Rebuilding the Squat, One Set at a Time

Writing lifting reports can be extremely self-indulgent: look at me, I lift weight. But they can also be honest reckonings of weaknesses, failures, setbacks and all the other roadbumps that interfere with our smooth progress towards long-set goals. So I write ’em; I haven’t done so too often out here but this year, I hope to rectify that.

So, here is the year’s first report. This time on the year’s squatting thus far. As is the case with most who take the squat seriously, it rapidly becomes the centerpiece of one’s lifting; no other lift’s ‘numbers’ matter quite as much; no other lift is tracked so extensively.

I feel especially inspired to write a brief note on my squatting because of having carried out what amounts to a successful reconstruction and rebuild of the lift this year.When the year began, I had lost some contact with a regular lifting schedule thanks to my new-born daughter’s arrival. I returned to squatting in mid-January and completed a cycle of squatting at Crossfit South Brooklyn, spread out over six weeks or so. I missed only a couple of sessions and slowly started to recover some strength, with my numbers creeping back up. I then began a second cycle and early in it, injured my back at the bottom of a squat. I was not squatting very close to a maximum; the week before I had squatted 240 pounds for sets across (three sets of five reps at the same weight), and on this occasion, I had been squatting 225. But the back felt bad and that was that. The next week, after resting, I tried again, and felt the soreness and stiffness again. No bueno.

It was time to deload. I set my work weight all the way back to 205, and recommenced my lifting sessions again. With a difference: this time I did sets of 5, 5, followed by a repout (i.e., as many reps as possible). This way, I hoped to continue to work on strength as well by adding a little volume to my lifts at a sub-maximal load. It worked; the following were my lifts over the next few weeks, leading up to today:

205: 5, 5, 10

210: 5, 5, 10

215: 5, 5, 12

220: 5, 5, 10

225: 5, 5, 10

230: 5, 5, 10

235: 5, 5, 10

240: 5, 5, 10

245: 5, 5, 11

250: 5, 5, 10

At this point, I began microloading in 2.5lb increments, as I was getting close to the maximum weight I have ever done for reps, 260 lbs):

252.5: 5, 5, 9

255: 5, 5, 10

257.5: 5, 5, 10

260: 5, 5, 9

Today, for the set above, I think I had the 10th rep but my back was getting sore and tired as I was waiting too long between reps to catch my breath. When I went down for the 10th, I collapsed at the bottom and couldn’ t stand back up. Still, nine was not bad at all. This session now counts as some kind of personal record for the last time I had squatted 260 lbs, I had done it for three sets of five reps.

These last few weeks of squatting then have been deeply satisfying: when I began them, I was injured, scared, and worried that I would not regain strength, and remain injured and out of action. But thanks to some judicious ego-swallowing and a patient, yet ambitious approach to recovery, I was able to lift my way back into some real strength gains.

Much hard work to be done over the summer (especially on squat technique), but for the time being, at least the squat is back in business.

Orin Kerr Thinks Executive Branch Searches of The Press Are a ‘Non-Story’

Orin Kerr suggests the story of the US Department of Justice seizing AP phone records isn’t one, wraps up with a flourish, hands out a few pokes at anti-government paranoia, and then asks a series of what he undoubtedly takes to be particularly incisive and penetrating questions:

Based on what we know so far, then, I don’t see much evidence of an abuse. Of course, I realize that some VC readers strongly believe that everything the government does is an abuse: All investigations are abuses unless there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt to the contrary. To not realize this is to be a pro-government lackey. Or even worse, Stewart Baker. But I would ask readers inclined to see this as an abuse to identify exactly what the government did wrong based on what we know so far. Was the DOJ wrong to investigate the case at all? If it was okay for them to investigate the case, was it wrong for them to try to find out who the AP reporters were calling? If it was okay for them to get records of who the AP reporters were calling, was it wrong for them to obtain the records from the personal and work phone numbers of all the reporters whose names were listed as being involved in the story and their editor? If it was okay for them to obtain the records of those phone lines, was the problem that the records covered two months — and if so, what was the proper length of time the records should have covered?

I get that many people will want to use this story as a generic “DOJ abuse” story and not look too closely at it. And I also understand that those who think leaks are good things will see investigations of leaks as inherently bad. But at least based on what we know so far, I don’t yet see a strong case that collecting these records was an abuse of the investigative process.

