not a joke. And I’d love nothing more than for these men to come to love it too. They only came once but I look for them every week, although not because I want them there. Honestly, I like my class best when it’s just us. I look for them because I value what I learned the day they came and reminded me not to be a dick because the patriarchy that hurts me hurts them too.
I am also dying to know if they learned anything, as well.
I want to know if they learned not to laugh at Margaret. I want to hear them say Barre was really fucking hard, actually. And that even if the women in the room didn’t necessarily look like Self magazine covers, each and every one of them was an athlete, stronger than they thought she should have been.
I want them to hear them say out loud that things that look womanly are as difficult and demanding as things that look manly.
I want them to stop seeing traditionally female pursuits as inherently easier than traditionally masculine ones, and stop believing that, as men, they’ve mastered woman things by default.
I want them to understand how much work it takes to look effortless.
I’d like them to understand that every woman they see who looks effortless, whether it’s at work or in the kitchen or teaching their children or driving their bus or laughing through gritted teeth at a creepy customer whose table she must serve because that’s her job, is also working very, very hard.
And she is not, in any way, a joke.
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