I haven’t seen Love is Blind for years, but the Great Pilates Controversy has been everywhere. Most recently, I opened a new tab in Firefox and one of the suggested links was this one: Why the manosphere reveres the ‘Pilates girl’. It’s published in The 19th, so we can treat it like the representative mainstream libfem take.
I don’t belong to either camp. My dad was a retired drill sergeant with a Jehovah’s Witness housewife. He used the GI Bill to become a domestic violence/child abuse social worker for the Navy. He’d come home and vent to my mom about work, which made a therapist tell me my “entire childhood was traumatizing.” When I read Andrea Dworkin, as a dude, my reaction was sadness and dismay that we’ve damaged the women so effectively they can’t even admit Andrea Dworkin told the truth about everything.
Self-respecting leftist men can totally support feminism when it’s real. Liberal feminism will only continue increasing misogyny, because it’s some bullshit. This article will illustrate.
Obviously, something is wrong with people on reality TV, just like there’s something wrong with people in the porn industry. But because those people are VISIBLE, they’re going to shape our expectations of life, due to our brains having evolved before screens. Porn and reality TV are our instruction manuals. This makes the conversation stupid from the beginning:
Fusco told Barrett that the physical attraction just wasn’t there for him; his usual type “does Pilates every day,” he said.
I’ve been an autistic dork on the internet for a long time. If you asked it why nobody wants to touch you, it used to be that you’d find advice from libfems about how being a Nice Guy violates the Kantian categorical imperative by making relationships transactional and you should feel bad if your love language is demonstrating that you’d be good at husband stuff (as opposed to “dating”). You could listen to them or pick-up artists in silly hats. The crux of the matter was whether women are honest about what they want or not.
In 2026, we can observe that negging the bitch works for Chad. The red pill has great explainers nowadays:
The first thing that’s obvious as a man is that red pill content basically defines itself as the observation that there’s hypergamy. In other words, women don’t fuck on the basis of feminism. The third wave was literally the victory of the women who said they shouldn’t be expected to. The manosphere would have no deep emotional appeal to men if women UNAMBIGUOUSLY demanded good treatment over status within the patriarchy.
Obviously, the adequacy of Jessica Barrett’s body as a dick-hardener isn’t the real problem. That’s why she’s on TV. Rejecting hot people is a flex, and this is reality TV…Chad successfully pushed the “lol you’re fat” button, the easiest button of all.
If they’d simply used sex to express their real feelings of mutual affection, the idea of making her feel sexually insecure wouldn’t even occur to him! Their sex wasn’t that, obviously. He was masturbating with her as a prop, which is how you’d think about sex if you were raised by your computer instead of your parents.
I don’t even know who Jessi Draper is:
Draper said he was also emotionally abusive, telling her, among other things, to “start doing Pilates every single day.”
Pilates has grown in popularity in recent years, fueled in part by social media. This dig at the exercise routine of Draper, the “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” cast member, has much deeper misogynist roots than simply criticizing her appearance: It serves as shorthand for both a set of instructions and expectations for how a “good” and desirable woman should be.
I mean…pointed feminist criticism of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives from someone who watches and enjoys it doesn’t hit very hard.
Libfems do themselves a disservice with their unwillingness to accurately summarize what they’re criticizing. This is a self-serving interpretation, not an actual description of what they’re up against. This does nothing to convey why it’s so effective:
This logic aligns with messages from parts of the manosphere that promote the notion that men have been made victims by the onset and momentum of feminism. The manosphere directs them to reassert their dominance over women to regain social status lost by their own lack of attractiveness — which, somehow, is caused by women.
Making a big show of how many men are beneath you is EXACTLY the impulse behind the Pilates comment.
Maybe respectability politics is bad or whatever, but proudly confirming your opponents’ talking points is usually stupid. The THESIS of the manosphere is that women’s phones have inflated their egos and made previously-acceptable normal men like our fathers invisible to them. Women joining the workforce put downward pressure on wages, so we’re struggling to be the traditional providers they’re still demanding. It’s such a blatant rejection of the social contract that we’re wondering out loud about, yes, the 19th Amendment. Are liberal feminists responsible adults trying to create a thriving society? Because this internet ragebait is not a serious political philosophy.
Influencers have increasingly popularized the ideal of a “Pilates girl” — a woman who engages in what they see as a feminine form of exercise, one that doesn’t result in bulky muscles. The Pilates girl doesn’t go to the gym, where she might encounter other men. (They might look at her! She might look at them!) Instead, she opts for 50-minute classes that are assumed to be filled with other White, lithe women.
“If your girl goes to Pilates, wife her up immediately,” said one man creator on Instagram who declared Pilates to be “wholesome” and “the biggest green flag ever for a girl.”
