And so into the Eighties…

During the Eighties, there was a Fitness Craze among the baby-boomers, who ‘from trying to improve society, [in the 60s and 70s…] turned to improving themselves‘. There can be no more evocative symbol of this than Jane Fonda and her striped leotard, although hers was a comparatively straight-edge style compared to some.  Let’s pause to take a look at the opening to Jane Fonda’s Workout (released in 1982). It looks a little bit like a dark and threatening Exercise Cult. Even the music is vaguely sinister:

It feels a bit like that to do the workout. Jane ain’t taking no crap, and the video is punctuated with whoops of enthusiasm and the occasional yelp of pain from her exercise minions – one of whom, Leslie, is even invited down front to sing Jane’s very own personal song, ‘Do It’. Leslie appeared in a few more of Fonda’s workout videos, unlike the the guy in the crop top who looks uncannily like Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (Alas, there is no YouTube evidence that this guy ever existed, bar a fuzzy image in the video above, so the latter link – with its excellent headgear – will have to suffice.)

Go for the burn: Bess Motta's 'Aerobicise'

Speaking of that dude, I’ve never understood if the men in the back row are there as misguided eye candy while you sweat it out, or if they’re intended to demonstrate that the workout is suitable for all genders. Have a think about that one.

Do It Yourself

The ‘New Workout’ was the first of 23 workout videos Fonda released and, apparently, the best-selling home video ever made (17 million copies sold). It’s hardly surprising: the DIY formula was a seductive one for (in particular) many American baby-boomer housewives, who were just beginning to own the new and exciting VCR-machine. Indeed, this exercise-at-home option contrasts curiously with these housewives’ stereotypical Victorian counterparts, all inactivity, crinolines and restrictive corsets. Fashion follows money, so the trophy wives of the 1980s would be as likely to flaunt their husbands’ wealth with lycra, fitness gadgets and gyms as elegant laziness; keeping trim between cleaning the house and nuking something for dinner.

Another explanation is the quality of the workout itself: there’s a pleasing sense of female camaraderie on Jane’s workouts – she’s occasionally ironic, and consistently determined that you should smile while you do your umpteenth set of sit ups (I never knew it was possible for your abs to hurt post-workout, but I was ignorant). At peak moments she shouts ‘Come on! If I can do it, you can do it!’, apparently forgetting that she trained as a professional ballet dancer, whereas we, her viewers, are more likely to be professional slobs. She believes in you!

Running Wild

That said, she’s also MAD – look at the ‘cool down’ section of the ‘Advanced’ workout for evidence. Rumours that she was filming the video on a diet of espresso, ice cream and cocaine remain unconfirmed, but she’s certainly on some kind of drug, even if just adrenaline. She drives her mob onwards, onwards, always onwards, and I always think there’s something vaguely Maenadic about the hoots and howls of pain she elicits from her class.

However, looking at similar videos of the time it seems that such a frenzied approach to exercise was completely normal: in the Canadian TV series 20-Minute Workout (1983-4), the instructions are shouted out by Bess ‘Aerobics Queen’ Motta almost as parts of a ritualistic cowboy song. The overall effect is unsettling, if not completely hypnotic:

Here’s Bess again, in a slightly more extended Aerobicise opus (the original 1981 show, whence 20-Minute Workout was a spin-off). For some reason, at this point she seems to require two versions of herself to work out with simultaneously. It gets very weird from about 2:40 onwards, at which point the line between ‘exercise-at-home cardio workout’ and ‘strangely synchronised proto-American Apparel soft porn’ becomes blurred to say the very least:

Both these are filmed with a pizazz lacking in Jane Fonda’s no-nonsense camerawork and they perhaps explain why, though Bess may have been Aerobics Queen, Jane was the housewives’ favourite. These are so lacking in practicality that they’re almost music videos; and indeed there’s a ‘genuine’ Sexy Workout prototype to compare them with, in the shape of Olivia Newton-John’s 80s cult classic ‘(Let’s Get) Physical‘ (1981).

Here, with a crazed energy akin to Fonda’s – but a sexual energy that’s more Bess Motta – Olivia Newton-John stalks a gym in something suspiciously akin to a thong-leotard. She pushes fat blokes around until they become ripped blokes shining with sweat (who then walk off into the changing rooms hand-in-hand…) – yet, ironically, the video was set in a gym in order to pacify hand-wringers who found the title too sexual.

