Can we be on the left and go to the room?

A few months ago, I ventured into what the bodybuilders call him “big men land”, that is to say the space, in the sports halls, devoted to the queen discipline of bodybuilding: the bench press. For those who can’t see, it’s from there that noises of metal and suffering, “klongs”, “ahhhs” and “putain-my-back” come out. Steeped in prejudice, I expected conversations relatively far removed from the great contemporary debates. It was quite the opposite: the first two people I met were immersed in a sharp political discussion on the authoritarian excesses of Macronism; the next two evoked the epistemological limits of an article published in the “Journal of Nutritional Science”.

A hundred astonishments of this type run through Guillaume Vallet’s book, “La Fabrique du muscle”, published by L’échappée. This sociologist, initially a specialist in Switzerland and the currency (like what), describes a fact of society that has become major: it is estimated, in France, at seven million the number of people who are members of sports halls. The pandemic has only temporarily slowed down the opening of new structures, whether rooms low-cost or some boxes of cross fit. Admittedly, many people, after registering on a whim, lose the desire to go pull or push on machines (it is dark early in January), but all the same, there is a phenomenon interesting to observe.

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