The Lessons and Wrath of Dani Mathers

Dani Mathers.

Just 24 hours ago, I was blissfully unaware of that name, as I imagine most of us were.  We had never heard of the 29-year old 2015 Playmate of the Year, because unless you’re a 15-year old boy or Hugh Heffner or live in your parents’ wood paneled basement surrounded by role-playing games and your VHS porn collection, why would you?

But yesterday I was slapped in the face with the hot mess that is Dani Mathers when she did one of the most despicable and vicious things I’ve ever heard of:  she took a photo of a naked, elderly woman showering in the locker room of an LA Fitness without that women’s permission; posted it on Snapchat; and captioned it, “if I can’t unsee this then you can’t either.”  Mathers is seen with her hand over her mouth, wide-eyed and in faux shock over the horror of the nude and unsuspecting body behind her.

I had a whole bevy of immediate reactions to this absolutely horrific situation.  I was shocked at the cruelty that motivated it, heartbroken for the woman whose privacy and dignity was so brutally violated, furious at the hatred women can show toward one another, and hopeful that the immediate backlash would provoke some sort of tangible result.  (As of this writing, Mathers is being publically shamed and has been banned from all LA Fitness locations, and there is a change.org petition encouraging the LAPD to take legal action.)  I’m livid, and I’m writing from a place of anger and humiliation and supreme disgust.  So bear with me.

The thing is, I have spent my adult life working in the defense of women.  I work for  women who are like me (fat, lesbo, former bulimic, cancer survivor, high femme, gym addict, etc), and for women who are nothing like me at all.  I consider myself a feminist before anything else, and I work hard to assume the best about other women, even when their actions are extremely suspect.  So while my immediate, gut instinct was to throat kick Dani Mathers, what I want to be able to do right now is think about how this happened to her, how she went from an ignorant young woman whose #1 goal in life was to spread her legs for Hugh Hefner to a full-on sexual predator, creating victims of other unsuspecting women.

But I can’t.

Look.  In some ways, I realize that Dani Mathers is a victim of a misogynist culture – we all are.  I realize that she didn’t decide to be a Playboy model because she got tons of positive reinforcement about her talent and intellect and potential.  I get it.  She probably turned to taking her clothes off for the same reason so many women do: we can make far more money naked than clothed, provided we fit a terribly uncompromising image of what women are supposed to look like, the very image Mathers herself is acting to reinforce.  “Empowerment” often comes at the expense of actual power, and there’s no better example of that than the sex industry. I get all of that, and so I want to be able to muster up some sympathy for a woman who could be so utterly cruel to another woman, an elder no less, and then laugh about it publicly, assuming she would get some sort of kudos from other people for being “daring” enough to assault a woman in a public locker room.  Something is definitely wrong, that a person like Dani Mathers came to be.

But I really don’t care about Dani Mathers right now.  What I care about is the anonymous woman who was photographed, against her will, without her consent, without agreeing to be a punch line for a young, privileged, white woman whose subsequent “apology” is nothing more a self-serving series of excuses:  she thought she was having a private conversation, not a public one [so she only intended to humiliate this woman in front of her closest friends, not the whole world], she doesn’t really know how to use Snapchat [except she managed to use it perfectly to post both the photo and the apolog], and she really loves women’s bodies [as long, apparently, as they look just exactly like hers].  Yeah, Dani.  We get it.  #sorrynotsorry.

With all due and honest respect to the amazing men out there who actually own their privilege and treat women like fully-realized and fully-capable members of society, this is the type of bullshit I expect from some douche-bag guy performing a fraternity hazing ritual, the same kind of frat that hangs banners reading “No means yes, yes means anal.”  I expect this from one of the dudes in a Hangover movie, or on Howard Stern’s show, or at a Trump rally.  Misogyny is less startling when you’ve been trained to expect it.  But when it comes from another woman, another person who has grown up in a culture that is designed to be demeaning to women, to strip us of all sense of actual personhood, to convince us that our worth is in our T & A, not in our minds and hearts… it’s shattering.  It devastates that part of me that wants to continue to believe in the best of people, that given the opportunity to do what’s right and just, most of us would.

But not Dani Mathers.

What she did to another woman, a woman who entered that gym to be the strongest and healthiest version of herself, is, dare I say it, unforgivable.  And it’s unforgivable because she didn’t just violate that one woman who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.  It’s unforgivable because she violated the trust of every single woman who has ever hesitated to walk in to a gym for fear of being judged.  She validated the fears of capable-but-hesitant women everywhere.  She has told hundreds of millions of women that because they don’t look like Playboy “playmates,” there is yet one more space that is unsafe for them, that prying and judging eyes are never, ever closed.  It’s not enough that LA Fitness has rightfully banned her from their premises.  It’s not enough that she has been suspended (but not fired) from her regular radio job.  She needs to be treated like the criminal she is and arrested for not just violation of privacy, but for sexual assault.  And if I had my way, she would be investigated for a hate crime.

