Chapter 1: What does the term 'swoletariat' mean in fitness culture?
The first guy was like, I go on jogs, and he was like really small, and then
There was a guy that was medium sized and he was like, I'm just like weightlifting to keep myself in good shape. And then the third guy was like, I am a competitive bodybuilder. And he was like pretty big. But then the biggest guy of the four was like, I am harshly aware of the rapid state of fascism that we are living under. And I feel a need to protect my loved ones. And he was like huge.
And I just thought it was so funny, but also that's so real.
Fitness has always been political. And so I think it's not whether or not fitness in the 21st century is political. It's just how does it manifest its political nature?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Today, I have a very special guest here with me, Margaret Cerino. Hi, Brittany. Marge is a producer over at Life Kit, but Marge, you also have a side job, right? As a CrossFit coach?
That's correct. To be honest, I just like yelling at people and telling them what to do. That's fair. I can understand that. Yeah. Yeah. The main draw for me. I am a jock for the record, but not like a self-serious one, if that makes sense. I'm more of like a lifting weights in my acrylics kind of person. But my algorithms don't know this.
So I do get a lot of gym adjacent people and their content online, but And, like, the thing about gym culture, it has a lot of politics wrapped up in it. Politics about bodies, of course. But I also feel like the bro-y side of gym culture skews towards right-wing politics. I don't think gym going is inherently right-wing. I'm just saying I feel like the gym is a stereotypically masculine space.
And fitness is a big part of conservative manosphere content. But this isn't really new. Yeah, I've definitely seen that before. But what I have been surprised by... You like my gains?
Well, guess what? There are gains. That's right, the mentality runs.
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Chapter 2: How has fitness historically been intertwined with politics?
Hold on.
Hold on.
I want to break that down. So that's a combo of swole, meaning like, you know, super muscular, like jacked. Correct. And proletariat, meaning member of the working class, like in a Marxist way.
Yeah. Swoletariat. I called Angel up and they said they first saw this term on a niche Reddit page called r slash Swoletariat.
It's always going to be imprinted in my mind. I remember one day I saw this picture that was cross-posted from the Swoletariat subreddit. And it was pictures of four different people. And they were all saying, the first guy was like, I go on jogs. And he was really small. And then There was a guy that was medium-sized, and he was like, I'm just weightlifting to keep myself in good shape.
And then the third guy was like, I am a competitive bodybuilder. And he was pretty big. But then the biggest guy of the four was like, I am harshly aware of the rapid state of fascism that we are living under, and I feel a need to protect my loved ones.
And he was huge.
And I just thought it was so funny, but also that's so real. And that's so true to me. And so I really clung to that. And since I saw that one image, I... Started following r slash Volataria and I started using it all the time because it just spoke to me so deeply about like how our bodies really are a tool, whether we realize it or not.
Like I really loved it so much that I just started throwing the word out all the time because I was already making content related to fitness.
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Chapter 3: What role did the Turner Halls play in shaping revolutionary fitness?
Thurnvater Jan is sort of like the founder, and that just means like turnfather. He started the first turnplats as a reaction against Napoleon, as you do, you know? There's a big fear, especially for Jan, that German culture is going to be extinguished, and so he starts these athletic gyms under the philosophy of gut heil, which means good health.
The whole object was to preserve German culture, get in shape, you know, use the pommel horse, however you're supposed to do that, and have a sort of strength that's going to, like, weather the storm of Napoleonic tyranny.
So Jan, he's essentially the father of gymnastics. But his halls weren't just about strengthening the body. They were also about strengthening the mind and the community, too.
There's not only, get this, not only a pommel horse, there's not only the rings and the parallel bars, but there's also like a lecture hall. Some of them, most of them had a bar in them to drink a bunch of beer after you were done working out. As you should get a little rowdy with it. And this is a community social technology for like centralizing a bunch of things a local community would need.
And that, in fact, turns out to breed revolutionary fervor.
Oh, wow. I'm guessing that that rowdiness and revolutionary fervor eventually burst out of the Turner Halls. Yes, you would be correct.
As the 1848 revolutions are approaching... The Turner Halls become these like revolutionary meeting halls. And so a lot of the early communist and socialist Germans, this is socialism contemporary with Karl Marx, they start meeting and talking about how we got to get rid of this archduke. The king is sort of an a**hole, you know, that kind of thing.
The 1848 revolutions, these were uprisings all across Germany calling for liberal reforms like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, representative government. Ultimately, these revolutions do fail and a lot of the turners end up in America because they need to escape punishment for, you know, doing revolution. But in America, they kept their gym routines and their politics.
One of the most interesting things about the group is that they are abolitionists. And the theory that set off the 48 revolutions is that you and I and everyone else are born equal. And they were very pro the US Constitution and the idea of a democracy and universal suffrage. This was very much a philosophical, moral struggle against the slave power in the United States.
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Chapter 4: How did the 1848 revolutions influence the Turners' activities?
I mean, it's martial arts training, the fruit of Islam that is connected to this idea of discipline. You have to be disciplined in order to be an effective fighter, but you also have to have discipline in order to be an effective community member.
I mean, the Panthers, you know, the police and the feds were really targeting them. Like a lot of these revolutionaries were getting gunned down. But I think when most people think about the Panthers and their methods of defense, they think about the firearms that their members carried. But I feel like it's less widely known that martial arts were also a part of their self-defense programming.
Yeah, and it was a community thing. In the Oakland chapter during the 70s, they even taught martial arts to kids.
during this period, within sort of African-American activist circles, it is very collective. I mean, the one thing that we don't see a lot of is sort of individual workouts, right? So it's not like, hey, all right, you know, we got a meeting at 10, y'all go work out in your basement, right? And come meet us at 10. It's like, no, no, no.
You know, we're going to have a meeting at 10, but at 8, we're going to be here, right? And we're going to do the physical aspect first.
I feel like this community aspect that we see with the Turners and during the Black Power movement is pretty different from contemporary fitness culture. I feel like fitness is really atomized and individual now.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I feel like everything is all about like personal gains.
Yeah.
Body transformation. And it's a lot more about you and how much you can lift and how you look.
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Chapter 5: What connection exists between fitness and the Black Power movement?
And I'm definitely seeing the Swoletariat picking up steam on social media.
This makes me think about what's been going on in Minneapolis, honestly. Like, I would guess not everyone who has protested ICE there thinks of themselves as leftists. But I could see how, with a right-wing government in power and, you know, seeing people shot and killed by ICE agents, that some left-leaning people might be turning to the gym to at least feel more prepared.
Yeah.
You know, I've even seen some posts on social media that seem to reflect that feeling. For one example, Instagram user Kate Alexander said in a recent post, training for my half marathon, red X emoji. Training to run faster than ice, green checkmark emoji. Brace yourselves and get ready for when the American Gestapo comes to your neighborhood next.
Yeah, I think right now a lot of people are struggling to feel agency. When I think of what people are doing in Minneapolis or what they're doing when they start going to the gym again... It's like they're rehabilitating this sense of agency, either individually or as a larger community. And I think both of those aims are really rooted in politics.
I mean, I keep going back to something Hasan told me.
Fitness has always been political. And so I think it's not whether or not fitness in the 21st century is political. It's just how does it manifest its political nature?
Marge, this was so enlightening. Thank you so much. Thank you, Brittany. My pleasure. That was Margaret Serino, producer over at LifeKit. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Poptock. Engineering support came from Nisha Hainas. Our supervising producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right.
That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.
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