scream responds: pilates

this post is also about the primary

A few weeks ago a Friend of Scream asked if I would listen to a segment on Adam Tooze’s podcast about pilates, and address to readers what I felt was accurate and/or wrong about it in a newsletter, simply because in real life I do a lot of pilates. I did listen to this segment, and I actually found most of it correct, though not very expansive. But it is true, as Tooze said, that the exercise regimen was invented by a man attempting to help people in internment camps essentially not lose their muscles while confined to beds. It is also true that Joseph Pilates then went to New York, and became the darling of the ballet scene, having invented a very precise way to help a body already doing something very hard then protect and rest and reset itself. For this reason, it is very funny that pilates - which I started doing after an injury back when I was 26 - has become the workout du jour for our wealthiest population, who are generally not facing much physical strife, if any strife at all.

I have watched this shift with the same disdain I watch everything in New York that has lost its roots as the wealthiest people in our city decide that’s the thing that they want. It makes sense to me that the most prominent versions of this new wave of pilates, so different from the original, have set up shop in places like the West Village. There is nothing left of the radical queerness that once defined this neighborhood on those streets; it is perhaps the shining example of the trade-off that many white men decided to make back in the early aughts, essentially to buy their rights and respect. We forget sometimes, due to its ultimate fair result, that the focus of the gay marriage debate for many people hinged on the prospect of two men becoming one legal unit - essentially doubling already large incomes. That the white, cis, male contingent of the LGBTQ crowd made good on that promise makes sense; that they now tend to veer more moderate and conservative than any other demographic in our queer community is simply the result of wealth welcoming people into its clutches. But when you walk the streets where Stonewall was a riot so many years later, you see the real loss in that callous calculation: you can certainly buy your rights, but whoever sold them to you will still feel like their owner. The West Village today is overrun by the most heterosexual people I have ever witnessed. I would assume they have no notion of the neighborhood’s history beyond the scattered rainbow flags.

Even outside of the West Village, you can usually tell if you’re in a more modern version of pilates right away, because in my experience the fundamental difference is that they do not begin the class with something called footwork. These are exercises meant to start up the motions of the body, and is sort of what it sounds like: a series of movements determined by the placement of one’s feet on the machine. The movements tend to be pleasantly easy at first and then become very hard. But the new form of pilates wants everything to feel very hard, all the time and right away, because it has identified itself with class names like Arms, Abs, and Ass, and become the number one way that our city’s roving Hot Girls Stay Fit. For this reason, these classes tend to take the fundamentals of the therapeutic workout and turn it into something that on its own is very difficult, thus leaving the class-goer exhausted and also, it must be said, so toned. I would not call the bizarre movements these studios tend to direct with the machine’s ropes and springs traditional moves, or maybe even pilates at all, simply because they have a totally different goal. These classes are for people who only do pilates; that is, they are classes for people whose bodies are not only receiving their only exercise from pilates - which can be and often is enough exercise for anyone - but also who want to be completely worn out from this, having nothing else that they need their bodies to show up for. There is a difference between the practice of conditioning a body meant to do more, and fatiguing one down when this is the only action you do. Those who choose the latter tend to have bodies that they simply want to be seen and admired: a still thing that looks perfect. Those who choose the former tend to have a body that has something it needs to do.

Another hint that you’re in a traditional studio, even before the work begins, is that your instructor is not American, and this I think Tooze actually touched on nicely. The most interesting thing about pilates is how international it is. It’s much more common, in New York, to have someone teaching in their second language than to have some transplant stereotype from Ohio. We live in an international destination for the arts, famously including ballet, but what so many people find when they make it here is that it is not actually a place where sustaining one’s dream is possible. Thus, teaching pilates has become a second, or back-up, career for vast swarms of dancers, whether they moved here from another part of the country or very far away.

It is a stereotype that is also true that most of New York’s so-called odd jobs are staffed by people who explicitly planned to be doing something else with their lives. By no means is this true of only our immigrant population. The state of pilates, in that sense, is the state of the city. In America, we are constantly asking our young people to make their way to our world-renowned institutions while offering them consistently worse training than they need to need to get there, whether it be with our failing early and high school education, or a complete lack of arts, or other, training at all. Thus they arrive significantly behind the expectations set for them, even if they came from our city’s own schools. At the same time, and with usually a fraction of the social safety net, people from all over the world are striving and succeeding in ways we cannot imagine in order to get here, only to find that they cannot afford to pursue whatever brought them here. In both cases, the prized destination they aimed for is not able to give them what they need. Whether this is a ballet career or simply raising a family, we have let New York fall into such disarray that no matter where you came from, it is likely that you might need to take on a second job in order to stay here. Pilates, with its freelance status and, as Tooze noted, impossible-to-track metrics, is one of the easier ways in which those working under specific documentation concerns might find that second gig. But for those not trained in ballet or something else done in an air-conditioned, easy-going room, that gig is likely to be much harder, and much more exploitative.