This summation and dismissal of the ‘non-story’ of a major news organization having its phone records seized by the legal wing of the executive branch is remarkable for its straightforward intention to treat the questions above as merely rhetorical: Of course, the DOJ is not ‘wrong’ to investigate aggressively, using all means at its disposal, whistleblowers providing information to the press. It should therefore seek to identify them relying on problematic doctrines of search and seizure of personal information provided to third-parties. These searches should be broad and extensive, casting as wide a net as possible.

In this conception of executive power, there is a visible asymmetry: the threat might be perceived dimly, but the response is clear and powerful, with few limits on its application.

For Kerr, therefore, it is a ‘non-story’ when a massive exertion of executive branch power is directed at a component of the polity vital to its information gathering and reporting functions, one of whose central functions has been exercising vigilance and oversight on that same power; it is a ‘non-story’ when exercises of executive power directed toward dubious ends such as prosecuting whistleblowers might result in an attenuated and impaired  domain of political discourse. This is of little concern to Kerr in his reckonings of whether legal propriety has been kept, of whether there has been an ‘abuse of the investigative process.’ But how could there be one, when the context of the ‘investigative process’ matters so little?

Constraints, Creativity, and Programming

Last year, in a post on Goethe and Nietzsche, which invoked the Freedom program (to cure Internet distraction), and which noted the role constraints played in artistic creation, I had referred obliquely to a chapter in my book Decoding Liberation, in which ‘Scott Dexter and I tried to develop a theory of aesthetics for software, a crucial role in which is played by the presence of technical constraints on programmers’ work.’

Today, I’d like to provide a brief excerpt from Chapter 3, ‘Free Software and the Aesthetics of Code’, pp. 90-91:

Understanding how a particularly ingenious piece of code confronts and subsequently masters constraints is crucial to understanding creativity and beauty in programming. Programmers have a deep sense of how their work is made more creative by the presence of the physical constraints of computing devices. Programmers who worked in the early era of computing struggled, in particular, to write code that would work in the tiny memory banks of the time — the onboard mission computer for the Apollo 11 project had a memory of 72 kilobytes, less than that found in today’s least-sophisticated cell phone. This struggle was reflected in the nature of the appreciation programmers accorded each other’s work. Steven Levy’s ethnography of the early programming culture, Hackers, describes the obsession with  “bumming” instructions from code:

A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of the limited  memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions. . . . [S]ometimes when you didn’t need speed or space much, and you weren’t thinking about art and beauty, you’d hack together an ugly program, attacking the problem with “brute force” methods. . . . [O]ne could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new algorithm which would save  a whole block of instructions. . . . [B]y approaching the problem from an off-beat angle that no one had thought of before but that in retrospect, made total sense. There was definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could use this genius from Mars technique (Levy 1994).

These programmers experienced the relaxation of the constraint of system memory, brought on by advances in manufacturing techniques, as a loss of aesthetic pleasure. The relative abundance of storage and processing power has resulted in a new aesthetic category. One of the most damning aesthetic characterizations of software is “bloated,” that is, using many more instructions, and, hence, storage space, than necessary; laments about modern software often take the shape of complaints about its excessive memory consumption (Wirth 1995; Salkever 2003). Huge executables are disparaged as “bloatware,” not least because of the diminished ingenuity they reflect (Levy 1994). Judgments of elegant code reflect this concern with conciseness: “I worked with some great Forth hackers at the time, and it was truly amazing what could be accomplished with what today would be a laughingly tiny memory footprint” (Warsaw 1999).

The peculiar marriage of constraints, functionality, and aesthetic sensibility in source code highlights a parallel between programming and architecture. An awareness of gravity’s constraints is crucial in our aesthetic assessment of a building, as we assess its ability to master the weight of materials, to make different materials cohere. While striving to make the work visually pleasing, the architect is subject to the constraints of the requirements of the structure’s inhabitants, much as the programmer is subject to the constraints of design specifications, user requirements, and computing power.

