Are Pilates the preserve of fascists? Or are Gen Z spending waaay too much time analyzing instead of enjoying themselves

If you’ve signed up for Pilates recently, your fascism is showing through your cute matching leggings and sports bra set.

And that jogging habit you picked up during the last election cycle? You need to look yourself in the mirror, you authoritarian scum.

That’s the only takeaway from MaryBeth Monaco-Vavrik, a barre instructor and fitness influencer living in Washington DC.

In April, she dropped a video asking her 17k Instagram followers, “Does anyone want me to explain the connection between the popularization of Pilates & running instead of strength training… and the rise of extreme American authoritarianism?”

No, but please go on.

With all the robust life experience of an extremely online 24-year-old whose mind was clearly programmed during the great awokening, she dropped some serious gobbledygook that showed her real expertise isn’t fitness but audacious confidence.

Which is why her video was met with backlash and prompted a piece in the New York Times this week asking, “Is Pilates Political?”

“There is a DIRECT correlation between a rise in conservatism (think 1950s housewife) and smaller bodies and liberal swings during the feminist waves in the 70s with more muscular frames,” she wrote in her half-baked caption; trying to, I guess, link conservatism to “extreme authoritarianism.”

Yet showing no correlation. No substance.

In was an encouraging sign, that her theory raised eyebrows, a nice departure from 2019 and 2020 when the trend in media was to indulge in performative atonement by racializing every nook of our society. Publications pumped out story after story saying hobbies and individual physical pursuits were rife with bigotry.

One of the many examples is the 2020 Runner’s World piece, “For BIPOC, Running—and Its Online Forums—Is Not a Refuge From Racial Discrimination.” There were think pieces about such ugly systemic racism in hiking, birding and skiing.

Google knitting and racism and you’ll be hit with pages of think pieces from 2019 about what Vox described as: “The Knitting community is reckoning with racism.”

In 2025 we’re more sober minded, and the push to racialize and politicize everything is met with laughter, not more examples. That’s a good thing.

Not every roll up in the Pilates studio is a pledge to uphold a dark ideology.

In the Times piece Monaco-Vavrick explained that her beef was with marketing of Pilates and how it was pushed online with — gasp — lean white women.

She didn’t like its “coded” methods telling women they needed to take up less space.

Don’t get buff, ladies. She describes it using progressive buzzwords like “whiteness,” “exclusionary” and “thinness.”

Instead of getting swole, women were being “pushed toward just taking a Pilates class and getting a smoothie afterward,” she said.

“What does it say about our culture that these are the things being pushed,” asked the influencer.

Oh, the tyranny of Pilates and smoothies…

It says that life here is pretty damn good — and we likely have too much time on our hands.

Or maybe, just maybe, after years of ‘fatness as fitness’ being pushed in the media and in academia, culture is swinging back to a common sense approach to health.

People don’t want to look like obese slobs. And many women, regardless of race, class and religion, want the strength and sinewy arms that come with a Pilates practice.

But these faux scholarly online proclamations plays into something I’ve noticed with a lot of Gen Zers on social media — and many interactions I’ve had in real life.

This generation was raised as digital natives in a very indulgent world that not only normalized unsolicited online opinions but monetizes them.

It’s produced a ridiculous obsession with overanalyzing everything from exercise, dating, sex and, yes, smoothies. Useless hashtags are slapped on these overwrought explanations and dubious hot takes are sent out into the world in the hopes of achieving virality.

Most of the time, it’s imbuing deeper meaning where there isn’t one.

And let’s be honest: our online world has been customized for our demographic and our interests. Many slurp up whatever slop the algorithm feeds us without looking outside of the echo chamber. And frankly, it delivers a myopic view.

For instance, as a middle-aged woman who should be worried about bone density, my Instagram feed features Pilates but it is dominated by chicks weight training, the activity Monaco-Vavrick ostensibly says the authoritarians don’t want women to see.

In fact, if another video about weighted vests across my feed, I’m gonna toss mine out my back door, not find some tenuous link between their popularity and the military industrial complex.

Before social media removed useful gatekeepers, one was expected to have some bit of life experience to weave together a great think piece and thank god for that. Cultural discourse benefited.

But with social media, everyone is a scholar, an ‘influencer’, but mostly shoveling whatever derivative drivel they heard on another TikTok video.

And there’s loads of younger folks — and yes people my age as well — too busy online analyzing life, instead of simply just getting out and living it.

So, my advice: If you can afford a Pilates reformer class, take it. Run or lift weights. Just don’t serve us up with a doctoral dissertation about it all.