The Possible Consequences of the Aerobics Culture and the Bodybuilding Culture - Research Paper Example

Introduction Culture in the society The term “culture” is used to represent a whole range of factors particular of a society that include but are not limited to the society’s customs, dress, beliefs, values, norms, language, skills, competences, roles, knowledge, and all other factors that are learnt by the people and that play a role in giving a shape to the lifestyle of the people of the society (Browne, 2008, p. 31). The culture evolves as a result of the various political, socioeconomic, religious, and demographic factors, many of which change with time. Culture grows and is transferred from one generation to another with the help of socialization. Although most of the members of a particular society have many aspects of the daily life common with one another, yet the differences of certain aspects leads to the surfacing of different conceptions and idealizations of culture. Gym has integrated into the modern culture as a result of immense emphasis of media and various other factors on fitness. Some of the factors that make the gyms highly appealing to the consumers in general and the women in particular is the fact that they provide them with precisely timed workouts, they are comparatively cheaper, and many of them are located near the retail centers (Craig and Liberti, 2007. p. 677). Gym culture Feminist literature speaks of the commercial gym as a place that contributes to female body’s stereotypical notions as slim, youthful, and toned (Featherstone, 1991). Gym culture cannot be exclusively expressed in terms of youth culture. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that a vast majority of the users of gym happen to be young people. There exist different kinds of subcultures within the gym culture. The fitness gym colonizes the modern urban environments and essentially serves as a commercial institution that provides the consumers with opportunities to do different kinds of exercises that include but are not limited to traditional aerobics, dance, body building, martial arts, and yoga (Sassatelli, 1999, p. 229). In this way, gym typifies the spread of a whole range of disciplinary body techniques that have been traditionally confined to the production organizations and various institutions of discipline into the leisure environments. Since a considerable time of the users of gym is spent in the gym, their identities are tied largely to a specific group. This makes the gym a social place wherein people see their friends and form a particular style and taste of their own. The gym is a venue where particular gender identities are constructed (Johansson, 1996). The groups often create a cultural milieu of body ideals in the gym. The culture of gym has become increasingly common among both men and women over the time. Media has played an important role in the popularity and spread of the gym culture among the people since beauty has been stereotyped in such ways in magazines, television programs, and advertisements. These days, the perfect look for a woman is a skinny muscular body rather than a voluptuous look that was considered beautiful in the past. “The lithe and energetic body, tight and slim, with its firm and toned-up boundaries is a powerful image of contemporary culture, especially as articulated in advertising and consumer culture” (Sassatelli, 1999, p. 227). There has been immense emphasis on fitness and maintenance of ideal figure and body weight as the fundamental essentials of beauty. As a result, young people nowadays spend a lot of time in gym. Meaning of body The body of an individual is fundamental to his/her identity. The body has taken the status of a project in the late modern societies. The self’s reflexivity slowly extends to the body that makes it drawn into self’s narcissistic pursuit. Body cultivates in different places like a gym. Inside the gym, people tend to develop a taste, style, and particular ways in which they relate to the body. Consequently, weight training and aerobics should be considered more than just physical activities so as to include the elements of a phenomenon that relates to a more general lifestyle. Body plays a very important role in shaping one’s perceptions of one’s gender as well as identity. “When asked what the term “femininity” meant to them, their answers ranged from ‘having breasts’ and ‘using Tampax’, to the way women looked and moved” (Cox and Thompson, 2000, p. 14). People generally get attuned to a part of lifestyle in which certain behaviours, styles, and bodies are valued more as compared to others. The way an individual looks has a large impact on the way he/she feels. To a large extent, the body determines the level of self-confidence and self-esteem. In this way, body has an impact on the personality traits of an individual. The importance of bodies in the daily life has been emphasized a lot in the feminist research in general and in the work of Foucault (1975, 1978) in particular. There has been a simultaneous growth of academic interest in bodies along with the rise of popular interest in them. For instance, the media has, for many decades, indulged in the practice of advising upon the ways to maintain a young, beautiful, and attractive figure. This is one of the reasons why the weight-loss programs and fitness training centres have become multi-million dollar industries over the passage of time (Shilling, 1993). Explanations regarding the way body is constituted socially are intricate and often problematic, since body has been defined in a variety of ways in the history and has particularly been defined in context of its relation with the soul (Synnott, 1993). In the field of sports, the natural or biological body is frequently employed as a paradigm. “The body in sport is often seen as an objective, mechanical object that can be dissected, conditioned and utilized as an instrument for performance and to increase one’s physical attractiveness” (Cox and Thompson, 2000, p. 6). Low (2006) defines spaces in terms of systems that are relationally and processually ordered. This implies that study of