Artists in other genres struggle similarly: creative artistic action is often a matter of finding local maxima of aesthetic value, subject to certain constraints (Gaut and Livingston 2003). These constraints may be imposed on the artist, as in censorship laws; they may be voluntarily assumed, as when a composer decides to write a piece in sonata form; or they may be invented by the artists themselves, as in Picasso and Braque’s invention of Cubism. Whatever the origin of the constraints, “creative action is governed by them,” and “artistically relevant goals,” such as the facilitation of   communication between artists and the public, are advanced by them (Elster 2000, 212). The connection between creativity and coping with constraints is explicit in programming: “It is possible to be creative in programming, and that deals with far more ill-defined questions, such as minimizing the amount of intermediate data required, or the amount of program storage, or the amount of execution time, and so on” (Mills 1983)….Thus, the act of programming, in its most creative moments, endeavors to meet constraints imposed by nature through the physicality of computation, by the users of the program and their desires for functionality and usability, and by the programming community through the development of shared standards.

The Slap of Love: A Mother’s Day Story

I should have 9511 stories about my mother. One for my every day of my life that she was alive. Today, I’ll recount just one of them.

As just-above-waist-high kids, my brother and I used the local park for our evening sports sessions. In the winters, this mean cricket; in the summers, soccer. Play ended when it became dark; in the winters, this dreaded time came earlier than it did in the summers, and because cricket was played with a dangerous hard ball, nightfall was not a barrier to be trifled with. Summers were a different matter; we were playing soccer and kicking and running around with our feet. We could, often would, play well into the dark, testing the boundaries of how long we could stay out without getting yelled at for being late for homework or dinner.

On one such summer evening, our soccer game ran late as usual. The streets around us brightened even as the park darkened and our game continued. Then, the ball was kicked to the sidelines and appeared to run out into the street adjoining the park. My brother sprinted after it, desperate to get it back into play so the game could resume. Unknown to him a strand of barbed wire was strewn across one of the breaks in the park’s wall. In the daytime, this was clearly visible, and those entering the park from that unofficial entrance had gingerly stepped around this bizarre barrier. (Perhaps placed there to stop animals from entering the park).

My brother ran into the that strand of wire at full tilt. As he did so, we saw him lifted off the ground and become entangled, heard him scream, and then, silence. We  ran over, extricated him from the wire, and stood him up. His shirt was torn, his skin was scratched at several points, and ominously, his face was streaked with blood. Horrified, wondering whether my brother had been blinded, I walked him–stoically silent–back to our home, where, terrifyingly, my parents awaited.

My mother’s face blanched as she saw my brother’s face. But she said nothing as she raced to the medicine cabinet and returning with cotton wool swabs, a mug of water, and some antiseptic solution, quickly got to work. She efficiently cleaned and wiped and medicated. And then, one of her swipes revealed that the blood on the face did not conceal a gouged out eye. My brother had not been blinded; he had gotten away with a cut above the eye.

At this point, my mother slapped my brother. It wasn’t a hard blow; but a stinger across the cheek, nonetheless. My brother, quietly undergoing the patchwork till then, stared back at my mother, astonished and hurt. What was that for?

Watching this little drama go down, I wasn’t puzzled at all. My mother must have been petrified when I had brought my brother home late, a bloody mess. She loved us, powerfully, a love that often racked her with deep fears that we might ever be hurt in any way. But she had suppressed every other reaction of hers in favor of immediately providing succor to him. With the most immediate wounds cleaned and shown to be non-threatening, her relief had combined with the anger she had felt at my brother for subjecting her to that terrible anxiety.  That slap followed. I felt sorry for my brother but I felt for my mother too. I knew why she had snapped. And slapped.

The Child’s Photographic Record and Personal Narratives

Like any doting first-time parents, my wife and I went a little photography-batty in the hours and days following our daughter’s birth. We had three cameras: two in phones, and one little Panasonic digital unit. We clicked away madly, recording every little change in expression, ever bodily movement that seemed significant. Those three cameras all allow the shooting of high-definition video, and so, we made little videos too. Every Sunday for my daughter’s first four weeks, I would faithfully transfer the week’s collection of photos and videos to an online repository. And of course, every once in a while, we would place a photo or two of her on Facebook and sit back, absurdly pleased at the adoring comments and oohs-and-aahs sent our way.

