Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 117

Are We Having Fun Yet? 113 sounds strange, consider the typical case of Raymond H- -, a major player in Stuart Ewen’s superb cultural study, A ll C onsum ing Images: Raymond H— has been working on his body for the past three years, ever since he got his last promotion. He is hoping to achieve the body he always wa nted.. .If the body ideal he seeks is lean, devoid of fatty tissue, it is also hard. ‘Soft flesh,’ once a standard phrase in the American erotic lexicon, is now—within the competitive, upscale world he inhabits—a sign of failure or sloth. Raymond H— spends his work days as an investment firm middle-manager staring glassy-eyed at a computer monitor. Like innumerable other inhabitants of twenty-first century cyberspace Raymond feels out of touch with his body. So what does he do? In his leisure time he go es back to work. Raymond’s work out consists of multiple exercises on Nautilus machines—’’twelve stations in all,” Ewen informs us. Beginning with the hip abduction machine, Raymond moves on to the compound leg machine, then the leg curl machine, then the pullover/torso arm machine, then the double chest machine, then the four-way neck machine, and so on. N o pain, no gain. In a grotesque postmodern parody of the stations of the Cross, Raymond’s “steps” become progressively more difficult until, exhausted, sweaty, and sore at the end of the workout he feels better about himself than he did at the beginning. Like that of a medieval flagellant, Raymond’s ultimate goal is self-improvement through self-denial. But unlike the medieval flagellant, Raymond has internalized the otherness of penance. A thinly-disguised form of narcissism, Raymond’s “penance” is all about self-aggrandizement. There’s a Russian word that describes what Raymond is actually up to: nadry V, loosely translated as “a pleasurable self-hurt.” N a dry V shouldn’t be confused with masochism, or the purposeful suffering of pain for sexual gratification. As opposed to masochism, n a d i y 'v is a power trip. Raymond hopes his hardbody image will give him a well-toned leg up on his fellows at work and help him to achieve further promotions in order to succeed in the New York City rat race. Men and women have always been willing to suffer, to offer themselves up for sacrifice in the service of a spiritual ideal. In traditional Christian theology work itself has served as a medium or catalyst for such self-sacrifice. Hence the traditional folk concept of work as a daily crucifixion. Spiritual ideals, as we know, are notoriously hard to come by in a post-Enlightenment era. And yet, corrupted as they are, such ideals manage to hang on—in the contemporary professional athlete’s pride in “playing through pain,” for instance. If Raymond H------ qualifies as the