This all hits me so personally not just because I am a woman, not just because I am a woman who will never fit the ideals of conventional beauty, not even just because I’m a personal trainer and therefore spend a lot of time in gyms.  It hits me right in the gut because I have been working my ass off to open a truly safe and body-positive gym, in the hopes of creating the exact space where things like what Mathers did wouldn’t happen.  I have invested all of my savings and thousands of hours trying to brainstorm and plan and prepare a space that would create community between people of all sizes and ages, for sis and trans people, for people of color, for people with abilities all along the spectrum of possibility.  I have worked harder on this project than I have on anything in my life…and now Dani Mathers happens.  And I’m so afraid that people who might have supported this project will turn away in disgust, assuming that gyms cannot, by definition, be safe.

But look, no place can ever be fully safe.  But there is still the potential to create a safer space, a place where no one is expected to look like the cover of a magazine, where we don’t have to be alike in order to support one another, and where the kind of malicious treatment of other people modeled so conspicuously by Dani Mathers just doesn’t happen.  I guess what I want to create is a place where people are simply nicer to one another, a bit of a reprieve from the world of spiteful Playboy models and their adoring audiences.  And I refuse to let a misguided, foolish, and mean-spirited woman like Mathers take that from me, or from us.

If you want to support the creation of this truly body-positive gym, to resist the body tyranny displayed by Dani Mathers and so many like her, please contribute here:  https://www.gofundme.com/29wvjxkc.  And in the meantime, please don’t let this petty little snot tell you that you aren’t beautiful.  Because underneath it all, she’s the ugly one.  #nomorevictims.

What’s Your Damage, Heather?

Earlier this week, I was honored with a cool invitation: Living Yoga asked me to say a few words at the kick-off to their annual fundraising campaign. Living Yoga is the amazing organization that sends me to Washington County Correction Center twice a month to teach yoga to people incarcerated there. In thinking about what to say at the event, I started retracing my own steps with the organization, and with trauma.

Living Yoga teaches what they call “trauma-informed yoga,” and that’s what I learned when I did my training with them last fall. And while I‘m not sure quite what I was expecting from the training, I was surprised by how straightforward it was, and how it seemed like just a matter of common sense. Things like, you know, don’t touch people without their permission. Avoid words that could be triggering. Don’t make assumptions about any one person’s background. Avoid language that is divisive. All good suggestions, of course, for how to be supportive to people who have experienced some sort of trauma.

But which of us hasn’t experienced some sort of trauma? The people I see at the correctional center… their trauma is easy to see, easy to touch. It’s on the surface, and obvious by their presence there. They have drug addictions, they have criminal backgrounds, perhaps they have experienced homelessness and violence. Their trauma is big and obvious and real. It’s a given. But let’s not forget that we all have some sort of trauma in our lives. Maybe we haven’t been homeless, but maybe we’ve struggled with long-term poverty. Perhaps we haven’t developed a chemical addiction, but we have a parent or other relative who is an alcoholic or drug addict. Maybe we struggle with grief and pain and insecurities that are just as powerful but less obvious than my yoga students. And those types of trauma inform our lives just as much, albeit in a more subtle, sneaky sort of way.

It’s so important that we treat ourselves with just as much tenderness and care as I treat my yoga students. Because we all have hurt and fear, and how close to the surface it is can be just a matter of one assumption or one touch or one thoughtless comment. We deserve to honor the fact that we are all evolving beings, every day, and that all of that trauma, all of those challenges, create who we are just as much as all the support and love and success does.

And I think that’s why the trauma-informed yoga training sounded so simple to me: I already practice trauma-informed personal training. I just didn’t know it. But my entire business is based on believing that every one of my clients come to me in some state of vulnerability, with hopes and goals, and the big fat dose of courage it takes to ask for a bit of help reaching those goals. Working in a gym isn’t just a matter of figuring out how much weight a person can bench press; it’s also about figuring out how much work is encouraging, and how much is demoralizing. It’s finding the line between feeling like a badass and feeling like a failure. It’s realizing that on some days, it’s really there, and on some days, it’s just not – and that’s totally okay, because we’re different, every minute of every day, and it would be stupid to expect anything else.

But more than just expecting our respective damage to show up here and there, I think we should really welcome it, with open arms, as part of our own history. It’s like a road map or a stretch mark or a post card. It’s the emotional equivalent of an old photo in an album you never pull off the shelf anymore. Trauma is part of your history, it’s part of my history, it’s an absolute universal; nobody gets out of this life alive. Let’s choose to honor that trauma, as a building block to our strongest, most honorable, most badass selves. Let’s own it, work through it as much as we can, and then create something gorgeous on top of it. What’s that traditional Buddhist chant, about how lotus flowers grow from mud? Yeah, like that.