As the days went by the number of photos being shot decreased. Days go by and I do not take a single photograph of my baby girl. My wife is less lazy; her phone shows more recent photographs than mine. And I’ve started missing my Sunday dates with the uploader; its been five weeks since I last uploaded a batch of photos and videos.  But all said and done, given that our daughter is only twenty weeks old, there is still an impressive photographic corpus associated with her. And despite our slowing down in the photography department, under the right circumstances, my daughter still retains the ability to trigger a frenzy of clicking in us. A new expression, a new physical ability, a first-time encounter with a friend or family member; these can all do it.

So I wonder about the curious relationship she will bear to this extensive document of her first few years and about the difference that entails between her and those children who did not in the past, and still don’t in the present, possess such records of their pasts.  At the least, I would imagine my daughter’s sense of personal identification with her past selves would be interestingly different; not only will she possess partial memories of her older selves but she will be able to correlate those with photographs and videos. She will be able to see how she moved, sounded, talked, gurgled, crawled, walked, and of course, cried; she will have available, for careful and repeated inspection, a detailed record of many of her most distinctive behaviors. For those of us that grew up with few films or videos of our early days, they remain utter mysteries; we have dim memories of them, but they lack any more definition than that. Our perspectives on those formative times would obviously be interestingly different if they were supplemented by such detailed transcribings. Such records after all, do not just show us; they show those that we played with and were taken care by.

The stories we tell about ourselves have always suffered and benefited from our lack of access to days gone by; grandparents and parents pass away; memories fade; we move homes. But  we might acquire a radically different sense of identity and self construction as we grow up with such an elaborately recorded and archived past, one where our memories are propped up and made more vivid. Perhaps then, a wholly novel art of storytelling, of personal narrative construction will emerge.

The therapist’s couch could look interestingly different in the years to come.

Diego Marani, Europanto, Blinkenlights, and Hacker Neologisms

In reviewing Diego Marani‘s Las Adventures Des Inspector Cabillot, Matthew Reynolds notes his invention of  Europanto, a ‘mock international auxiliary language‘:

Marani’s ability to see humour in his longing for a universal language has flowered in his creation of Europanto, a jovial pan-European language which began in his office [presumably, either the  the Directorate-General for Interpretation of the European Commission, where Marani is currently employed or his previous office at the EU’s Multilingualism Policy Unit] and spread to columns in Swiss and other newspapers, some of which have been collected in Las Adventures Des Inspector Cabillot. This book does not need to be translated: Europanto is ‘der jazz des linguas. Keine study necessite, just improviste, und du shal siempre fluent esse in diese most amusingamente lingua.’ Take a framework of English word order, varied with the occasional German inversion, and chuck in whatever vocabulary occurs to you French, German, Spanish, Italian, and occasionally Latin. Don’t worry too much about inflections. Europanto is more capacious than Miles Kingston’s Franglais, and less exacting than Esperanto.

As I read this passage in Reynold’s review, I was reminded of a sample of an older ‘international auxiliary language’, one rich with hacker’s neologisms, and one which produced many, many chuckles in me when I first encountered it in the machine room of the Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center in Newark, NJ, where I worked as a graduate research assistant from 1988 to 1990. I am referring, of course, to the famous ‘Blinkenlights‘:

If that ‘Gothic’ font is a little too hard to read, here is an easier version:

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mitten grabben.  Ist easy schnappen der springen werk,  blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.  Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.  Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

What is it that makes such languages so pleasurable (and funny)?

Well, in the case of Europanto, as Reynolds points out, there is a sense of freedom, of release from syntactical structures and constraints, a chance to relish one’s knowledge–even if rudimentary–of more than language:

There’s a coltish pleasure in encountering worlds like ‘nightcauchemare,’ alsyoubitte’ and ‘smilingante’, and phrases like ‘under der heat des settingante sun’. You do feel momentarily released from the ‘grammaticale rigor’ that immures us, and ready to celebrate ‘der liberatione des lingua van alles rules’

In the case of the ‘Achtung’ sign (which went ‘viral’ in its own way after it first made its appearance), there is something else at play. Besides its straightforward nod to old WWII humor and war comics featuring caricatures of the German military, it’s an inside joke with all the distinct pleasures of that genre; it let the computer-literate enjoy a little dig at those that were on the ‘outside’ and that often, perversely, seemed to mock our literacy as a sign of general social incompetence (was it really such a bad thing to be a computer nerd?). But best of all, even as it made up a new ‘non-language’, those in the know knew that it pointed to a world where the distinct language of the hacker, the geek, the nerd, was spoken.

