{"id":363293,"date":"2026-04-04T10:16:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T10:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/363293\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T10:16:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T10:16:19","slug":"why-wanting-a-pilates-woman-may-not-be-a-good-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/363293\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Wanting a Pilates Woman May Not Be a Good Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pilates is having a moment<\/a>. According to Women\u2019s Health<\/a>, Pilates has seen the largest uptick in its popularity within the last five years, where participation has grown from 9.2 million people to 12.9 million. It\u2019s also become one of the trendiest workouts you can engage in on social media.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a single man who\u2019s aware of this boom in the slightest, you might find yourself becoming more interested in a woman who does Pilates. It\u2019s certainly a phenomenon some women are experiencing firsthand, but the discourse surrounding it is a little darker than you might think. And it all goes back to the manosphere, an umbrella term for an array of online communities that promote masculinity through misogynistic and anti-feminist discourse. Think of influential men who\u2019ve experienced recent popularity, like Andrew Tate<\/a> or \u201cClavicular\u201d<\/a> (Branden Peters), who\u2019ve spewed rhetoric on social media to other young men.<\/p>\n

For example: A few months ago, I wrote about a moment between a couple on the reality show Love Is Blind<\/a> that went immensely viral online. A couple who initially had a lot of promise ended up in turmoil when contestant Chris told his partner Jessica that she doesn\u2019t have the body he\u2019s \u201cused to\u201d and was looking for someone who does Pilates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Gen
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

More recently, an episode of the hit podcast \u201cCall Her Daddy\u201d brought up a similar topic: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Jessi Draper reveals her soon-to-be ex-husband also had multiple conversations with her regarding a desire for her to do Pilates more. It sparked a viral post on X asking if the preference for women who do Pilates is driven by the manosphere.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get one thing immediately clear: Maybe you\u2019re a man who wants to date a woman who works out regularly. There\u2019s nothing wrong with having that particular preference. But there is a stark difference. A recent report from The 19th News<\/a> unveils that, yes, there are certainly ties to \u201cmanosphere\u201d men desiring women who do Pilates, and that\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

Unless you are a personal trainer who\u2019s being paid to share this kind of information with a female client, telling a woman, no matter how well you know her, what workout you think they should be doing is controlling and weird.\u00a0This doesn\u2019t apply if you have a partner who simply enjoys doing Pilates for their own personal reasons and you don\u2019t have weirdly strong feelings about it. It\u2019s popular for a reason!\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But The 19th raises an image of the \u201cPilates girl\u201d that many of these male manosphere influencers promote: \u201cA woman who engages in what they see as a feminine form of exercise, one that doesn\u2019t result in bulky muscles. The Pilates girl doesn\u2019t go to the gym where she might encounter other men. (They might look at her! She might look at them!) Instead, she opts for 50-minute classes that are assumed to be filled with other white, lithe women.\u201d (The Pilates community has deeper controversy about who it often caters to<\/a>, including race, body types, social class and even political values.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The desire here is rooted in control and upholding a certain image. Why date a girl who lifts heavy weights and wears skin-tight clothes in a gym packed with \u2014 gasp! \u2014 other men when you could be with the Pilates girl? And it\u2019s arguably better than going to the gym because men go there, and no man in the history of time has ever taken a Pilates class, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the article also points out, social media often connects someone who does Pilates with a softer and slower aesthetic. To these men, their dream girl may opt for a quiet Friday night so they can get up and go to Pilates in the morning. They might have a \u201cclean\u201d or \u201cwholesome\u201d lifestyle. (I\u2019m sure no one has ever gone to a morning Pilates class hungover or even still drunk with their makeup on from the night before.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

These lifestyle characteristics very easily mesh into ideals that many manosphere-centered men<\/a> say they desire in a wife, and it\u2019s all rather misogynistic: submissive, attractive and skinny by societal standards, willing to stay at home (maybe embracing a trad-wife lifestyle), and very feminine.\u00a0But you can\u2019t simply equate a woman who\u2019s interested in Pilates with these other notions. The truth is that anyone can do Pilates, even people who, in a social media and manosphere lens, don\u2019t \u201clook\u201d like they should or could.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s mentioned in the article from The 19th that \u201cthe manosphere has a \u2018rigid conceptualization of what a woman should be,\u2019\u201d so really, this kind of generalization makes sense. What it really comes down to is the men who want their \u201cPilates girl.\u201d In these instances, \u201cPilates\u201d doesn\u2019t just mean Pilates. It means something a little more disturbing.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMeet your guide<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Joanna<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tJoanna Sommer<\/p>\n

Joanna Sommer is an editorial assistant at InsideHook. She graduated from James Madison University, where she studied journalism and media arts, and she attended the Columbia Publishing Course upon graduating in 2022. Joanna joined the InsideHook team as an editorial fellow in 2023 and covers a range of things from the likes of drinks, food, entertainment, internet culture, style, wellness\u2026<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tMore from Joanna Sommer \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMore Like This<\/p>\n

The Charge will help you move better, think clearer and stay in the game longer. Subscribe to our wellness newsletter<\/a> today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pilates is having a moment. According to Women\u2019s Health, Pilates has seen the largest uptick in its popularity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[565,134,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-363293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}