“If your girl goes to Pilates, she’s probably staying in on the weekends so she can get up early and go to a Solidcore or BodyRok class,” he continued. “And she’s going to come back from the Pilates class in a great mood because she went with her friends and didn’t get hit on by any creepy guys and got a great workout in.”
Mariel Barnes is an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she studies the manosphere and its political impact. She’s not surprised that “Pilates” has emerged as a kind of code word.
The manosphere, being straight men, isn’t especially looking for masculine qualities in women. The aspiration of liberal feminism was explicitly to start fucking like an avoidant dismissive man, be a #BossBabe, have an attitude, etc. They’re trying to become the men they’re attracted to, ignoring men’s preferences.
Having an avoidant dismissive mindset, by choice, and ideological commitment to polyamory, libfems can’t admit that cheating is something women do all the time, that bonding entails a degree of possessiveness (they’re YOUR person), that respecting our partners by not triggering insecurities goes both ways.
Men are literally posting videos about “We are done with women gaslighting us with ‘You’re just being insecure’ bullshit.”
Imagine being this offended at men finding LOYALTY desirable in a woman. Simply…not acting like she’s single and looking for an upgrade. Someone we don’t have to worry about. The concept of meeting such a basic need is presented as irritating and burdensome.
Single women keep women single.
“It’s this normalization of some of these qualities that have emerged from the manosphere but couching them in a more palatable manner and making it harder for women to detect,” she said.
I think the quoted explanation of Pilates girls as wife material was very clear and direct. And it doesn’t make me a Trump-supporting Neanderthal to say that, yes, I’d rather be with someone who goes to Pilates than someone who posts gym selfies on social media to fish for my replacement. A green flag would be not having anyone like that in her friend group at all to poison her mind with bullshit that’s going to make your relationship more difficult.
There’s obviously an association with social class, which is acknowledged:
“It was still very unusual for women to devote a designated part of their day to work their bodies, but because this had an association with dancers — and thus with grace and thinness — it became something that women who had time to spare in their days pursued,” she said.
This next excerpt is a bit longer, but notice how little is about women’s bodies:
Barnes said the manosphere has a “rigid conceptualization of what a woman should be”: a traditional, submissive stay-at-home wife who doesn’t challenge a man’s status as the breadwinner and head of household and who fits a specific aesthetic presentation.
“I think the stereotype of who goes to Pilates is that aesthetic,” she said. “It’s this slim, toned svelte woman who is younger, has no curves, a flat stomach and ab definition. And they use Pilates as a euphemism for getting that kind of woman.”
The same Instagram creator who said men should “wife up” women who go to Pilates called in in another post to “bring back stay-at-home Pilates wives,” clarifying that he didn’t believe that women shouldn’t work but should choose a career that allows time to “tan by the pool, go to Pilates, go to farmer’s markets in a sundress and raise a family.”
Other men post Reels joking about working hard so their future wives can go to Pilates and drive luxury cars. Women “soft life” creators who promote Pilates as part of their highly curated aesthetics are often seen but not heard: take one Reel from a woman showing herself exercising on a Pilates reformer with the overlaid text: “You can’t hurt me. I’m a millennial with a degree I don’t use, a husband who provides and being spoiled is my love language.”
The ideal is getting attributed to the “manosphere”, but the women are promoting it too because it’s just wealth worship on social media, the most ordinary thing in the world.
Women aspire to be wifed up. This naturally entails a corresponding aspiration in men. They can’t even resolve the ambivalence themselves:
All of this isn’t to say that people — including women of all ages — shouldn’t be able to freely do Pilates without men telling them to.
“The reality is that Pilates is a great way to become strong,” said Friedman. “It’s an excellent form of resistance training. It just doesn’t tend to create as much mass as other forms of strength training.”
But Friedman also noted that throughout history, exercise culture has operated in direct dialogue with the social power women have held.
“Right now it’s hard to parse what’s happening, but I think as long as women are focused on making themselves small and controlling their bodies for other people’s pleasure or benefit, that sort of inherently puts women in an unequal position.”
When men are saying “Pilates”, articles like this are women CHOOSING to only hear the part about being lithe and not the part about being loyal.
Again, the red pill is about HYPERGAMY.
“So we all get to die now because the mids get to be mouthy.”
To spell it out even further: the red pill dudes are upset because they ALREADY THINK THE 4s ARE HOT ENOUGH. They’re not the most attractive, and they want someone on their own level. Those women are not cooperating.
The men are saying, “I want to provide a woman with a life of leisure in exchange for loyalty” and the women are hearing “I have to look hot enough for Chad and men have no attachment needs I’m bound to respect.”