Graham Greene on Happiness

In a post last year on the subject of happiness, I had cited Freud and Burke–the founders of psychoanalysis and political conservatism, respectively. Their views of happiness spoke of the seemingly necessarily transitory nature of the sensation we term happiness–Freud even enlists Goethe to help make this claim–that happiness was marked by brief, fleeting intensity, by its ‘novelty and contrast’.

Today, for a slightly different perspective, I’m going to enlist Graham Greene, a member of that class of humans with perhaps exceptional insight into the human condition, the novelist. Greene always was, in his autobiographical writing, very frank about his depression, psychoanalytic treatments, and the influence these had on his writing and in the case of psychoanalysis, his understanding of the supposed relationship of the unconscious to creativity; his views on happiness should be of interest here.

During the course of a series of interviews conducted by Marie Françoise-Allan, Greene, in speaking of his childhood says:

[H]appiness is repetitious, while pain is marked by crises that which sear the memory. Happiness survives only in the odd incident. Being happy is almost like making love: One attains a state of blissful ‘nothing’–one does not remember, one remembers only happiness, a state of contentment.

This is quite a mixed bag. First, happiness is described as ‘repetitious’–perhaps it is a mental state which recurs or is more temporally extended than pain, which is described in terms similar to the ones that Freud and Burke used to describe happiness. Here, Greene seems to suggest that happiness is a mental state with continuity, one which acquires its distinctive quality because of its ‘sameness’, its invariance. But then, happiness is described as surviving only in ‘the odd incident’, a return to the episodic state described by Freud and Burke. And lastly happiness is compared to the orgiastic pleasures of ‘making love’, a ‘blissful nothing’ which is perhaps supposed to be like the Buddhist nirvana, but with very few particular features to it, so much so that the subject remembers no details but just the sensation (or lack of it). Happiness is now analogized to a ‘petite mort‘ a little dying, a little flirtation with a state of nothingness. (It should be clear that in these descriptions Greene is taking the side of the philosophical inquiry into happiness that suggests it is a psychological term like ‘melancholia’ as opposed to that which would consider it a ‘value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing’ (Dan Haybron, Stanford Encyclopedia, ‘Happiness‘).)

This does not amount to very coherent view of happiness. Perhaps it is because of Greene is answering a series of questions about the happiness of childhood, and so his memories of that time have suffered the attrition of memory. Indeed, his interlocutor makes a great deal of this loss of memory in this session, remarking on how Greene’s childhood does not play a particularly prominent role in his autobiographies. And Greene’s quickness in ending his answer with a brief ‘We were happy’ also seems to suggest a desire to move on, almost as if the memories of that happiness were too painful to bear. So Greene might have unwittingly left us with at least one more possible facet of this ever elusive phenomenon: happiness might be that sensation, which when remembered later, produces a state distinctly unlike it, a mixture of regret, melancholia, and the fear that that sensation will not be experienced again.

Excerpt from: Marie Françoise-Allan, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.

More Than 140 Characters on Twitter

I must be a very savvy social networker, because I use both Facebook and Twitter (and indeed, I even have a Tumblr page). That’s a little inside joke – just between me and myself, because in point of fact, I don’t consider myself to be any such thing. And nothing quite shows up my social networking incompetence like Twitter does.

To back up: I joined Twitter a year and a half ago because: I kept glimpsing portions of Twitter conversations; I heard about ‘tweetstorms’ and was intrigued; my cricket book was due to be released, and as I had noted in my ‘Reflections on Facebook’ series of posts, I had been advised to ‘build a social media presence’; most importantly, because I had begun working on new blogs–this one and one over at ESPN-Cricinfo–and wanted readers. I signed up, sent out a few greetings to folks I knew on Twitter, and began tweeting infrequently.