the topological dimensions of different cultures does not mean “observing the way structures are ordered in space but looking at how these structures form spaces” (Low, 2006, p. 120). Therefore, gender and space should be considered as an effective structure that is reciprocally constructed, whereas the body helps in the establishment of the meaning of the reciprocal constitutional dynamic. The exact way in which the power relations are interlinked with space’s reciprocal structuring as well as its inhabitants’ gendered bodies is hard to figure out. According to Bourdieu (1998), the social space helps create an understanding of the power relations since social space cannot be fully controlled except in few cases. Construction of identity through different forms of interaction Body projects Identity, body and behaviour can also be constructed by the diverse interaction of sport cultures that an individual makes part of. Fitness programs offered by the gyms provide people with an opportunity to get into form and change their identities (Craig and Liberti, 2007). A gym is not simply a place where people can work out after a hectic day; it also happens to be the venue where specific identities of gender are constructed. There is a whole range of factors in which the gender order is materialized. These factors include but are not limited to body techniques, clothes, facilities, pictures displayed on the walls, and the magazines. The gym essentially serves as a gendered space in which certain locations and techniques of the body are linked with women whereas other techniques are linked with men. In the modern gym, cultures of both the female body and the male body coexist in terms of coexistence of the aerobics culture and the bodybuilding culture. Gym: a space for science and technology (equipment) artefacts to transform the body There is a special dimension to the contrast in the way young neo-liberal self is explained and understood. For instance, Fusco (2007, p. 55) asserts that the use and access of the young people to space is framed in their contemporary imaginations regarding the youth, city, and health that are discursive in nature. Fusco (2007) argues that such discourses can inscribe and prescribe the space in ways that are engaging for the young generation as civic participants. These discourses can also lead to the construction of youth as problem. In these ways, discussions of health, city, and youth articulate ways to being a young citizen according to the new standards of public health and also the definitions of the urban citizens that are young and yet undesirable (Fusco, 2007). Ostgaard (2006) conducted a research to study the perceptions and experiences of being a member of a gym meant only for women and the role played by the space in developing the experiences of the women using the gym. The research was grounded in feminist cultural studies and Ostgaard (2006) carried out an ethnography of the gym located in Northwestern Ohio called “The Gym”. Results of the research suggested that the gym’s social space constituted contradictions between the gym culture and the macro culture. Although women found the gym culture more empowering, there were undeniably various influences of the hegemonically-defined femininity as well as the hegemonic masculinity in the gym. However, in spite of the existence of such influences, the gym culture buffered the society’s macro culture’s potentially harmful effects. Ostgaard (2006) quotes the experience of a participant named Amy in these words, “You don’t feel intimidated when you walk in… When you walk in it’s not this great big huge overwhelming room. It’s just that everything’s right here. And, it’s not this big expansive space where you go, oh my gosh.” Beth, also a staff member, commented that, “it’s comfortable, like, when you’ve been here for a while it’s very familiar” (Ostgaard, 2006, p. 36). In addition to the presence of people of similar mindset around in the space of a gym, another factor that fundamentally differentiates between a gym and other places of workout is the existence of equipment that people use for exercise in the gym. Human body itself can be considered as a machine that can be tuned in specific ways to induce a change in the identity. Body as a machine that can be trained to change identity The literature about gym and bodybuilding is crowded with the strategies that young people can adopt to gain their ideal figures and body shapes. According to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has authored numerous books on the subject of bodybuilding, “A lot of times I see women who look fantastic, and they still find a little tiny problem. But that means she is very critical of herself which is healthy. As soon as you feel you are perfect, that’s when life becomes very dead” (Green, 1988, p. 86). Such visualization of the body definitely spurs a desire in women to constantly evolve and change. The perfect body’s construction includes questions that are related to the gender identity including the way a perfect woman look, and the way muscles and gender relate to each other. Considering the fact that different techniques can be used to change the body, many informal yet strict rules regarding the gender’s construction still prevail. Continued influence of the body’s perception as a “natural” machine marks a turning point of the contrasting notion that visualizes body as a neutral surface that serves as a platform to inscribe the social meanings upon. This perspective of human body was strongly supported by Foucault (1975) who placed sexuality and body at the focal point of the social analysis. According to Foucault (1975), scientific discourses linked with human body e.g. psychiatry, medicine, and biology unveiled the knowledge that could be used meaningfully to give desirable shapes to the human body. Bartky (1990) gendered the analysis of disciplinary practices of body made by Foucault (1975) by considering the different ways in which women tried to modify and share the way they looked in order to comply with their understanding of the “ideal” female body. According to Gilroy (1997), one of the prime