Thematically and choreographically, this is almost an inverted reworking of the song 1950s icon Jane Russell sings to the US Olympic team in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

I’m not in condition to wrestle
I’ve never trained in a gym
Show me a man who can nestle
And I’ll pin a medal on him

– Jane Russell, Ain’t there Anyone Here for Love? (1953)

Here, again, the woman is a kind of Exercise Divinity (note the Greek reference in the murals!), but not yet the Olivia NJ-style fitness dominatrix, just a sexy slavering (and physically passive) male muscle-fan.

The Maenads Today

Many modern exercise videos start from celebrity and work back (Kerry Katona, Davina McCall), but they seem to set out to strip their celebrity fitness instructors of all trace of the divine: Davina (whilst being instructed by a mysterious woman sitting cross-legged in full gym kit just behind her) howls at the exercises (‘They’re really hard!!’), while Katie Price/Jordan’s 2005 effort The Jordan Workout is full of ‘I’m shattered!’, although I somehow doubt working out was the main intention of this particular video, given what Jordan is wearing:

It’s interesting that the camaraderie is still there, but the star is no longer the instructor: instead, you’re ‘sharing’ the star’s expensive personal trainer for the price of a DVD. Perhaps as a result, whereas Jane and Bess are driving you on to ‘better yourself’ (we’ll leave the body fascism issue at the door for brevity’s sake), Jordan and Davina are much more prosaic about the whole thing. They even feel the need to give you a context for their workout: we learn that Jordan made her video because she wanted to be ‘back in her g-string and on the beach as Mrs Andre in just twelve weeks’. And look at how the sex appeal has changed: it’s gone from a kind of primordial Dionysian cult to a bit of a cheeky snigger at Jordan’s knickers.

Conclusions – well, there are strange intersections here between sexuality, female camaraderie and the drive towards fitness. Personally, I reckon Jane’s still the best – and let’s not forget she also has an excellent political record – but I will leave you with this video, made in 1983 by Debbie Reynolds (of Singin’ in the Rain fame): Do It Debbie’s Way.

Do It Debbie’s Way (1983).

The next time I’m fed up down the gym, I am going to fling the dumbbells down in disgust and flounce off, offering as explanation merely: ‘I spent years at MGM making musicals! This is the lousiest exercise I eveeeer haaaad!!!!’

‘Honestly Pola, why can’t you keep those cheaters on long enough to see who you’re with?’ asks exasperated gal pal Lauren Bacall, to which Pola replies:

‘Oh no, I’m not taking a chance like that! You know what they say about girls who wear glasses.’

Apparently – according to a single and slightly biased internet source – this wasn’t a million miles away from Monroe herself, who was ‘nearsighted and often wore glasses at times when she was out of the limelight’. If we believe this Fun Fact, its absence from the public domain underscores the irony. You know what they say about girls who wear glasses.

Got To Put My Cheaters On!

I’ve got a lot of sympathy for poor Pola-Marilyn. I’ve had moderate to severe myopia since primary school, and spent a large portion of my teenage years bumping into things and hugging strangers out of a misguided desire to be considered attractive by the Average Teenage Boy.

The Glasses Situation, by Hodge.

To be fair, I am unluckily one of those people for whom glasses do not automatically provide a sense of insouciant high-end Tom Ford cool – all the angles of my face are fattened and distorted with a bad pair of frames. And the laws of statistics and dubious teenage taste dictate that most longstanding myopics will choose a bad pair of frames several times over the course of their younger lives before alighting on the style that works for them. (I’ve always considered it very mean that the average glasses model can be selected for her glasses-friendly angles, whereas Real Life distributes myopia and astigmatism with no such aesthetic consideration. But lol fashion industry / real womenz / shocker.)

Marilyn as Pola in How to Marry a Millionaire

To bring the sob story towards a conclusion: I got contact lenses for my sixteenth birthday, wore them every hour of consciousness (to the long-term detriment of my ocular health), got a few erosions, corneal scars and whatnot due to excessive wear, finally accepted I needed a good pair of glasses and recently found the pair of frames I like with the help of a critical and dedicated sales assistant and a significant wad of cash. I objectively like my glasses nowadays. But I still don’t wear them if I can help it.

Yes, I know. What.

