Peloton advert a metaphor for pressure on middle-class women

Due to the ongoing insanity that is the internet, Peloton lost a billion dollars because it ran an advertisement that offended people. In the advert, a stunningly beautiful woman comes downstairs on Christmas morning, holding an equally beautiful little girl by the hand.

Her handsome husband has bought her a Peloton exercise bike and she appears to spend the next year spinning on it, taking endless video selfies. She shows a highlights reel to her husband the following Christmas, expressing her undying gratitude to him. The child never features again.

The bike costs more than €2,000 and the internet reacted as if the husband had bought her a giant “I speak your weight” scales and forced her to stand on it for a year.

I thought the bike was a perfect metaphor instead for the hamster wheel that so many modern middle-class women spin on. The look of faint terror on the face of Monica Ruiz, the actor who plays the wife, mirrors the kind of pulverising pressure so many women feel.

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Ruiz comments on how smooth the gin is. She then downs it in one swallow

Nothing but perfection is good enough – perfect child, perfect home, perfect cook, perfect career, perfect body, perfect relationship. It is utterly exhausting.

In a glorious piece of opportunism, the actor Ryan Reynolds (who has a sideline in gin) got Monica Ruiz to film a commercial where she is sitting at a bar counter between two girlfriends, looking utterly drained. The two friends are communicating their concern to each other via eyebrows and grimaces. Ruiz comments on how smooth the gin is. She then downs it in one swallow.

“This is going to be a fun night,” says one of the friends and pushes her own barely touched glass into Ruiz’s hand, who accepts it gratefully.

It’s funny, clever and kind of chilling. While gin may be the current tipple of choice, lots of women cope with relentless pressure by living for wine o’clock. Women deal with a punishing life by developing a punished liver.

And of course, it is not just wealthy middle-class Americans who are feeling pressure. Many far from wealthy women would love to have the time to themselves to spin on a madly expensive exercise bike. But if they had two grand they would probably be spending it on their clapped-out car or be thanking the gods that they did not have to worry about creche fees for a while.

This is exercise as religion ... the instructor is on a sanctuary-like raised podium surrounded by candles

The problem is not Peloton husband, really. The problem is that it is really, really hard to be a 21st century woman.

Author David Zahl, in his book Seculosity, describes a meme where cartoon villain Cruella de Vil is driving at speed, clutching the steering wheel and looking crazed with her bloodshot eyes and waving hair. The image is captioned: "Me trying to excel in my career, maintain a social life, drink enough water, exercise, text everyone back, stay sane, survive and be happy.'

The woman in the Peloton advert is so insecure, she is wide eyed with delight when the spin coach on the screen between her handlebars calls out her name.

Interestingly Peloton’s main rivals are called SoulCycle, which instead of exercise at home specialise in packing people into a dimly lit studio where music pounds and coaches yell inspirational slogans. This is exercise as religion. In some studios, the instructor is on a sanctuary-like raised podium surrounded by candles.

It fits well with Zahl’s thesis in Seculosity: that even though what he calls capital-R religion is in decline, replacement religion is booming. Just as SoulCycle’s name and ambience is no accident, many aspects of our lives have taken on an almost religious fervour, except that the object of worship is not God but a frantic desire to manage guilt and to feel “enoughness”. (Hence security – secular objects of worship.) As Zahl says, modern human beings are never out of church.

Even meditation has become something to be tracked, measured and posted online

For example, he comments wryly that a quick visit to the baby department on Amazon proves that no one ever went broke catering to parental anxiety. This anxiety often translates to adherence to one of the different churches of parenting, each with their own orthodoxies and loaded with judgment for the heretics.

Similarly, food has become a signal of righteousness. The very term “clean eating” has religious overtones. Even meditation has become something to be tracked, measured and posted online, not exactly a Buddhist approach. Meditation has become a form of self-medication that enables you relax just enough to allow you not to question why you are so insanely frazzled in the first place.

Not that Zahl lets more conventional religion off the hook. He derides what he calls Jesusland religion, describing it as a form of bastardised Christianity that is as exhausting and competitive as its secular counterparts. The only difference is that the competitiveness lies in literally being holier than thou.

For Zahl, who is an Episcopalian, the solution to Peloton wife’s woes would probably be to step away from the exercise bike, put down the gin, and spend some time in silence relaxing and contemplating that perfection is unobtainable but grace is abundant.

Merry Christmas!