The Body Electronic: Aerobic Exercise on Video: Women's Search for Empowerment and Self-Transformation

Even though health and fitness have been an American preoccupation since the Igth century, a cultural resistance to institutionalizing physical activities for mature women has prevailed until quite recently. For instance, calisthenics (beauty + strength), a nonsport, nondance, indoor movement form invented for 1gth-century schoolgirls, had to justify itself in terms of the health of future childbearers, but was, for all intents and purposes, foreclosed to women of childbearing age and older. Sport is a leisure domain long said to masculinize its few female participants. Even as late as the 1970s, women athletes reported feeling a deep conflict between two identities-athlete and woman. Today sport remains a prime means for distinguishing and maintaining masculinity, for despite the entrance of women into sport in greater numbers, and even though the ideal of sport challenges the notions of femininity as dependent, static, contained, and passive, it is the last major social institution to remain segregated by gender and its hierarchy of values implicitly favors male performances.1 That there should be cultural institutions which encourage movement activities for average, everyday women is no longer an issue-there are numerous possibilities from jogging to dancing. But aerobic dance-exercises, popularly known as aerobics, are preeminent among these, and act as a symbol of the domain of movement for women. According to the International Dance-Exercise Association in San Diego, 21.9 million people nationwide engaged in aerobics in 1986, the vast majority of them women.2