The New Creativity: Our Spectacular Ass Pants

Warning: Asses Ahead

A few days ago while I was watching one of my police procedurals, I was greeted by a new Adidas commercial. I know what most of these commercials are like, so my multitasking skills reigned supreme: I maintained my steady ascent into the “Emerald League” of Candy Crush Jelly and yearned for the days of non-cartoonish serial killers and Elliot Stabler’s head-busting on Law & Order: SVU.

Anyway.

Initially, I barely took note of it. Like most advertisements, it wasn’t quite clear what exactly Adidas’s new and exciting shoe or “wicking” garment was. But as is also the case in the business of hawking athletic accoutrements, exercise programs, and “athleisure” wear, these advertisements are not selling products but a lifestyle. Take this ad for Peloton — an at-home spin class — where you get to live in a million-dollar home with your sleek Ass Pants, have an edgy pink-haired instructor “not go easy on you,” ride with “your friend in another city,” make your life better for your family (?), and then drink orange juice with the lot of them:

However, Adidas managed to take me aback. I wasn’t quite expecting this:

This commercial is part of Adidas’s new “Unleashing Your Creativity” campaign, and blogs are wasting no time lauding its use of “influential” female athletes… and Karlie Kloss, who last I checked is a former Victoria’s Secret Angel who made headlines for cutting her hair in 2013. We see these inspiring women spritzed with sweaty-gleamy-spray, their hair is tied in perfectly imperfect ponytails, and they kick heavy bags and sometimes do flips. This is all par for the course when it comes to athletics commercials. They’re “just doing it,” to call up an old Nike slogan, and some of them are professional athletes, so good for them for being hard-working and all that. I have great respect for actual sports and sporting skills. It is no secret, either, that it is difficult for women to break into martial arts — and when they do, it’s best if they’re “hot” — or women of color into sports like tennis.

But what troubles me about the Adidas commercial is that it isn’t really about sports. I don’t think it’s all that controversial to venture that Ass Pants — perhaps with the exception of the Ass Apotheosis AKA absurd beach volleyball uniforms — don’t have much to do with athletic performance in soccer, track and field, or boxing. Despite its depiction of some female athletes and other “powerful” supermodels, this commercial is about how wearing Ass Pants, doing backflips, and thumping heavy ropes are what now count as “creative.” Then again, filtering, or #nofiltering, one’s Instagram photos is also considered creative. And we’d be kidding ourselves if this Adidas ad weren’t actually driving at something other than, say, Gatorade’s rather charming Rio Olympics commercial that features Usain Bolt (track), Serena Williams (tennis), April Ross (beach volleyball), and Paul George (basketball) working out as their childhood selves remind of them of the joys of hard work, play, and sports themselves.

Again, the Gatorade commercial has absolutely nothing to do with what this Adidas campaign is pushing: “Unleashing your creativity” is meant to be “relatable” to the millions of women who organize their social (media) and self-worth around SoulCycle, Barre, CrossFit, trampoline bouncing (not kidding), or various bootcamps, and, lest we forget, yoga, although the last of these activities has the added appeal of allowing white liberals to flagellate themselves for paying hundreds of dollars to “culturally appropriate” a religious practice. (I’d add some links to this last one, but just Google “yoga cultural appropriation.” Or don’t. You do you.) And the “creative” culture of publicizing one’s workouts, showing “body transformations” on Reddit, obsessing over diet restrictions, and otherwise fetishizing bodies is not restricted to women. From an early age, men are also subject to trafficking between the macho need to get “ripped” and the tedious, faux-spiritual narcissism that masquerades as “health.”

But I’d like to focus mostly on female athletic creativity, since that’s apparently where the money is for companies like Adidas. Being creative starts with going to the gym so that you can take the best Fitspo Belfie (FYI: a “Belfie” is NSFW).

Or, as I’ve seen in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, you can sit around in your Ass Pants with your $300 stroller and sip a mimosa at brunch with your gal pals to compare the benefits of spirulina versus acai berries when making the morning shake that you read Jennifer Aniston’s nutritionist recommends.

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The advent of athleisure is not big news. One need only turn on the TV, use a computer, or leave the house to see that business is booming. Ass Pants are not only de rigueur for young and affluent women, but all other women (regardless of age, shape, size, ethnicity) who want to be sexy, fit, empowered — and to attain the semblance of youth and affluence. Bodies, after all, are the new markers of socioeconomic status. Your body broadcasts your ability to hire a personal trainer or join a gym (to harness your sexy-strong-beautiful-on-the-inside selfhood, of course); it signifies the amount of “free time” you make for yourself in the midst of your Second Shift Modern Woman schedule; and it showcases your mindful dedication to self-improvement, pursuing immortality, and, amusingly enough, YOLOing.

So what, you may ask? Well, it’s fascinating to me how rapidly the culture of bourgeois Spectacle-fitness has become normalized. Prior to 2015, articles about cultish fitness groups like CrossFit peppered newspapers from the New York Times to Houstonia Magazine. “Box” owners and other CrossFit instructors found themselves quelling fears of rhabdomyolysis and ruptured tendons, while dedicated gym members attended paleo-friendly mixers where they eyed each other’s callouses and “monkey butts” to determine their commitment to the lifestyle. Nowadays, though, whether a female celebrity or a “relatable” woman, she “takes control of [her] life” through juice (or colon) cleanses, aerobic dancing with tiny pink weights, mud-running, ultra-marathons, or hot yoga. “Weight loss journeys” are now “becoming a badass” journeys. More importantly, it is highly unusual not to feature at least some kind of image of working out, collecting a medal, or “results” on one’s social media page or any number of the online forums dedicated to weight loss, bulking, lifting, CrossFitting — you name it. Failing that (or in tandem), one must always tell the world of having achieved a PR (personal record), or, if exercising “just for you,” making gleeful endorphin-laden proclamations about the hereto untapped Joys of Body Celebration.

