America Shapes Up

(6 of 10)

Freedom in an Unfree World. That globulous body of quasi knowledge could only be critiqued by another title: The Culture of Narcissism. In his savage 1978 indictment of changing attitudes, Social Historian Christopher Lasch wrote: "Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, [they] seek neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence, but peace of mind." The boomers have acquired pinstripes and purchased their entry into the American mainstream. But their search for laid-back pleasure does help define the present lust for fitness.

Michael O'Shea, 34, owner of the Sports Training Institute in New York City, speaks for his generation: "Most of the people my age have been through the drug scene, Viet Nam, protesting and all that. Now instead of being a workaholic to the point where you have to have a house and car, we want something to equate how we feel about ourselves. If you spend more time on something like exercise, you may like yourself a little better."

The gigantic East Bank Club in Chicago is a two-block, five-story country club of glass and steel. It is nicknamed the Biggest Meat Market by its 5,000 youthful and mostly single, upper-middle-management members, who pay an initial $900 to join. The E.B.C. is more than a Dating Game in sweatsuits, however. It is a latterday, secular cathedral built to the glory of the body. The $20 million club contains ten tennis courts, a complete indoor golf facility, eight handball-racquetball courts, three squash courts, a basketball court, saunas, whirlpools, massage rooms, sleeping rooms, steam rooms, sunrooms, library, nursery, card room, an outdoor restaurant and a crowded, quarter-mile banked and cushioned indoor jogging track. As even the architecture asserts, life is nothing more—or less—than the body beautiful.

Preoccupation with the flesh and its beauty has been geometrically accelerated by television. The original moment of truth, for millions of viewers, came in the field of politics, when youthful, imperially slim Jack Kennedy apparently clinched the presidency with the first closeup in his televised debate with the blue-jowled Richard Nixon.

Later the networks brought the minicam to the locker room. Athletes with enviable physiques were suddenly "up close and personal." They proved neither as intimidating nor as unmatchable as they seemed from a distance. If petulant Jimmy Connors could do it, playing tennis had possibilities for Everyman. In 1972 television struck another blow for fitness when Frank Shorter, the first American to win the Olympic marathon in recent times, lunged across the finish line in Munich's Olympic Stadium and into 13,540,000 American households. The images wavering on the color tube informed viewers that there were better things to do with the body than leave it in an easy chair clutching a beer and a sandwich.

While television may be a simple medium, its messages are often contradictory. Each evening perfect bodies are projected into millions of living rooms. Prime-time grandmothers, whether in sitcoms or the countless ads hawking cosmetics, yogurt, diet soda and designer jeans, hardly look older than the actresses who play their daughters. The crow's-feet and wrinkles by which age and even character are judged have been pneumatically erased. A recent