In February, I received the best compliment of my adult life.
There I was, strapped into a Reformer Pilates machine, muscles trembling as I… actually, I have no memory of how my body was contorting in that particular moment. The only thing I remember is what the teacher, who had sidled up next to me, whispered under her breath: “Are you an instructor?” I left the studio, calves screaming and walking on air.
Up until very recently, this anecdote would not have been a humble brag. In fact, it was distributed across my group chats as an explicit, full-chested, look-how-fucking-strong-I-am brag. I had made it – in the sense that, after six years of dedication, my abs were now visible to a keen-eyed pro, if not in a bikini.
The promises of the Pilates Princesses you see online had clearly embedded themselves in my psyche. I felt in control and, if I’m being honest, a little superior. What, you can’t hold a teaser position? I used to be like you. Then I found discipline.
Insufferable, I know. But that’s not the worst thing a pilates devotee can be called these days. Now, confessing this kind of information publicly runs the risk of you being labelled a fascist.
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Over the past year, the exercise programme – invented more than 100 years ago by a German called Joseph Pilates – has gradually been co-opted by the far right as a faint dogwhistle, subtle enough to glide over the heads of passive observers, sexy enough to seduce women down the tradwife pipeline. It’s the kind of thing hustle-culture bros now casually drop into conversation.
“Pilates is the biggest green flag ever for a girl,” said influencer Christian Bonnier in a recent video. “If your girl goes to pilates, she’s probably staying in on the weekends so that she can get up early and go to a Solidcore or Bodyrok class.” (Let it be known that I still go out and often suffer a late class-cancellation fee the next morning.) “Every attractive, wifey-material girl goes to some form of pilates class,” he continued. Well, yuck.
This kind of rhetoric has seeped into reality TV, too. On Love Is Blind, contestant Chris Fusco unwittingly outed himself as a misogynist by saying that his usual type is a woman who “does pilates every day”. Over in Utah, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives cast member Jessi Draper revealed that her ex-husband had demanded she “start doing pilates every single day”.
These men don’t really want a life partner. They want a hot, obedient woman who will be home in time to airfry their chicken nuggets.
Men are not the sole force behind pilates’ slide towards the right, though. As the workout has surged in popularity – with businesses that use Reformer machines in particular experiencing 948% growth in the UK between 2024 and 2025 – so too has a certain ideal of the kind of person who does pilates. Ripped, obviously, but also wealthy enough to afford £200 Alo Yoga workout sets and go to 11am classes without getting fired from their 9-to-5.
The codified lifestyle – or aesthetic – is, for some, more affirming than the workout itself. Running parallel to a GLP-1-aided return to idolised thinness in mainstream media, it’s a brand of femininity that thrives on conformity, self-surveillance and virtue restriction. The easiest way to control women? Trick them into doing it themselves.
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It’s hard to say what Joseph Pilates himself would have made of all of this. The fabled founding story of the workout is intrinsically linked to the democratisation of fitness, thanks to the fact he developed the method – originally called “Contrology” – while imprisoned in an internment camp during the first world war. But he wasn’t shy of elitism. After moving to New York in the 1920s and opening his own studio, he quickly grew a clientele of celebrities and dancers, training everyone from George Balanchine and Martha Graham to Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier.
His students were instructed to wear uniforms and put great emphasis on precision and discipline. “One of the major results of Contrology is gaining the mastery of your mind over the complete control of your body,” he wrote in his 1945 book, Return to Life Through Contrology. “Practice your exercises diligently with the fixed and unalterable determination that you will permit nothing else to sway you from keeping faith with yourself.”
In the foreword to a later edition, written by the then-president of the North American Physical Fitness Institute, Frederick Rand Rogers, this language was further moralised. “Mortal perfection is achievable only through bodily perfections and therefore the development of physique to high levels of strength and beauty, under control of the mind,” wrote Rogers. “Also the maintenance of a superior standard of physical fitness is increasingly necessary to the maintenance of life and liberty in any complex civilisation. It is supremely so in times of social strife.”
What is life in 2026 if not a test to stay sane in the face of immense “social strife”? Reading the news weakens your hope; pilates strengthens your core, your mind, your sense of purpose.
Us pilates girls may be the ones getting it in the neck for finding solace in a vaguely authoritarian fitness regime, but nearly everyone’s searching for domination over their own bodies. Globally, the number of run clubs tripled between 2024 and 2025. Ten million more Britons than in 2022 have a gym membership. Hyrox, the indoor fitness racing competition, has multiplied its disciples from 650 to 650,000 in under a decade.
This is less a fascism problem than a two-pronged product of capitalism. We work out to optimise ourselves for the demands of modern life, but also to find agency within structures that deny us any kind of meaningful relief from those demands.
As one jacked-up TikTok bodybuilder put it: “I’ve been so incredibly alienated from all my labour, since the time I was born… I have to do my bodybuilding to do something that I give a fuck about.” It’s about self-actualisation, not wellness virtue signalling. “What could be more embodied, more visceral, more real than sculpting your own body?” Then he flexes his biceps: “I own the means of fucking production here.”
This mentality isn’t inherently fascist – nor is clocking in for a 7am pilates class before work. But it is incredibly useful for the far right.
When we’re already moulding ourselves around codes of self-improvement and individual responsibility, it’s not too much of a leap to start viewing fitness as an investment that leads to social superiority. Pilates doesn’t actually need to be political for that moral grey area to be exploited. Somewhere between your first class and 200th class, it’s easy to start feeling that you’re better than everybody else. You might even enjoy it.
Just remember: when a loud man tells you that’s your biggest green flag, he’s not admiring your mind-body connection. He thinks you’ll be easy to control.
Olive Pometsey is a freelance writer and editor whose credits include British Vogue, Elle and British GQ
