For Women, Is Exercise Power?
Of all the cult workout products that have dominated the American imagination over the past few decades, the one I least expected to be rooted in feminist protest was the ThighMaster. Consider this TV spot from 1991: “Great legs,” a male voice opines as a pair of disembodied, high-heeled gams stroll onto the screen. “How’d you get ’em?” The legs are revealed to belong to the TV actor Suzanne Somers, who explains to the camera that after doing aerobics “until I dropped,” she finally found an easier way to “squeeze, squeeze your way to shapely hips and thighs.” Male TV hosts mocked the ThighMaster relentlessly (Jay Leno used one to juice an orange on The Tonight Show); consumers—mostly women—bought millions of them anyway, sold on Somers’s cheerful closing pitch: “We may not have been born with great legs, but now we can look like we were.”
The ThighMaster was one of the defining, Somers that would have brought her pay up to what her co-star John Ritter was making. ABC refused, shrank her role down to infrequent cameos, and then fired her altogether. After a decade spent in the TV wilderness, the ThighMaster was Somers’s ticket to financial autonomy—a home-fitness empire predicated on the troubling idea that women’s bodies could be bought and built, that “problem areas” could be conquered one workout product at a time, that fat could be squeezed, , into submission.
