If you need a woke-approved excuse to skip leg day at the gym, NPR has you covered: Fitness is fascist!
The headline above is not exaggerated for effect; it’s how NPR’s radical “Code Switch” podcast, which is also available to air on NPR member stations, introduced the episode: Why fascists love “fitness.”
The online introduction to the October 16 episode read: “Right-wing ideology has crept into gyms across the country. Is this a new phenomenon, or is the very idea of "fitness" ripe for politicization? Is our idea of fitness inherently fascist? We find out with political commentator Hasan Piker, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and professor Ava Purkiss, author of Fit Citizens.”
The episode recently resurfaced to ridicule on X, with independent journalist Benjamin Ryan saying, "I just opened Instagram and there was an NPR video with a couple of people saying that going to the gym is eugenics."
You know you’re in for some crazy takes when hard-left radical and gym rat Hasan Piker is the most reasonable voice in the discussion.
GENE DEMBY, Host: ….I'm talking to Hasan Piker, political commentator, the internet's self-proclaimed himbo and current fixation of the chattering classes….Hasan has become an unofficial poster boy for the swoletariat, this loose collection of leftist gym rats, right? These are people who want to raise class consciousness among gymgoers and also want to reclaim gym spaces and gym culture for the left to keep those spaces from being sweaty breeding grounds for fascism….
HASAN PIKER: I think right-wing ideals are very easy to fall into. If you don't think about things too much, the idea of, like, body fascism and eugenics -- I know that this is -- there are people far, far more intelligent than myself who have thought about this concept extensively. I just -- maybe I'm a little bit of a dumb guy, but I don't really see it that way.
After that (relative) bit of sanity, Demby’s other two guests (commentary from the three guests was weaved in and out) traced the history of healthy exercise back to fascism, eugenics, and the Hitler Youth. Ava Purkiss is, of course, a professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Michigan.
AVA PURKISS: Can we first think together about the relationship between fascism and fitness?....And let's think about big F and small F fascism. So fascism is about the consolidation of state power and state authority and coercion and the minimizing of democracy. And when the state or a powerful institution or a powerful person is pushing fitness, it can seem harmless. It can seem anodyne. It can seem maybe even, like, a positive good. So I'm going to give some examples. So fitness has been and continues to be used to determine who is hardworking and who is lazy, who has self-restraint and who is greedy and insatiable, who can contribute...
DEMBY: There it is.
PURKISS: ...To national progress through sacrifice of their body and who takes from the nation by getting fat off of the government. So when we can use fitness as a proxy to do that sort of separation, it can be a tool of soft fascism, maybe even actual fascism.
Host Demby circled back to Perkins for a warped history lesson.
PURKISS: We have an oppressive historical relationship to fitness.
DEMBY: That's Ava Purkiss again. She wrote a book called "Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise From Post-Reconstruction To Post-War America."
PURKISS: When anyone who is a member of the state who represents the state, who has some sort of large influence or power, is using fitness, we have to think about how fitness can be a shorthand or a subtext or a strategy to dehumanize people, debase people, divide them and, like I said, put them into some sort of hierarchy, right?
DEMBY: For sure.
….
DEMBY: But who was, like - who was helping shift that definition? Was it the evil capitalists? Was it evil industrialists who were making this sort of shift? Or was it just as...
PURKISS: Oh, my gosh, a lot of it came from the state -- state leaders, military leaders -- because, again, World War I changed a lot in this country and in other countries, too….
Purkiss reluctantly admitted “as classist and oppressive as this sounds,” some middle-class blacks were actually trying to help poor blacks by pushing fresh air and exercise: “Black people were dying of tuberculosis and pneumonia at very high disproportionate rates....A very middle-class aesthetic project, but also deep, deep worry and concern about the survivability of the black race.”
Demby said, “Something about it always struck me as really classist.”
After Purkiss questioned him, Demby rambled about how hard it was to run in South Philly, then switched back to Petrzela and how gym-going is actually a "very eugenic project."
DEMBY: When I first asked Natalia about fitness and fascism, she said there were two ways to think about it. OK, so there's the big systemic ways that our bodies are useful to the state. But then there's the more personal, intimate ways that these ideas can creep in, what she calls body fascism.
PETRZELA: ....We display and we cultivate and we value our fittest citizens. And then what happens, by implication or explicitly? Well, it's this very eugenic project - right? - that the people who are weak or disabled or can't cut it, they are seen as expendable.
