This post is brought to you by my almost-year anniversary of going to Planet Fitness. I know Planet Fitness is wicked, but I can’t afford a fancy gym and so far there have been no men in the lady’s room—we are not the kind of place that is fancy enough for that sort of thing. We are the backwater and the downtrodden, the sort of people who go to the gym for our mental health and not because anybody cares what we look like or how thin we are
I did the thirty-day shred—not recently, mind you, but many years ago after the birth of my sixth child when I thought it would be nice to get thin and be fit. I actually paid money—I kid you not—and did it for the thirty days. At the end of the month, I looked amazing. And, no lie, I was strong enough to swim out into the ocean when one of my kids was being swept away on a rip tide. When she climbed on my back and kept dunking me, the voice of Jillian—and the cries of us both to Jesus to save us—meant that I kept coming back up for air. As my feet were finally hitting the ground, a stranger—who disappeared into the dunes as soon as we were verifiably ok—lifted her off my shoulders and carried her to safety. Boy, did I learn my lesson—Don’t Work Out Or God Will Use Your Strength In Ways You Never Wanted To Imagine. It’s taken me at least ten years to even contemplate getting fit again.
And, you know, times change. I can’t live in a world where Jillian Michaels shouts at me from my tiny iPad screen, delivering health and fitness affirmations in her powerful voice in my general direction. I prefer the mediocrity of middle age to jumping jacks and trying to live my best life.
Now, like so many lemmings, Jillian Michaels has reached the end of her tether. This is the point in late-stage decadence where the progressives who created a perfect world for themselves look around and hate what they have made. They are Frankenstein, recoiling from their fancy-liberal-utopia Monster. They are the proverbial I-Didn’t-Leave-the-Left-the-Left-left-Me:
Seriously, watch the whole thing. And also, I’m so sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. You can’t embrace and preach all the stuff of social disintegration and then halt that social disintegration, suddenly, right when it is about to destroy everything. Why is this not obvious?
Sage Steel takes the bold and brash step of whispering the word “Evil.” Jillian, nonplussed, leaps in to explain that it’s just “insane.” It was just about freedom, see, about people having rights. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. But what happened was, it just went too far. She goes on to enumerate—again—the insanity.
Which, of course, I’m grateful that people are noticing. I mean, it is super unbelievable—and evil—that the doctor who brought to light what was going on regarding “gender-affirming care” is actually facing ten years worth of jail time. Of course everything is mad.
But just going back a couple of years to the time it wasn’t “mad” isn’t possible. The whole thing functions as a whole. There is an entire philosophical superstructure underneath a culture that suddenly finds reasons for pedophilia to be fine, that thinks its fine for a man to pretend to be a woman and bash a lot of actual women’s heads in. You can’t just slap a bandaid on it, or move to another state, and suddenly find that it’s all ok.
For this is a hard saying and worthy of full acceptance, that shoving equality as the basis of all human relationships down the gullet of every person is not going to be a good time. We aren’t equal. Young boys aren’t the same as grown men. Women can’t survive in workplaces where they have to pretend their biological realities don’t matter. And, worst of all, none of us are actually gods—we want to be, but we fall so uncomfortably short.
Jillian Michaels ought to reconsider all her assumptions about the universe. She might think she’s “equal,” but, as she points out herself, she is at the tip top of the social hierarchy—she is a lesbian, she’s a person of color, she is fit, she is beautiful, she is rich, and she has been vouchsafed the spiritual standing to yell at all fat people about the potentiality of their flourishing.
Read my lips—no one is equal. Jillian Michaels doesn’t enjoy “equality,” she enjoys intersectional privilege. It might look like the same thing, but it isn’t. She isn’t the beneficiary of justice. She is part of a world that has always been and always will be unequal. Except that, for a hundred years, abstract conceptions of social equity have redistributed the actual social standing of women to men.*
Imagine a comfortable and happy society where all the people have different kinds of work and relate to each other in all kinds of ways. The babies are bounced on the knees of their mothers and grandmothers, the old reminisce in the presence of the young, the rich discharge their duty and care for the poor, the men work to protect the vulnerable, the preacher stands up on Sunday and delivers a sermon about how God created the universe and stuff like that. It’s not hard to imagine because intuitively, it is the grain of humanity. The high and the low, the rich and the poor, the weak and the strong, the old and the young, the man and the woman are able to figure it out together. Justice is tempered by mercy, enthusiasm by duty, and evil by goodness. But then some lying liar who lies—and there were a bunch of them, actually, who shaped the philosophical underpinnings of this present moment—said, in effect, we’re all equal.
And so Jillian Michaels, and all her compatriots, are taking to their podcasts and rushing to find new places to live. But oh sweet child, if you’re going to move, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote—that’s all I’m saying. It’s For The Children.
*See Erika Bachiochi’s Women’s Rights for a thorough and careful reckoning of the matter.
"This is the point in late-stage decadence where the progressives who created a perfect world for themselves look around and hate what they have made."
Thank you Sage Steele for clearly naming "evil" for what it is. Watching Steele listen and allow Micheals to pontificate with shock and awe about the very liberal world she helped create is a master class in apologetics. Michaels astonished comments surely echo those throughout history when a self-worshipping godless culture implodes on itself. The walls are crumbling.
She may check off a great number of intersectional categories, but to all appearances she's an upper-class, wealthy white woman who can express herself well. However, she couldn't see the trajectory of her ideas and now she is horrified when they appear. Her assumptions about certain good things are being challenged - and she can't see that the ideas behind the changes she wanted are the reasons why 24-year-old homosexual men are allowed to sleep with pubescent teen boys, to her horror.