Barre Class Quotes

Any man who can spend a million a year and have nothing to show for it, don't need a recommendation from anybody. He's in a class by himself, and it's a business that no one else can give him a pointer about.

I use my own interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s phrase “a room of one’s own” to explain historical differences within the continuity of women’s lives.19 Women, throughout history, live within the confines of patriarchy. Bennett describes this as the patriarchal equilibrium. Regardless of how much freedom women have, they always have less than men. Yet the patriarchal equilibrium is a continuum, not a fixed standard. The boundaries of patriarchy wax and wane; the size of a woman’s room—the space where she is able to make her own choices—changes. Some women have bigger rooms, such as wealthy women with husbands and fathers among the highest social classes. Some women have smaller rooms, such as poorer women from families with little political and social influence. Historical circumstances, such as the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe, temporarily expanded women’s rooms by increasing their independence as wage earners, while other historical circumstances, such as Athenian democracy, made women’s rooms smaller.

Confiding Julie, the first to get breasts, was cynical by Thanksgiving. Since no one else looked like the class slut, she was given the position, and she soon capitulated. She bleached her hair with Sun In, and started to mess around with boys who played in garage rock bands. Marianne, because she had long legs and a stem neck, rushed from school to her pliés at the barre, her hair in a bun, her head held high, to arch and sweep and bow toward the mirror until night fell. Cara delivered her audition piece flat, but since she had a wheat-colored rope of braid that brushed her waist, she would be Titania in the school play. Emily, bluntnosed and loud, could outact Cara in her sleep; when she saw the cast list she turned silently to her best friend, who handed her a box of milk chocolate creams. Tall, strong, bony Evvy watched Elise try out her maddening dimple. She cornered her outside class to ask her if she thought she was cute. Elise said yes, and Evvy threw a pipette of acid, stolen from the biology lab, in her face. Dodie hated her tight black hair that wouldn’t grow. She crept up behind blond Karen in home ec class and hacked out a fistful with pinking shears. Even Karen understood that it wasn’t personal.

Words, says Freud, are a halfway house to lost things; and words are only one class of the sets of symbols that make up human culture. “If we could not have schizophrenics we also could not have cultures,” says LaBarre.21 Freud’s analysis of word-consciousness deepens our understanding not only of language as neurosis, but also of culture as neurosis and of culture as a “substitute-gratification,” a provisional arrangement in the quest for real enjoyment.

AS A KID GROWING UP IN A RURAL PENNSYLVANIA COAL COUNTRY in the 1930s and 1940s, Bill McGowan never dreamed of a career as a businessman, unaware that such a profession even existed. The son of a railroad engineer and a schoolteacher, McGowan got his first glimpse of the wider world during a three-year stint in the U.S. Army in postwar Europe, after which he returned home to complete an undergraduate degree in chemistry at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. McGowan excelled at chemistry, thanks to his talent for comprehending the rules of complex systems, but found little joy in the subject. His plans for a career in medicine left him similarly lukewarm. One King’s College professor surmised the gregarious, hyper-analytical student’s true calling and suggested he apply for a seat in Harvard Business School’s class of 1954.

A year ago, I’d been impressed by the depths of the rage of the beautiful woman I’d encountered in a barre class, the grimness with which she was “working on herself” in front of the mirror, but I hadn’t fully identified with her anger. Now, I realized, women are conditioned to believe that their anger not only isn’t valid but also is something that needs to be contained or channeled into something productive. I was rejecting that notion. I just wanted to acknowledge that what I was going through sucked, and I was allowed to be really fucking angry about it, and I wanted everyone else to know how angry I was, too.

Learning how to function more efficiently within an exhausting system: this seems to me to be the thing, with barre, that people pay $40 a class for, the investment that always brings back returns.

Lotte Berk and Lydia Bach, too, acknowledged the sexual dimension of a barre class. But these days, most studios do nothing of the sort. Unlike most other forms of group exercise, in barre there’s a heavy element of affective discipline: you are expected to control your expressions and reactions. This is one of the reasons, I realized at some point, that barre feels natural to me, as my only athletic experience has been in feminized, appearance-centric activities in which you are required to hide your effort and pain. (This may in fact be the ugliest facet of my attraction to barre, and the reason I took to it so quickly after witnessing the Ann Arbor queef attack: I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an aesthetic—even when I can feel that instinct tipping into cruelty and reflexive disgust.)

Barre classes are disciplinary rituals, and they feel that way: an hour of surveillance and punishment in a room of mirrors and equipment and routine. The instructors often encourage you to close your eyes and literally dissociate—and, in its own bad way, this can feel sexual, too.

Around 2010, barre hit a boom period. A Times trend piece noted that the classes had developed a cult following for helping women “replicate the dancer’s enviable body: long and lean, svelte but not bulky.” Another Times trend piece, from 2011, began with the same angle, which is barre’s primary sales pitch—giving you a body that gets its own results. “Women have long coveted sinewy arms, high and tight derrieres, lean legs and a regal posture.

Barre is results-driven and appearance-based—it’s got the cultishness of CrossFit or a boot-camp class, but with looks, not strength, as its primary goal. It’s not a pastime, like going to a dance class or taking a lap swim, because the fun you are pursuing mostly comes after the class and not within it. In barre class, I often feel like my body is a race car that I’m servicing dispassionately in the pit—tuning up arms and then legs and then butt and then abs, and then there’s a quick stretch and I’m back on the track, zooming.