Despite all these issues, I do go to pilates as regularly as I can, which has been less than usual lately. Per my last email, I have been spending most of my time volunteering for Zohran Mamdani, which in my case means leading canvasses around the city a few times a week. I am grateful that I have learned how to protect and rest and reset my body in this time especially, because any one of our legions of volunteers will tell you that canvassing in New York City is very physical work. But I have heard less people make the requisite jokes about getting their steps in on this campaign than any other, because from the beginning our volunteers tended to be people who had been very used to walking the streets of New York City for the cause they believe in. This campaign has been a home for thousands of people who have marched relentlessly to voice their support for a free Palestine, for a country without ICE, for a world where Black and brown people are not faced with violence at every turn. This campaign has been a place for people whose bodies move with a purpose, and we have filled the streets with the message that we are not leaving anyone behind, even if they do not yet know how to move with purpose too. I have met hundreds of volunteers just back from climbing six-floor walk-ups, braving rain and cold and wind and such heat, only to tell me that none of that mattered, because someone who had never heard of this man is going to vote for him now. Nothing has made me more certain that we will win than these moments of people discovering their own strength. What we have seen this year is 46,000 people discovering that they have the power to reshape a city so forcefully set in concrete and steel and absolute rot that no one thought it could possibly bend. What we will see tomorrow night is the truth: everything is reshapable. It only needs a clear vision of what it could become.

I was not a believer in this campaign to begin with. I thought it would be a nice try, and a good attempt at building more socialist power. But I do not care about nice tries; I really only care about winning. I knew Zohran Mamdani could and should win when I saw him confront Tom Homan to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil. I watched a man I knew nothing about use his body to stand directly in the way of power, to demand the justice that is necessary not only for a democracy to exist, but for civilization at all. I could not believe what I was seeing, because we do not have politicians who move. Our leaders are still, and they are perfect. They say what they know needs to be heard, and then they stay put. They do not have beliefs that need to be exercised, they do not have reasons to leave a perch where they can be seen and admired. When I saw Zohran move, I knew I should too. And so I have.

I wanted to go to Morningside Heights. I wanted to walk those streets, to knock those doors, to send people out to an area that I knew mattered a lot in terms of voter turnout, but that would be harder to sway to its normally progressive perch in this election. These are older intellectuals who are generally quite settled in life, having gotten into education or the arts or something like that back when you could still do that and end up buying a co-op on Riverside Drive. I assumed it would be difficult to sell them on a young, Muslim, pro-Palestine candidate, and it was. It was frankly very hard, and for the first weeks or so I would come back home to Brooklyn after every canvass filled with anger. I could not believe that these people were so willing to leave our city behind. And so I told my volunteers to tell them that. We asked our doors to stop focusing only on these existential battles that they watched on MSNBC, to come back down to earth with us, to see what their real, actual, living and breathing neighbors needed and were not being given. And then suddenly, almost all at once, they listened. They saw their cloistered neighborhood swarmed with real, actual, living and breathing people, New Yorkers now no matter where they started out, and they started choosing to move with us too.

All day yesterday I kept one turf list in my pocket. It was a wealthy block, flanked by Columbia on one side and the rest of New York City on its other. I wanted to see what it felt like, so in our final shift I walked over from our launch side to walk it myself. We are positioned further from our lists now, on the other side of Morningside Park, so I had to cross down below on 110th. And when I turned the corner onto Amsterdam, I saw a swarm of people, holding Palestinian flags. And I heard people chanting, and I realized that I was walking into a rally, and I read signs I had never seen before, and they said “Welcome home Mahmoud Khalil.” And there on the steps of the Cathedral of Saint John Divine was the man who has represented to so many of us the fact that all of our fights are the same fights, that we can leave no one behind if we truly want to win. And he was free, and he was home, and he was telling us all to keep going, to keep moving, to march straight to Columbia and demand that he not be the only person released from ICE, that he not be the only person allowed to be free. And the crowd went with him, and I walked my turf.

They were chanting, as I walked up, a very clear message: I believe that we will win. I know that they are right - about it all.