attractions of the work of Foucalt (1975) was his consideration of body as a production of relations of power rather than being natural. “To understand the body we need to understand the discourse within which the body is constructed and then operates” (Gilroy, 1997, p. 99). Identity, body and behaviour is constructed by diverse interaction of sport cultures Difference of gym culture between men and women In the past few decades, the number of women in fitness clubs has exceeded that of men (Craig and Liberti, 2007, p. 677). Indeed, the segment of the fitness industry that has shown the fastest growth is the women-only gyms that provide the consumers with different kinds of circuit training programs of exercise (Craign and Liberti, 2007, p. 677). Despite the fact that they are marketed as places where women are categorized, gyms tend to appeal to the category of women that are less athletic and that feel excluded from other venues of fitness (Monsoon, 2006). Gym culture is different for men and women. There are differences of gender space in a gym. Women are frowned upon for entering the weights room which is a more male domain and should only be seen in the cardiovascular area or attending classes such as aerobics or dance. Certain gyms are dominated more by the masculine strategies of exclusion whereas there are also certain gyms that are more inclined toward addressing the needs of women and the training strategies. In a research study, a female interviewee Anna described her experience of two different gyms in these words: I started going to a gym. However, I felt immediately that I didn’t belong there. There were just lots of big guys doing their muscle thing. I went to that gym for approximately one or two months. But too many men were watching me, thinking: – a girl, what on earth is she doing here? ... So, I quit. Instead I went to another gym, where they also had aerobics. It was much better. There were no bodybuilders in that gym and the people working there were friendly. I felt comfortable going there. (Johansson, 1996). Jock culture Students who study and participate in sports and other subjects related to physical education during their higher education are often defined by themselves as well as by others as belonging to a jock culture (Sparkes, Brown, and Partington, 2010, p. 333). The jock culture has been linked with the development and sustenance of hegemonic kinds of the heterosexual masculinity through numerous andideological formations and social practices that tend to celebrate sexism, competitiveness, and mesomorphy (Brown, 2005). Brown (2005) conducted a research on the students that participated in a Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) program and noticed that the culture provided the participants with hierarchy of identity playground wherein the freedom to construct the identities and play with were distributed differently among the students depending upon their gender. She focused upon the ways in which the rules, attitudes, and rituals with PETE’s social structure were repeated whenever a new intake happened to occur so that the jock culture and the identities linked with it were replicated and reproduced again and again by different generations of participants. The rules were primarily established by a group that was small in size but was dominant. The group subscribed to the practices of hegemonic notions regarding the meaning and significance of being male in the environment of sport. As a result, the attitudes and norms of this group played a decisive role in the social interactions of the PETE program’s participants and also played a very important role in moulding the ideas of the participants for the accepted and appropriate identities in that sport culture. “These attitudes and ‘unspoken’ rules appear to be subscribed to and accepted by a significant proportion of both male and female PETE students; whether by choice, or social survival, is an issue of debate” (Brown, 2005, p. 124). Jock culture’s boundaries are quite permeable especially when there is potential for movement across the groups on the basis of bodily performances of the group members. The status of the “wannabes” exemplifies this permeability Sparkes, Brown, and Parkington, 2010, p. 340). In spite of the fact that they have initially the status of an outsider, yet the wannabes are able to join the jock culture till the time they have enough physical resources and come prepared to be a part of the behaviors and values nurtured by the jocks. Conclusion This paper described and analysed the possible consequences of encounter between the aerobics culture and the bodybuilding culture in the gyms. Jock culture prevails in the team sports in universities, and in a vast majority of cases, the behaviours and norms of the group are established by a small group of male participants. The gym provides people with an opportunity to manipulate as well as change their bodies in different ways. People also get to change or maintain the way they look at the link between their gender identity and their body. Gym offers the users means to change the body which is an offer that appeals to a lot of young people in general and the women in particular. After a comprehensive insight into the growth of sports culture particularly among women in the last few decades and the underlying factors responsible for its growth and nurturing, the discussion leads to the conclusion that the sports culture does construct bodies in many direct and indirect ways. Sports like gym not only have a direct impact on the muscles and the way people look, it actually shapes their daily life and routine in such a way that their relation with their bodies continues to evolve. People get to notice positive changes in their bodies with sports as they do them regularly, and in a vast majority of cases, the results are so obvious that people are reassured of the occurrence of the positive changes by others as well. Therefore, sports culture does construct and shape bodies. References: Bartky, SL 1990, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, London: Routledge. 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