Let's Get Physical

"Ridiculous": Olivia Neutron-Bomb.

My mom was one of these women. She was intrigued at first by aerobics’ promise to help her lose the weight she had gained during her pregnancy with me, and then she found that she loved the music, the energy, the adult camaraderie.

Good...Right? Isn’t all that good?

… One particularly challenging day at home caring for my older sister and me, she told me later, she was counting down the hours until my dad’s return from work, when she could leave for aerobics. She was already in her leotard, tights, and sweatband when he called to remind her he had to stay for a meeting that night — she’d have to miss her class. She sat down at the kitchen table and wept. Taking in the ridiculous combination of her Lycra and tears only made her cry harder. Aerobics, she realized, had become integral to her identity as a woman, independent from her roles as wife and mother.[emphasis added]

?...Are you being critical of your mother having an identity independent of wife and mother? How liberated of you!

Why is Lycra and tears ridiculous to you? Would tears and bib overalls have been a better combination? Lycra and smiles?

…

…the 1980s aerobics boom is typically treated as little more than a neon-hued fad that was more about teased hair and leg warmers than it was about women’s empowerment. Our culture has a depressingly consistent track record of dismissing the things women love as trivial. But aerobics meant something monumental to my mom and many other women: It meant self-determination. [emphasis added]

This is very shifty: With “ridiculous” Lycra and now“neon-hued fad”, “teased hair and leg warmers”, the author is “dismissing the things women love as trivial”! And she’s dismissing what it all meant to ‘80’s women—“self-determination”!

… Patriarchal myths like these reinforced the idea that women were the weaker sex. Men enjoyed a lifetime of practicing how to use and trust their bodies — from childhood sports to military service to physically demanding careers and heavy lifting at home. Women did not. This led to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, ensuring women were physically inferior to men.

Wait a minute. You’re not telling me the female human is as physically strong as the male human, are you?
… The women’s movement encouraged my mother and others to cultivate literal and figurative strength. And the dawning realization that exercise was healthy for women, too, was soon backed up by science, when in 1968 Dr. Kenneth Cooper published the book “Aerobics,” which presented research suggesting both men and women should condition their heart and lungs. 

  So, it was, and is, scientific fact: Aerobics was good for women’s health. So what is your fucking problem? 

  …It’s hard today to conceive of how groundbreaking it felt for women to participate in a group physical activity… 

If I was your mother it would be hard for me to conceive that I conceived you. 

  And sharing an activity with other women made them feel psychologically better. 

  …women discovered that the classes made them feel great. 

Okay, have we covered all the bases here? Improved health, check. Feel better physically, check. Look physically better, check. Improved psychology, check. Woman comraderie, check. Empowered, check. Giving birth to you as a daughter, priceless.

Many women flocked to classes because they wanted to look like dancers — long and lean and free from dreaded flab. [original emphasis]

Can you imagine? They wanted to look like dancers not struggling writersAmerican fitness turned its back on this promise of empowerment and community… 

  Oh yeah, how'd it do that?

Yes, the language of aerobics also urged self-esteem — but if body-transformation and body-acceptance were at battle within the movement, there was eventually a clear winner: Women found that aerobics did transform the way they looked…[emphasis in original]

… Working out began to feel like a requirement of womanhood. Self-care became hard work. Consider Ms. Fonda’s mantra from this era, “discipline is liberation”…
…

As support for the Equal Rights Amendment flailed, a new belief in the individual took hold: If society wasn’t going to guarantee equal wages or control over a woman’s own body, she would need to find other routes to social power.

Oh bullshit. We lost ERA but we got “Physical”?

…

Aerobics shifted from a movement that allowed women to feel radically in control of their bodies to one that demanded women control their bodies and treat them as our primary projects — to be tweaked, molded, and perfected forever.

?  What is the difference between “radically in control” and “control”? Usually anything "radical" is bad; here it's not. Evidently. 

If we switch the adverb we get:Aerobics I…allowed women...feel in control of their bodies; Aerobics II demanded women radically control their bodies…No, that doesn’t make any more sense. What makes sense is that this woman is out of her mind. 

What does “demanded” mean here? How did the fitness industry “demand” women “control their bodies”, shifting from "radically allowing” “in control of their bodies”? This is gobbledy-gook. This woman is traumatized by her mother’s Lycra and tears.
…
As for my mom, at 72, she continues to sweat it out at a cardio dance studio where most students are over 50 and represent all shapes and sizes. When I’ve accompanied her to class, I’ve barely kept up with the ecstatic routines.

So your mom's kept at it, it wasn't a "neon-hued fad" for her! Good for her, sucks to be hue. 

It’s a great workout, but it never feels like work.

Whatever that means. That’s how it ends.

No, I'm not even naming the writer. Google a sentence or two if you want to know.