You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein Read Free Book Online

occurred to me how incredibly FUCKING hard these women are working to look the way they do. No one ever told me. It’s not just about going to the gym and doing the elliptical for forty minutes. 3 It’s about taking a class where you are in horrible pain and hate your life and might lose your lunch at any moment.
    And as I study these women holding their squats for minutes at a time, it dawns on me that they must have started doing this when they were teenagers. These women, with their flat stomachs and the lines down their quads and the skinny jeans that fit perfectly, have been chiseling, toning, chipping, and whittling since forever. I hadn’t known that this is what it takes to have an acceptable body. I feel like I’ll never catch up.
    There are so many miserable things about Bar Method, it’s hard to know where to begin. Well:
    First of all, the instructor wears a headset microphone. I’m not exactly sure why this bothers me so much, but on some level it makes me feel like we’re all taking this way too seriously. This is not a Madonna concert. The room is not that large. We would definitely hear her without the microphone but she is determined to wear it. It also evokes one of my huge pet peeves, which is when a famous actor directs a short film for the first time and it’s very important they have their picture taken with a headset around their neck so we know they are DIRECTING.
    Furthermore, all the instructors have an uncanny ability to memorize the name of every woman in the class and will use it to humiliating effect when they correct you over the microphone: “Jessi, tuck your seat.” Everyone looks over to see who this shitty seat tucker is. The first time I ever took the class there was another Jessi there, clearly someone who had earned enough Bar Method hours that she now had the dignity of going by first name only, and so I was the one stuck with “Jessi Klein.” Over and over again, the teacher would curtly say into her fucking headset, “Jessi Klein, lower your shoulders. Jessi Klein, deepen the tuck in your seat.” Just in case anyone wants to be able to track down the muffintoppy girl with terrible form, her full name is Jessi Klein.
    Did I mention that in this class your butt is always referred to as “your seat”? Can you imagine anything creepier than this? It’s oddly neutered, somewhere in between medical and infantilizing. It’s only slightly better than “tushy.”
    Then there’s the Bar Method music. Like the class itself, it is joyless. Of the one dillion hip-hop, rap, soul, punk, and R&B songs in the world that would be fun to move to, they have opted for none of them. Instead they have selected (and I think created?) a kind of ambient, stripped-down beat, the sort of sound that used to come out of my brother’s Casio synthesizer circa 1985. (There were a few buttons you could push that would lay down the foundational bass for “samba,” “tango,” “rock,” and I think also “polka.”)
    On top of all this, there is the price. It costs $36 a class. Thirty-six bucks! That means it’s $72 for two classes. Bar Method suggests that for optimal results you do the class five times a week.
    That’s $180 a week you’d be spending on your ASS.
    The saddest fact about Bar Method, however—the most heartbreaking, annoying, decimating thing about it—is this: It works. After taking maybe about seven classes, I went to my waxer, Rivka. Rivka has been up in my most personal physical business for a decade now, and when I say she has seen parts of my body that I never have in my entire life, I am not exaggerating. Every three weeks I go to her for what is essentially 80 percent of the way to a colonoscopy. The point is, she knows me. I was lying on the table on my stomach (don’t ask, it’s all so unspeakably gross) when suddenly Rivka gasped. “Why does your butt look so good?” Rivka is a boundary-less Russian Jew who has more than once demanded to see my tits because