In other words, let’s all treat ourselves and each other just like we would all treat my yoga students: with compassion and love and with the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume we’re all worth that. Because we are.

Look it up

                                           

 

I read an article recently, illuminating the link between obesity in women and occurrences of endometrial cancer, that really pissed me off. The article highlighted a researcher named Dr. Elisa Bandera, of Rutgers University, who is quoted as saying, “Women who are obese have two to three times the rate of endometrial cancer. People who are more active regularly tend to have a decreased rate of endometrial cancer.”

And here is where I take issue with this obviously well-intended article: why is it that even doctors, doctors who are pioneering research on the links between obesity and various medical conditions, still assume that obesity and inactivity are one in the same, as though one automatically represents or explains the other?

If Dr. Bandera had said something like, “People who have lower body weight tend to have a decreased rate of endometrial cancer,” I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But the fact is that even a knowledgeable doctor is using “obesity” and “inactivity” as weirdly-inappropriate little synonyms.

The fact is, they aren’t. Sure, one can make a reasonable argument that most people who are regularly active in their bodies aren’t obese, because regular activity (or at least regular strenuous activity) is going to entail the burning of calories, etc. But nothing is one size fits all, including the body’s response to activity (or inactivity, for that matter). As a personal trainer, I work with quite a few women who would be considered clinically obese. For that matter, I’m pretty sure that I,myself, am clinically obese! And yet, we are showing up to the gym and working our asses off, sweating and grunting and lifting to muscle fatigue, all in an attempt to gain that precious and valuable lean muscle mass…you know, the stuff that works to ward off, let’s say, cancer! My clients aren’t what I would call “inactive.” And neither am I.

So the article becomes confusing, in that I wonder if the real link is between cancer and obesity, or cancer and inactivity? There is a growing school of thought around the links between obesity and diabetes (A/K/A The Holy Grail of Fat Shaming), a link that is considered virtually sacrosanct in the media and in society at large. These new medical researchers and thinkers are questioning if it’s the state of obesity that lends itself to diabetes, or the lack of lean muscle mass that often (but not always) accompanies obesity. (If this argument can happen around diabetes links to obesity, it can and should surely be happening with cancer links as well.) And while it sounds like a bit of a “chicken and egg” semantic argument, it’s really more fundamental than that. Because this argument is the one that will ultimately determine if it’s possible, even theoretically, to be both fat and healthy.

I believe that it is. I believe that muscle mass and stamina and endurance and agility are possible at any size and at every shape. I believe it’s possible to be both obese and active, because I am surrounded by the people who prove me right every day. I believe it’s high time that the medical establishment get its act together and start using its words more carefully and precisely.

At its best, this article is confusing and therefore not very helpful. But at its worst, it’s adding fuel to the fat-shaming fire, a conflagration that, frankly, doesn’t need any more stoking. Inactivity is one word. Obesity is another. There’s a reason they have two different entries in the dictionary. Maybe it’s time for the medical establishment to look it up.

Best,
Lily-Rygh Glen
Flexible Fitness
http://www.flexiblefitnesspdx.com

Here’s the original article, if you’re interested:
http://www.today.com/health/sweet-starchy-foods-probably-cause-womens-cancer-study-finds-8C11124866

Getting to know you…

A couple of weeks ago, I tried out some new Crossfit classes in my neighborhood, intent on learning some new exercises for my clients and for myself.  And I did learn some new things.  But the real take-away from those classes was something entirely different.  More than anything else, it was a reminder that the overwhelming majority of people working in the fitness industry have no idea how to train people who are overweight or out of shape or not already athletes in athletic bodies.  In a class full of people who looked like professional underwear models, it took me a full 5 minutes to explain to an otherwise knowledgeable trainer than I could not lower my squats any further or I would fall backwards; he didn’t understand that gravity is a real contender when it comes to those of us with a bit of junk in our proverbial trunks.  I’m a personal trainer, which means two things: I have a relatively strong body, and I’m not afraid to be a little mouthy.  So I held my own with this guy.  But it made me wonder how demoralizing that situation would have been for a woman who didn’t already know what her body could  do, and wasn’t confident enough to stand up for herself.

It’s a sad and totally irrational truth that much of the fitness industry is like the diet industry: it sets people up to fail, because failure creates repeat customers.  I’m interested in really breaking  that mold.  I believe that most people who start exercise plans and “fail” only do so because they weren’t coached into the right plan in the first place, and they weren’t given the proper motivation.   My goal is to do the exact opposite: to introduce women to exercises that are appropriate to their bodies and their goals, and to encourage them to work up to their potential, understanding that potential, by design, isn’t achieved right out of the gate.  True fitness incorporates the body, the mind, and the spirit, and it takes time.  There are no quick fixes to fitness, no sexy pills, no “as seen on TV” packages that make it easy.   It’s hard.  But it’s attainable.   It really is.

To get started, contact me at FlexibilityCoach@gmail.com. 

Lily-Rygh