Bennett describes this as the patriarchal equilibrium. Regardless of how much freedom women have, they always have less than men. Yet the patriarchal equilibrium is a continuum, not a fixed standard. The boundaries of patriarchy wax and wane; the size of a woman’s room—the space where she is able to make her own choices—changes. Some women have bigger rooms, such as wealthy women with husbands and fathers among the highest social classes. Some women have smaller rooms, such as poorer women from families with little political and social influence. Historical circumstances, such as the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe, temporarily expanded women’s rooms by increasing their independence as wage earners, while other historical circumstances, such as Athenian democracy, made women’s rooms smaller.

I imagine that if I had been a male student my name might have been mentioned in class or that the professor might have encouraged my career in computer science, or perhaps offered me an opportunity in his or a colleague’s lab. This is why I get deeply angry when famous men (like Larry Summers, whom I will come to below) espouse the idea that women as a group are innately less good at science than men but say that of course they do not discriminate against individual talented women. They fail to miss the basic point that in the face of pervasive negative stereotyping, talented women will not be recognized. Such negative stereotyping is not supported by any data and is deeply harmful to all women

WILLIAM MARSHAL: IN LIFE AND LEGEND In many respects, William Marshal was the archetypal medieval knight. His qualities epitomised, perhaps even defined, those valued in late twelfth- and early- thirteenth-century Western European aristocratic culture. His storied career stood as testament to what knights could achieve: the heights to which they could rise and the extent to which they could shape history. In spite of Archbishop Stephen’s reputed pronouncement at his funeral, Marshal was not the only great knight of his generation. Other warriors, such as William des Barres and William des Roches, could match his prowess and reputation. Yet they never reached such astonishing heights. William Marshal’s life represents both a model of knightly experience and a unique example of unparalleled success, for in the end, his story transcended the normal boundaries of his warrior class.

But the main reason Trump won the nomination—and later the general election—was simpler than any of that: he fit the times. Trump had explored running for president twice before, and the voters had shown little interest. This time around, he turned half the country’s unease and confusion about what was happening to America into a powerful political response. In his own way, he articulated the anger that many middle- and working-class Americans felt over the excesses and condescension of the Democratic Party, the coastal elites, and especially the mainstream news media. Trump had diagnosed a decisive divide in the nation: the alienation of average Americans from the increasingly smug and isolated elites that had mismanaged the country and appeared content to preside over a declining America. They felt the old-boy system in Washington had sold them out and that it was time to disrupt the system. Many ordinary Americans were especially sick of the radical progressives’ shrill disparagement of America and scornful attacks on traditional values, and they were deeply frustrated by the wildly partisan role played by the media. In short, in 2016 many voters felt like the character Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Trump’s pugnacious style worked. These frustrated Americans found in him a fighter willing to punch back, go toe-to-toe with the press, and mount a full-throated defense of America and middle-class values. They were tired of the cooing doublespeak of professional politicians and wanted someone who would tell it like it is—straight from the shoulder—and someone willing to follow through and actually do what other politicians said they would do but never did. Trump’s combativeness also enabled him to break through the distortions and smothering hostility of the partisan media and talk right past them, straight to the American people. For many, supporting Trump was an act of defiance—a protest. The more over the top he was, the more they savored the horrified reaction of the elites, especially the media. Arguments that Trump wasn’t presidential missed the point. Trump’s supporters already knew he didn’t conform to presidential norms. Their question was: Where had presidential norms gotten them? They wanted someone who didn’t conform. The Left was taking a wrecking ball to the country. Many fed up Americans wanted to strike back with their own wrecking ball.

Mr. White, Heath’s sixth-grade teacher, once told the class that hatred wasn’t the worst emotion; the worst emotion was indifference. She’d not understood what Mr. White meant until this night.

Then he turned to Rosemary Barr. “Meanwhile we’ll put you somewhere safe,” he told her. “Your tutorials will start as soon as the soldier is buried.” The outer western suburbs were bedroom communities for people who worked in the city, so the traffic stayed bad all the way out. The houses were much grander than in the east. They were all two-story, all varied, all well maintained. They all had big lots and pools and ambitious evergreen landscaping. With the last of the sunset behind them they looked like pictures in a brochure. “Tight-ass middle class,” Reacher said. “What we all aspire to,” Yanni said. “They won’t want to talk,” Reacher said. “Not their style.” “They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks to me.” They drove past the Archer place slowly. There was a cast-metal sign on thin chains under the mailbox: Ted and Oline Archer. Beyond it, across a broad open lawn, the house looked closed-up and dark and silent. It was a big Tudor place. Dull brown beams, cream stucco. Three-car garage. Nobody home, Reacher thought. The neighbor they were looking for lived across the street and one lot to the north. Hers was a place about the same size as the Archers’ but done in an Italianate style. Stone accents, little crenellated towers, dark green sun awnings on the south-facing ground-floor windows. The evening light was fading away to darkness and lamps were coming on behind draped windows. The whole street looked warm and rested and quiet and very satisfied with itself. Reacher said, “They sleep safely in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm.” “You know George Orwell?” Yanni asked. “I went to college,” Reacher said. “West Point is technically a college.” Yanni said, “The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.” “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it,” Reacher said. “I’m sure these are perfectly nice people,” Helen said. “But will they talk to us?” “They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks.” Helen pulled into a long limestone driveway and parked about twenty feet behind an imported SUV that had big chrome wheels. The front door of the house was made of ancient gray weathered oak with iron banding that had nail heads as big as golf balls. It felt like you could step through it straight into the Renaissance. “Property is theft,” Reacher said. “Proudhon,” Yanni said. “Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world.” “Abraham Lincoln,” Reacher said. “In his first State of the Union.” There was an iron knocker shaped like