Flash forward: I have almost 900 ‘followers’; I still tweet very infrequently; I get very few readers to my blogs through Twitter. In sum, I wouldn’t say my Twitter experience has been a ‘success’. I have heard and read about the various ‘strategies’ for being a ‘successful Twitterer’ and find myself unable to implement them: I’m not a very witty and prolific tweeter; I don’t tweet all sorts of ‘interesting’ links to photo-essays, blog posts, breaking news, or even dog/cat/baby videos. I do not retweet others too often; I do not get into long discussions with other Twitterers (or is it tweeters?);  I cannot compose ‘tweet poems’; I’m not an ‘influencer’ or ‘thought leader’ or ‘conversation leader’ or whatever. In sum: I’m a pretty useless user of Twitter;

Some of this failure is easily explainable by my indolence. But not all of it: I still find 140 characters a frustrating length for any kind of communication; I do not quite see the point of supplying links that I have ‘found’ on my ‘net travels, which are actually quite limited because most of my time online is spent on a very small cluster of sites. On the few occasions that a tweet of mine actually elicits a response from someone, I either miss it completely because I am not actively paying attention or I get embroiled in a discussion, which I’m always keen to interrupt as soon as possible because I find it too hard to keep up.

At its best Twitter reminds me of Internet Relay Chat channels populated by people with similar interests. It approaches this when there is a critical mass of like-minded folks on my timeline, ‘gathered around’ a live event: perhaps a big game or an election debate or result or something else on those lines. But those events are quite rare; most times, I barely respond to my Twitter feed, not because the content there is inherently dull or anything like that, but rather, because I simply do not have the time to chase down everything linked to there, and because of my reluctance to commence Tweet-conversations, more often than not, I simply bite my tongue rather than respond to a tweet.

I don’t actively dislike Twitter, in the way that I sometimes do Facebook, even though it encourages some of the same narcissistic behavior. Rather, I’m perplexed by it. I don’t understand its appeal for online discussion; I think its role in news and political organizing is overstated; many of its functions are replicable in other forms of social networking. And clearly, I don’t have what it takes to be a ‘successful’ Twitterer.

A year and half on, and I still feel still like a newbie. I should tweet that.

Crossfit, Women, and ‘Tough Titsday’: A Woman’s Perspective

I have often blogged on Crossfit here in these pages. In large part that is because I genuinely enjoy my experiences at Crossfit South Brooklyn (CFSBK), a very unique and distinctive space in which to work out and pursue the ever-elusive objective of being mens sana in corpore sano. It is also because I find a fitness phenomenon an interesting context within which to think about–among other things–the issues of masculinity, militarism, sexism, and misogyny. So, I’ve blogged here on Crossfit and strong women, the question of Crossfit’s relationship to the military, and for a long time, have wanted to write something on whether Crossfit provides a female-friendly space.

That last post will get written soon, but for the time being there is this: yesterday Jezebel ran a blog post that accused Crossfit South Brooklyn of sexism and/or misogyny.  I found the charge baseless, and so did many of the other folks that work out with me. Crossfit South Brooklyn, for its part, posted a rejoinder here. (The comments are worth reading to get a broad perspective on all the issues raised by the article and CFSBK’s response.)

My wife–who works out at CFSBK like me–and has participated in the Tough Titsday program and meet, was moved to email me the following:

If anyone could take something good and misread it completely, it is cheap and frivolous publications like Jezebel. That article, loaded with preconceived notions of what Crossfit is, and armed with the rantings of a single, incredibly imperceptive female visitor to the gym, actually does a great deal to strengthen a misogynistic view of women in its attempt to “expose” Crossfit South Brooklyn’s imagined affront by naming its female-centered strength training course and competition “Tough Titsday”.

As someone who has both participated in the course and who has done quite a bit of strength training at Crossfit, I find the article itself insulting. First, it is clear that the author, Ms. Katie J.M. Baker, could not be bothered finding out anything about the institution she seeks to criticize. Although each Crossfit affiliate is its own entity with cultures varying widely depending on the coaching staff and the location, Baker chooses to assume all participants and Crossfit gyms are some sort of stereotypical “bro-fest.” And despite the fact that the Tough Titsday class was actually created by an incredibly forward thinking and badass woman as a way to encourage other women, many whom were initially intimidated by heavy weightlifting, to get on the platform, Baker insists on creating her own imaginary universe, one where the “douchey bros” in the gym simply decided to form a class for us, their harem girls, in which they could sit around and comment on our tits or something. It insinuates that the women that participate in this course are perhaps too dumb or self-effacing to realize that they are being insulted. Perhaps Jezebel imagines us as a bunch of air-headed sorority girls all too happy to be on display at the meat market.