These are the exulted cries of people who have experienced life-changing epiphanies, and the rhetoric behind the holy power of getting ripped could not be bested by even the most mealy-mouthed advertising sloganeers. They are variations on the same theme: “I now think about what my body could do instead of how it looks!”“I am just so grateful to be in tune with my body’s needs now.” “I was always strong and beautiful — now I just feel that way!” Alternatively, you can also talk about how “tough” that workout was; you’re quite the survivor if you make it through all those burpees and sprints back and forth in the studio. You could even fantasize about being on The Walking Dead, whose cast members I am convinced somehow found a treasure trove of John Varvatos leather jackets while doing their zombie-killing workouts. And, best of all, you can wear those Ass Pants with pride, no doubt.

So thanks to social media, Ass Pants and all that they entail are here to stay. And what they entail is an extraordinary metaphor not for empowerment, feminism, or even hyper-sexuality. Ass Pants are symptomatic of what Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle” way back in 1967: they are a commodity that breeds the false consciousness of social unification; a garment that must be rendered in detached images where even “the deceivers are deceived”; the Pants of a lifestyle that eradicates privacy and underscores our estrangement, where sculpted asses are synecdoches for people — where “Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at.”

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I don’t know what else to call Ass Pants other than Ass Pants. I am aware that they come in many guises and are sold under various euphemisms. But whenever I’ve uttered the phrase “Ass Pants” to a friend or even an acquaintance, since I lack basic social skills, they all know what I mean. They all chuckle, sometimes nervously, since Ass Sculpting is a well-respected hobby. They, like you, all know about Lululemon, and you all know about how satisfying it was to see its guru CEO be ousted as you read the story wearing a different brand of Ass Pants. You all know how “yoga pants” are the grandmothers of them all. You’ve all heard how asses are the new breasts. Many of you surely read the other story about Lululemon, where they made an amusing foray into menswear, and where, despite their many meetings where employees sit cross-legged and ass-storm, they’ve found that Ass Pants For Men don’t quite work, even though these market-targeted gentlemen are very committed to squats and deadlifts. So if you gaze into the window of Lululemon’s 5th Avenue location, you might be (un)surprised to see that men’s activewear looks as if it’s been stolen from REI or Columbia. In other words, the mannequins are wearing clothes rather than the lycra-empowerment-wear so desperately needed by women in order to do creative weightlifting and to attack those simulated hills in a strobe-lit spinning class.

In the interest of full disclosure, I own some Ass Pants myself. I also exercise, albeit without the help of Instagram or Facebook. I, too, wish to wick away sweat from my groin and avoid whatever chafing issue justifies Ass Pantsery. But when I wear my Ass Pants, I accept that they are mostly designed to be pants that feature my ass. Sports bras flatten out my already flat chest. Tank tops drape in such a way as to make me even more androgynous. My pirate bandana conceals my hair and frightens away those who use the gym as a dating service. But my Ass Pants assert my powerful, elliptical, third-wave feminist declaration of femininity that assimilates myself into FitSpo “culture” but doesn’t make me less of a feminist. Like Zooey Deschanel, I could even wear “a fucking Peter Pan collar” with my Ass Pants if I wanted to. Don’t judge me: that’s my job. Step aside, uncreative person in the grocery-store line buying Banquet potpies. I have a Power Ass fueled by kale and Greek yogurt with which I will render a creative masterpiece when I practice my roundhouse kicks and take a selfie of my six-pack. (I do not have a six-pack, but I do have Adobe Photoshop.)

My Ass Pants are black and boring, though, and sometimes I don’t bother to shave my legs between the knee and shin. I view them as functional, mostly because I can no longer find exercise pants that are not sweats or running shorts. And due to my fear of flesh-eating bacteria, I don’t want to touch any surface in the gym if I can help it. Accordingly, my Ass Pants are rather pedestrian compared to the more fashionable versions.

Ass Pants that are not black and boring, or that at least have a little stripe on the side:

Ass Pants with mesh panels on the thighs.

Ass Pants that look like they were designed by Jackson Pollock.

Ass Pants that the CrossFit store calls “The New Shorty Short,” featuring a woman doing a handstand in an off-white pair that for some reason hasn’t gotten as much flak as Lululemon’s transparent Ass Pants:

Other tiny shorts that seem altogether too susceptible to some kind of spill.

Ass Pants that are sometimes covered in chalk from weightlifting and hence creating your power to be hardcore, etc.

More demure and full-length brunching Ass Pants:

“Be-you-tiful” tanks and yoga/“everyday” Ass Pants for children in the Athleta catalog (because Mommies are, like, totally showing their daughters how to be strong women).

And, if I dare include a recent anecdotal observation, Ass Pants that are uniforms for miserable-looking preschool teachers. Sorry, I didn’t photograph those poor women. Perhaps the preschool wants the toddlers to think that their chaperones are creative like their Mommies.

These beleaguered young women are the exception, though. Ass Pants are meant to tantalize others as they help you-do-you. Ass Pants allow you to fit in with the rest of your exercise class. Ass Pants prove that you can be a Hot Mom. Ass Pants get you likes and retweets on social media as well as comments that are sexually aggressive: comments that frighten and excite your vanity all at once, and, best of all, provide fodder to complain about objectification over your mimosas. Those gazing trolls and fans may look, they may admire, they may desire, but your barely concealed bodies are not meant for them: they are meant to wield social and narcissistic power. They are Spectacular.