By the 1930s, “obesity” was in the lingua franca and on the male mind. The hero of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air was George Bowling, a lower-middle-class suburbanite with a 49-inch waist at age 45. On contemplating his middle-aged spread, Bowling concludes, “No woman… will ever look twice at me again, unless she’s paid to.” Men’s body belts and Linia shorts (Spanx for chaps) were advertised. After the war, the spreading male middle was linked to the deadening culture of the commuting suburbanite and his sedentary life from office to home to TV set.
I don’t quite know when this exercise craze hit women. When the mantra of the Duchess of Windsor that you can’t be too thin or too rich hit the steno pool. When the models in the Eaton’s catalogue went from size 10 to size 4. But hit it did, and for those of us stranded on the shore, the pre-baby-boomers, the women who were too late for the youth leagues and too early for Jane Fonda, there was Jack LaLanne exhorting us all to stop being slaves to our aging bodies and help our slackening muscles match up to our inner youth.
God bless him. I know you’re doing fingertip push-ups on the clouds, Jack, with angels and cherubs in tow, all in heavenly workouts together.
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