Well, Ms. Baker may get her rocks off with her fantasies, but if she took a couple minutes to get off her lazy ass and do some real journalism, she would have found out that I share the platform with female economists, philosophers, prosecutors, stand-up comedians, teachers, mothers, and other genuinely impressive women who find strength in each other’s companionship and are motivated by one another’s accomplishments. And, unlike our disgruntled visitor, we think the name is funny.

This is not to say that we are unaware of sexism. Context is everything. If you don’t believe me, think about this joke: three women go for a job interview, one with a degree in economics, one with a law degree, and one with 10 years experience. Who gets the job? Answer: the one with the biggest tits. Told by a 40-year old white man, the joke is crass and offensive, but told by a 40-year old woman, it becomes social commentary. Without placing CFSBK and its Tough Titsday training program and meet, in the context of what it is– a gym attracting a wide array of people of different backgrounds, genders, and body types–and refusing to find out what type of community is being created, the article misleads and misinforms. It seems too obvious to have to point out, but because programs like Tough Titsday go out of their way to promote women’s strength, the context renders the name inoffensive.

As a woman and a feminist, I begrudge Jezebel for carelessly demonizing something that gives myself, and many other women at our gym, strength and confidence. But frankly, I don’t really have time to get too bothered over half-baked writing like that in Jezebel, I’m too busy kicking ass on the platform and in the courtroom, and playing with my beautiful 4-month old daughter.

Of Prefects and Punishment Drills

In my ninth and tenth grades, I attended boarding school in India. Like many boarding schools of its type, it incorporated the disciplinary mechanism of the prefect: senior schoolboys placed in charge of those junior to them, armed with the rule book, and cricket bats and hockey sticks with which to hand out six of the best. And the punishment drill. They, and we, the subjects of their not-so-benign rule, called these ‘PDs’.

A PD was an exercise routine designed and implemented on the fly by those who administered it; it felt like a boot-camp workout, a candidate for inclusion in Hell Week, a lung-busting, muscle-burning series of movements that had only one objective in mind: to exhaust you till you could no longer perform it correctly. The contours of a PD were determined by the fiendish imagination of the prefect(s) in charge of the PD: they dreamed up the sequence of exercises–perhaps a series of duck walks across the length of a football field, followed by running up a flight stairs, and then a series of pushups with legs on an elevated platform, followed by…you get the picture.

No normal human being could perform these movements without muscle failure setting in eventually. When it did, you were reprimanded and punished more: perhaps by a ‘shot’, a smack on your backside with a cricket bat or a hockey stick. If you were lucky, the prefect wouldn’t swing too hard. If you weren’t, you were hit hard enough to bring tears to your eyes and a patch of skin that smarted so fiercely that sitting down on a wooden chair became a painful experience.

A PD was handed out for violations of the school’s disciplinary code: perhaps talking during prep, or wearing the wrong uniform, or smoking cigarettes, or something else altogether. It began with a peremptory command to change into sports uniform–shorts, sneakers, short-sleeved shirts–in two minutes and report to the prefect. Some prefects never administered PDs. Yet others loved to, and their drills acquired a reputation all of their own. These were young men who loved to punish and seemed to derive a sadistic pleasure from it; the PD was invented for them.

More often than not, a PD was conducted at night.  Perhaps those who conducted them had figured out a long time ago that darkness and cold always made the PD more intimidating. Its venues were various: sometimes a football field, sometimes the school’s quadrangle, sometimes a paved road. It didn’t matter. Physical pain and discomfort could be inflicted anywhere.

I suffered many PDs in my two years in my boarding school; there was little chance I would escape its distinct ‘pleasures’ during my tenure there. Sometimes I was swept up in a prefect’s dragnet; sometimes I was part of a select bunch of miscreants picked out for chastisement. I grew to fear the sensation of my body giving way, collapsing from the abuse sent its way. I learned to ‘cheat’ on a PD, to perform it in a way that protected me.

I do not know if I ever became more ‘disciplined’; I do know I grew to despise those who so casually inflicted such misery on those weaker than them.