Eyes Wide Shut

I have a literary precursor as far back as George Eliot, whose short-sighted Dorothea Brooke misses part of the plot of Middlemarch, by being ‘aware that there was a gentleman standing at a distance, but see[ing] him merely as a coated figure at a wide angle’. For Dorothea, the sights of Rome on her honeymoon are like ‘a disease of the retina’. On faut souffrir pour être belle, non?

Indeed, you certainly don’t see many glasses on women pre-1950 or thereabouts, although they’ve been around for a while. While part of this is undoubtedly an expense issue, pre-Nye Bevan and the NHS ‘John Lennon’ frames, and in the age of the Sherlock Holmesian ‘gold pince-nez‘, I think it was an aesthetic thing too. It’s significant that once bespectacled women start to appear in film and books they are generally working, or practical, women: Midge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, who is opposed to the mysterious Madeleine Elster, a lady of leisure; the (sexy) secretary / librarian trope; the Plain Jane in need of a makeover and the woman who’s really very intelligent but not very sexy – the one you have to really look at closely to realise – gosh! – she looks like Kate Winslet.

‘Do you know? – without your glasses, you don’t look half bad.’
‘Do you know? – without my glasses, nor do you.’

Kate Winslet in Enigma (2001)

These last are very much about glasses as a cover-up for something more exciting (whence, I assume, the provenance of the sexy secretary’s appeal). In another Marilyn Monroe film, The Seven Year Itch, the protagonist imagines his secretary throwing off her (tailored) jacket, throwing out her hair and losing the glasses, to reveal ‘I’m a woman! I’m flesh and blood!’. In much the same way, any unattractive high school social outcast has but to throw off their frames to reveal a Rachel Leigh Cook or an Anne Hathaway. Glasses, a synonym for intelligence and mystery, are the first things to discard when you want to seduce the hottest guy in school, trust.

The 'Glasses Apostle' by Conrad von Soest (1403)

Of course, the popularity of pre-makeover glasses – and their enduring use in teen films – is partly practical. Glasses are the easiest way to disguise a Hollywood beauty, and an instantly recognisable trope for your basic socially inept personality traits: ‘brains’, ‘practicality’ etc. But as a teenager you’re inevitably subjected to a series of little humiliations and embarrassments that go on to dog you, to a greater or lesser extent, for a large part of your adult life. As a girl growing up behind a pair of glasses, and steeped in the standard adolescent amount of ideological nonsense, you cannot but associate all that tedious baggage (‘I’m unattractive! I’m awkward! Nobody fancies me!’) with the teenage glasses, and shedding it with embracing contact lenses.

Indeed, it even seems to be a kind of ironic (and slightly obnoxious) appropriation of these ideas when, conversely, glasses are deemed ‘sexy’ in themselves. One slightly palm-sweating blog in this vein compares them to garters – ‘men want to take them off [the woman wearing them]’, except more  fetishy. Personally, I just wear them cos I like …seeing.

Glasses-wearer By Day, Superhero By Night

This is not just one for the girls – before he discovered the famous NHS frames, a very image-aware (but severely myopic) John Lennon refused to wear glasses when playing live, making him a Beatle who didn’t actually see the Cavern Club. But, by and large, men in glasses seem to have had an easier ride: the counterpart to the ‘sexy secretary’ is, rather unfairly, the Clark Kent / Peter Parker paradigm, or rather, ‘glasses-wearer by day, superhero by night’. Compare this to the excellent typist who ditches the glasses only to show her employer that, actually, she does enjoy sex (hmmm… enjoying sex / saving the world…).

Moreover, the weakness myopia is seen to connote in men is generally considered more attractive than the dowdiness it suggests in women – ‘You don’t think they make me look like an old maid?’ worries Marilyn-Pola, through her Dame Ednas, as does Bette Davis pre-makeover in Now, Voyager (1942) – and millionaire-seeking once again in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn hopes ‘her’ man will have glasses. ‘Men who wear glasses are so much more gentle, sweet and helpless’, she says. Indeed, there’s even a sense here that a man with glasses becomes less frightening or powerful, less brashly ‘male’. The only disadvantage for Marilyn is that when she kisses the one she finds, his glasses steam up.

But perhaps she has something when, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she asserts to her (bespectacled) groom’s disapproving father – who sees right through her gold-digging tricks – ‘Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a woman being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a woman just because she’s pretty but, my goodness, doesn’t it help?!’.  If a woman’s face is her fortune, best not to cover it with glasses, eh?

But actually, I think the time has come to take that as exactly the nonsense it is. Seeing is sexy. Wear your glasses with pride.