Barre – The Ultimate Sexercise!

She had such a natural instinct to flirt, to play the coquette. How quick she was to bed them. How quick she was to throw them out. She was a natural predator with a killer streak!

Esther Fairfax – from her book, Mother and Me

So, last week I wrote about various classes offered by gyms up and down the planet, as I mentioned in my post, whilst compiling my research I was a little surprised to find that Barre, a common gym class, certainly in the UK was originally developed to improve women’s sexual health, well, I had to find out more and report back!

Barre, a fitness phenomenon based on stretches and strength-training exercises performed at a ballet Barre, has really taken off over recent years. The workout is as challenging as it is effective at sculpting women’s bodies — its enthusiasts are known for being physical overachievers who are already fit but nevertheless driven to shape themselves to perfection.

Up until this week to be honest, I’d never been to a Barre class but wow… what an eye opener! From the pelvic “tucking,” in which you roll your groin forward, to the seated ab work, where you sit with legs spread and bent, to the “knee dancing,” which is what it sounds like, the class felt like an hour-long rehearsal for sex, and I loved it!!

Barre classes rarely draw attention to the workout’s sexual undertones — or to the fact that its tucks and thrusts can, as many instructors will privately admit, bring very real improvements to women’s sex lives. Sex is altogether absent from the experience; however, Barre practitioners sell strength — or “long, lean muscles” and a “ballet body” — not stronger orgasms.

The secret most Barre studios don’t promote — and one many instructors don’t even know themselves — is that Barre’s origins are deeply sexual. Barre’s creator, Lotte Berk, a free-love revolutionary who began teaching the regimen in 1959, specifically wanted to advance what she called “the state of sex” by encouraging women to pursue sex for their own pleasure. And in the post–sexual revolution 1970s, women’s magazines pitched the workout as a way for women to do just that — or as Cosmopolitan put it, to “build sexual confidence and competence.” Today, what has become a mass commercial fitness trend — a straitlaced subculture in which bums are called “seats” — was once a radical, decidedly erotic practice.

Lotte Berk, a German-Jewish dancer who fled the Nazis for London after they forbade her from performing, originally invented the workout that would become “Barre” to recover from a back injury. Over time, she found that her special combination of ballet moves, yoga, and rehabilitative exercises helped her not only to heal and hold onto her dancer’s figure, but also to get more pleasure from sex.

From the start, Berk’s classes and her sex life were intertwined. She talked about her love affairs while she taught. She named her exercises “The Prostitute” and “Naughty Bottoms.” One move was simply called “The Sex!” Perhaps most famously, she is rumoured to have told clients, “If you can’t tuck, you can’t fuck!” And her clients loved her for it.

This was nothing short of radical. In the 1960s, the modern fitness industry was still in its infancy and the few regimens that existed prioritized finding and pleasing a husband! Berk actively encouraged women to pleasure themselves — an attitude that complemented and contributed to the emerging sexual revolution. It liberated women to show them, I can be sexy as well! It’s not just men that should derive pleasure from sex.

In the early 1970s, Lydia Bach, one of the few female entrepreneurs of the time, attended one of Lotte’s classes and was immediately hooked! She realised there was a commercial untapped element to the class she could exploit. She bought the rights to franchise, and in 1971, opened the Lotte Berk Method studio in New York City. Her client list included a slate of the era’s stars — Love Story actress Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, and famed book editor Nan Talese.

In New York, Lydia carried on Lotte’s legacy of sexual frankness into the workout. In a 1972 New York Times article about the studio, Bach described the method as “a combination of modern ballet, yoga, orthopaedic exercise and sex.” In her 1973 exercise book Awake! Aware! Alive! — Lydia devotes the entire last chapter to sex! “All of the exercises in this book are important for sex,” she advises. The press was all over the book like a rash! In a feature on Bach’s book, Cosmopolitan gushed in the headline, “Exercise Your Way to a Better Sex Life!”

Eventually, as the wider culture shifted, so did Barre. From the mid-1970s into the ’80s, with the rise of women’s liberation, the idea of women enjoying sex became less revelatory. For entrepreneurs, selling visible muscles and physical perfection became lucrative. Jane Fonda brought aerobics to the masses, and women’s gyms became more popular. Liberated women of the world started to view their bodies more like machines, and so the studio shifted focus to a more mainstream regime. In a blog post about Barre’s history, Burr Leonard, the original author of the “Barre Blog” explains, “By the ’80s the innocent idea that sex could be a path to freedom and enlightenment had run its course. Women had tasted strength and realized there was more to exercise than sex.”

Today’s Barre enthusiasts, who range from college-aged to grandmothers and are willing to pay serious cash to attend a class, say they don’t always want to feel sexual while working out. “I know if, during training, I had been told to behave like a prostitute at any point, I would probably have never become an instructor,” one Barre teacher who taught at two different studios confided. “I bristle at the idea that sex would be the end goal simply because I want to think of myself as more than a sexual being.”

Of course, even without being an explicit sex-workout, you can still reap the sexual benefits of Barre — from increased pelvic floor strength to increased stamina — even if no one’s talking about sex during class. When Lotte Berk first introduced women to her workout in the ’60s, the class’s sexual openness felt thrilling, and empowering, because it was taboo. Now, more than 50 years after the sexual revolution, women seem to feel that turning a rigorous strength-training workout into something overtly sexual is almost complimentary, as you know I’ve written previously about exercises for the pelvic floor.

Still, at least one franchise owner is actively working to bring the sex back! Pop Physique founder Jennifer Williams said in an article that she laments that Barre studios of today feeling totally “beige.” She wants her studios, based mostly in Los Angeles and New York, to feel more electric. Unlike other franchise owners, she makes a point of teaching her instructors about Barre’s sexed-up history. Indeed, Pop Physique’s first ad campaign was inspired by the photos in Awake! Aware! Alive!, and the brand’s website is the only one to directly promote Barre’s sexual benefits. “A hotter sex life …” the site coyly promises. “Well, that’s what we’ve heard.”

So, the next Barre class I attend will have a totally different feel and I intend to whisper the contents of this post liberally to my fellow classees!!

What’s on this week?