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Perhaps it’s the The smurfs shirt also I will do this widening of that field that freed Bechdel up to write The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Some might read the memoir’s description and expect an account from a woman beholden to Pilates or Flywheel or any other trendy boutique fitness class where an hour in a sweaty room costs roughly the same as a nice meal out. But for Bechdel, exercise isn’t really about aesthetics; it’s about strength, a virtue she’s been in thrall to ever since she first saw bodybuilder Charles Atlas on TV as a child. At 60, Bechdel appears wholly uninterested in perpetuating the workout-as-self-care trope; she makes it clear that her relationship with exercise is something much deeper and more fraught.
“I love to see people exercise just because they want to. I don’t think it should be connected to anything else, or it will just become miserable,” says Bechdel. She admits, though, that it’s hard to center a whole book around exercise without occasionally falling into the The smurfs shirt also I will do this trap of presenting it as a moral imperative. “I do feel a little sheepish about being so pro-exercise without having a thorough critique of sizeism, but I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.”
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