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.

Found Exercise

“Find what you love, and do it.” Sounds like just some cheesy slogan on a poster hanging in a high school career counselor’s office, complete with a visual of some hiker on top of a mountain. While it’s a laudable professional goal, few of us actually get to earn our money doing something we love. But this cliché slogan can be redeemed from its relative futility, because it is also perhaps the most oft-repeated exercise advice. In this case, however, it’s true and reasonable and attainable.

A long-term commitment to exercise requires a lot of experimentation, repeated kicking of the tires, in order to find what feels good to you, today. Typically, it may not have anything to do with what feels good to you tomorrow. So it’s important to have a lot of tools in your proverbial belt. And while variety is the key, one thing needs to be consistent: find what you love, and do it.

Let me be clear what I mean by this. I’m not talking about going into a gym, trying a few grueling things, and deciding what you can tolerate, what is bearable. This isn’t about choosing a chest press over a lateral tricep press. It’s not about deciding on crunches instead of push-ups…unless you actually enjoy chest presses and crunches, in which case, knock yourself out. Because while some of us may develop a love for gyms and weight lifting and repetative cardio, many of us never do. And that’s okay, because there’s a whole world of possibilities out there.

I, personally, love a good, old-fashioned skull crusher. But you know what I love more? Roller skating. There. I said it. Not an official “exercise,” not anything the bodybuilders at my gym would recognize as a viable alternative to a leg press or time on a rowing machine. But my experience tells me that it elevates my heart rate for long stretches of time, it works my quads like gang-busters, it forces my balance to take center stage, and I laugh like a fool while I’m doing it. In other words, I am getting great physical benefit while actually having fun! Find what you love, and do it.

I like to call this type of thing Found Exercise. Much like found art, found exercise is a happy accident or a coincidence. Or maybe it’s an activity that you deliberately set out to do because it’s fun, and then you get the added benefit of increased fitness. Roller skating is a great example. So is trampolining, even bowling. (My motto: the more ridiculous, the better!) Of course there are things like tennis and softball and football and soccer. But there’s also less obvious things, like gardening and water balloon fights and even shopping! Does it elevate your heart rate for 20 minutes at a stretch? Do you feel your muscles engage and maybe even burn? Do you find yourself feeling muscle fatigue the next day? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then congratulations – you have just exercised! You found what you loved, and you did it.

Keep doing it,
Lily-Rygh Glen
Flexiblefitnesspdx.com