I'm reading the "Ask a Cool Person" column at New York Magazine, and I see "100-Teen Poll: What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021? We surveyed high schoolers around the country. Here, 19 takeaways about how teens shop." After seeing the cool type of "top" is a corset and something about comfortable sweatpants and favorite "loungewear" brands I get to:
4) The only workout item mentioned multiple times was the weighted Hula-Hoop.
A respondent named Aida bought this Hula-Hoop after seeing it on TikTok. “I like it because it’s not an intense workout and instead it’s a more relaxed one you do for a long period of time,” she says. “I watch TV while I do it sometimes.” Just don’t expect to magically get a waist like the girl in the video, Aida says: “Definitely not the realistic outcome of hula-hooping for, like, 30 mins a day.” Plus, she added, TikToks like that one “are quite triggering,” and the platform is “very toxic when it comes to body positivity.”
The hula hoop is a workout item?! I was a kid in the late 1950s, when the hula hoop became a big fad in the United States. I had a hula hoop, and I was pretty good at it.* It was all for fun — fun and some thinking about Hawaii, which was about to come in as a state (and my young head envisioned "coming into the United States" as the islands floating steadily toward California and about to connect).
No one talked about "working out" back then, and certainly no one — no one anywhere around me — regarded the hula hoop as an exercise device. It was play and a display of skill that was amusing to watch, because it was like doing the hula, which was not treated with politically correct cultural respect in those days, but seen as an entertaining dance, like the twist, that entailed hip wiggling with accompanying arm movements.
And, of course, no one talked about "triggering" and being "toxic" or "body positivity" back then. Here's this toy that was perfectly fun for young people in the days when Baby Boomers were kids, and now it's part of a grim agglomeration of everything but fun, where you have to work on your body, worry about it, and also worry about worrying about it. Did you watch the linked TikTok video? It's all about tape-measuring your waist over and over and earnestly attempting to reduce the number by hula hooping.
I know I'm old, and I'm even giving this post my tag "these kids today," so I'm aware that I'm speaking like a stereotypical old person, but what are we doing to our culture? The NY Magazine column purports to represent coolness, but it's only finding out what teenagers are buying and assuming that things going on with teenagers are cool. I wish they were!
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* If you told me Wikipedia's photograph — by George Garrigues, at the top of its article "Hula hoop" — is in fact a photograph of me, I could not with 100% certainty say that it is not:
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5 comments:
Ozymandias writes:
"Is there “cool” anymore? “Cool” once was something that came gradually, in layers, from myriad, mostly small, choices, inflected by personality, reflected by attitude, a way of being. The process was relaxed—the “cool” of Sinatra, Miles Davis, Brando, Dexter Gordon. Cool could even be somewhat dorky, a la the young Bill Evans with his Brylcream hair and erudite glasses.
"As teens, the Boomer (sad to say) falsified “cool,” making it largely a by-product of consumerism. Now, as the article reflects, “cool” is utterly bound up with shopping—the OCD acquisition of cult objects, fetishes, and talismanic accessories, displayed with the particularistic overkill of a Russian gangster’s tattoos. And, as it has with virtually everything, the internet has turbocharged the turnover and pursuit of “cool stuff,” adding hazards and “Go to Jail” cards of “triggering,” “body positivity,” and innumerable other taboo disqualifiers.
"Pity the Millennials and Zs, clambering over one another on a sad snark hunt. Not cool.
"Oh, and: “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”"
Eric J. writes:
"The Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel had a scene with a 1950s Hula-Hoop-based exercise class.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77mPaq2odM8
"I make no comment on whether or not it is anachronistic."
George writes: "The magnificent wordless Hula-Hoop scene in the Coen Brothers movie "The Hudsucker Proxy" gives a painless lesson in economics and pricing. Accompaniment by Aram Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance." There's an equally brilliant sequence immediately prior to this in which the idiot CEO Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) names the thing, and the camera follows the product's progress from its naming through manufacturing and pricing."
K writes:
"What else will they bring back? They have motorized "scooters" nowwhich I would definitely have liked back then and they have electric bikes which I would like right now. (And I would like Harley decals to put on it.) We used to go camping with an amount of gear that would now be almost minimalist because we shared so much - one tent for all (when our parents weren't there), knapsacks smaller than many book knapsacks I see these days, sleeping bags, one Scout cooking set, plates/knives forks for all, a box of matches, a hatchet, a bag of groceries, our regular clothes and one change, one soap/toothpaste for all, toothbrushes. The boys had jack knives. As a girl I got to have toilet paper. No electronics except one flashlight. We spent all our time cooking or swimming or scouting trails for bear tracks. I think now kids have to go to Bound Upward or something like that and be coached. They acquire a really admirable poise and we, well, I can only say we did have fun, for what that's worth."
maggieb writs:
"I too had an early 60s hula hoop. My girlfriends and I hooped to Twist and Shout for fun not fitness.
"Yet fitness was on our minds because of the grueling
https://www.vox.com/2015/4/24/8489501/presidential-fitness-test
"The bane of my grade school existence."
I say:
Yes, I remember that. We were forced to take gym, but never taught how to improve our fitness, only subjected to JFK's test once (twice?) a year to humiliate us as the gym teachers sneered.
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