SoulCycle Searching
Some jerks in my spin class hurt my feelings.
For all the toxic positivity and empty empowerment the sport peddles, it can be surprisingly hard to find a welcoming spin class. And yes, that pun was intended, okay? Back in New York, I used to take classes at a gym above a Mercedes dealership, which — in a city where only the very wealthy and the bridge and tunnel trash have cars — already felt alienating. Our young female instructor was a peaches-and-cream ingenue with the biggest diamond I’ve ever seen IRL on her finger. I came to believe she was the wife of a cruel investment banker who would only allow her to venture past the confines of their luxury apartment if she were teaching a spin class. After all, why work as a spin instructor when you can afford a rock like that unless it’s your Sleeping With The Enemy-type means of escape? I stopped going the day after she told the class she was pregnant. I couldn’t bear to watch her bring a child into that kind of chaos.
Later, I would frequent the SoulCycle in Williamsburg. Once, Jake Gyllenhaal was in my class, but usually my fellow spinners were just hot people who were not Jake Gyllenhaal. I think you might have been legally required to have an eating disorder to work there. I don’t want to police people’s bodies, but a spin instructor’s body is their brand, and that’s got to be stressful. If you look too perfect, people won’t take your class because you make them feel bad about themselves. If you look too imperfect, people won’t take your class because you appear to suck at your job. My point being, nobody at SoulCycle looked like they were bad at their job, but I did leave many a class hating myself. I stopped going to SoulCycle because I moved to LA, where eating disorders are so copious, they’re actually just “eating orders.” Now I don’t have to pay $30 a class to hate the way I look, I can do it for free just by walking down the street.
There’s a small, boutique spin studio in my neighborhood which I politely ignored for a couple of years because breast feeding was my fitness regimen. But when the jugs ran dry, and a chronic foot injury rendered me unable to enjoy other preferred forms of exercise, I limped down the street and bought a class package. Reader, since the moment I crossed its excessively air-conditioned threshold, this spin studio has brought an abundance of joy to my life I could not have anticipated. People from all walks of life gather on its stationary fleet. The instructors are approachable and funny and positive without being treacly. The prices are affordable and every time you reach a milestone they take a polaroid of you and put it up on the wall. (I just hit my 75 classes mark NBD.) I do not exude the warmth and openness to make “gym friends”, but without cultivating any actual relationships there, I feel cared for and welcomed in my tiny spin sanctuary. So just imagine my outrage, my terror, my heartbreak, when last weekend, three spin trolls appeared in my Saturday morning class, hellbent on shattering the inveterate sense of safety the studio provides. Imagine how hurt my feelings were.
I clocked them right away. Three bros in the back row who were not only not cycling to the beat of the music, they were barely pedaling. At first, I assumed they must be friends of the instructor, who was filling in for my usual Saturday morning gal. They’re probably just here to raz her, I thought, which didn’t make their presence less annoying, but did make them seem slightly less sinister. However, it quickly became clear that the instructor did not know them, was as bewildered as the rest of us at their presence, and was doing her best not to be thrown by their putrid vibes. Remarkably, each was terrible in his very own way. The one on the right couldn’t stop leering at the cornucopia of spandex encased butts surrounding him on all sides. The one in the middle kept laughing and rolling his eyes at our masterfully synchronized upper body choreography. The one on the left actually didn’t seem that bad, but he was marked by the stain of his company. Why were these young men who seemed to hate spinning taking a spin class, I wondered? What had the rest of us done to deserve their disdain? This is why young (and many old) white men are horrible. Ruining people’s only respite from the relentlessness of the day-to-day is their idea of a good time.
As a white, hetero, married mother of two boys, it pains me to hate the general idea of everyone I love. They’ve done nothing to deserve it but to be born this way! And my particular white men aren’t awful, or at least, if my husband is, he’s very good at suppressing it (raised Roman Catholic) and if my sons are, it’s my job to teach them not to be. But why does this particular human model come pre-installed with violence and entitlement? Why does my younger son only build with blocks so he can then knock them down? Why does my older son forget to say please every time he asks for something, no matter how many times we remind him? Am I unfairly gendering their behavior? Does it have more to do with what’s between their ears than what’s between their legs? Is my vocal contempt for white men just a means of distancing myself from my own privilege and culpability as a white woman? After all, I’m not ignorant to the weaponized fragility of white women’s tears, and here I am writing a newsletter called “That Hurts My Feelings.”
The other day, my older son said, “Mom, wanna know a secret? Boys can be girls and girls can be boys. It’s all made up.” I find it comforting that the next generation is refusing to embrace a binary worldview. Maybe part of the reason (many) white men are so awful is not because it’s in their DNA, but because people like me expect them to be. But there I go, excusing men’s bad behavior and assuming blame for it myself. How female of me. I just hope that when my sons are old enough to take spin classes, they won’t feel like they have to feign irony to justify their attendance. They can just spin and enjoy themselves and admit they’re there for the same reason we all are: to get an ass you can bounce a quarter off.