It Happened To Me: My Addiction Lured Me Into Inadvertently Supporting MAGA - And Then I Couldn't Get Myself Out
My sick secret was not only my exercise addiction. It was how that sucked me in to support the GOP - financially and otherwise - and then not be able to stop. Can you see my side?
Hello Sassiest people!
I'm making the featured story free to everyone AGAIN today, partly because I'm excited about all the new readers who just found us and haven't paid (yet!)*. I am truly so grateful that you are allowing me to send you these stories, regardless of your subscription type.* Thank you!*
I'll be back next newsletter with more meaningful material from me and I'm curious which topic you prefer - or if you prefer neither or both:
My behind-the-scenes history with America's Next Top Model. As I‘ve mentioned, one of my Jane magazine editors and favorite people in the world, Eric, was right up on that ANTM judging dais between Janice and Tyra when we worked with them as the publication partner for Cycle 2. He turned down talking to “E” for their recent series (because he is much classier than me), but he of course tells me and will tell you everything. As will I (big surprise).
My history with JFK Junior, who I knew thatmuch in high school and again when he was living in NYC pre- and post-meeting Carolyn.
“Neither, Jane” is a perfectly valid response. It's weird when a topic is being discussed so widely that you have a connection to and hard to know whether to tell your little side or not. You don't want to be the “it's all about me” person at the table. On a related note, you definitely don't ever want to be the person who, the moment someone dies, it’s as though you were the New York Times obituary department with their farewell piece ready to publish, racing to be first to post an IG picture of you with that person. Often I have noted that it’s also a picture where the subject doesn’t particularly look great, but who cares, I guess, they’re dead and You Knew Them. I do appreciate how far my old friend E Jean Carroll takes this trend; the moment she finds out someone has died, she just blasts out an email with their first name in all caps followed by a lot of exclamation points as the subject line. Why be subtle about what everyone is doing anyway? I love her.
At the same time, you don’t want to withhold any stories your friends might find interesting. So let me know in the comments what you want.
And let me know what you think of Jenn’s piece today there too. I want to talk to her more about her story because it was understandably difficult for her to write and because I think what she covers is part of an increasing dilemma for so many people. And I know she wants to hear from and talk about it with you too. So say anything.
Last: If you haven’t voted for any controversial books yet, get in there and support your favorite offenders!
I love you all a lot.
Jane
* If however, you are a particularly beautiful and generous and supportive new person who understands that we pay the writers out of the six dollars or so a month subscription fees, it will mean even more if you upgrade now when your nose is not being held to any grindstone or your curiosity about what comes after a cliff-hanger paywall is not eating away at you so much that you cave and say, “OK I’ll just take out that free 7-day trial to find out whether she lives and then I’ll cancel out of it after 6 days.” Though you can always do that too, of course!
By Jennifer Dines
I puked out the car window and pissed my pants every morning in the early months of 2014, en route to the middle school where I taught English to four sections of twenty or so new immigrant students each per day. I made a point of arriving early to work in those days, heading to the staff bathroom to double-bag my wet underwear and pants into corner store Have a Nice Day sacks. I stuffed this squishy mass of cotton, pee, and plastic into the front pouch of my backpack for the walk down the hallway to my classroom. Once I sat down at my desk, I swiveled around in my teacher chair and pulled out one of the four-gallon trash bags in the top drawer, dumping the evidence of my incontinence inside. Then I hid the whole mess in the back of the bottom drawer, where it languished until safely after the final bell. Before leaving for the day, I placed the trash bag in my third bag of the day, a paper grocery bag, which I carted home, sitting in the damp driver’s seat with the old folks’ home scent of urine wafting around me.
It was the second trimester of my first pregnancy - twin girls! My body transformed into a shape not un-like Roger Hargreaves’ Mr. Greedy, the main character in one of those British Mister Men and Little Miss books. Mr. Greedy, a purple blob-man, has a giant beer-belly, but not from downing pints at the local pub. Rather, his binge-eating disorder drives him to devour a giant’s “pillow-sized sausages” and “potatoes the size of beach balls,” this after wolfing down a 17-item breakfast.
My Mr. Greedy-ness came not from the meals I couldn’t keep down, but from the exponential growth of the babies and their accompanying rivers, lakes, and oceans of amniotic fluid. I could no longer engage in pre-partum fitness routines either. Running? In the city? I couldn’t see over my bump, so I couldn’t see the slip-and-trip hazards of sidewalk cracks, uneven pavement, pebbles, and sticks, not to mention the ever-present threat of stepping in dog poop. Pilates Reformer? Nope. My trainer of three years cut me off from sessions because she felt lacking in the expertise to work with pre-partum clients, and I didn’t care to find someone else. [Just a tangentially related aside, but I quit my one form of exercise, Pilates, when I got pregnant with my daughter because I couldn’t imagine that those pelvic moves and compression and twisty stuff and pushing were good for her. And now I see women whose water basically breaks on their front-row Soulcycle saddles and I still can’t imagine that that’s healthy. But tell me why I am wrong and old-fashioned in the comments. -Jane]
I headed to the library to peruse the fitness DVDs for child-bearing ladies, where I found PregoFit, KnockedUp Fitness, and fitmama. The titles of these workouts set my already precarious pregnancy hormones a-ragin’. If someone called me ‘Preg-O’ or ‘Knocked Up’, I’d clock them with my swollen fist. And Mama? MAMA? What, was I wearing calico bonnets, churning butter, and sewing ragdolls now? I huffed out of there and road-raged home to my computer.
I cruised the internet for an hour or so but found only more of the same stupid stuff and more irritability. I took a break from browsing to scarf down half a sleeve of saltines and a couple huge spoonfuls of peanut butter. This replenished my energy enough to give the World Wide Web another old college try.
I don’t recall the search terms I typed, but, all the sudden, a miracle popped up on the monitor: Ballet Baby Fit & Graceful Pregnancy. The ballerina on the DVD cover had a huge swollen belly, a knowing smile, and long glossy chesnut-colored hair. Her face resembled Mad Men’s Allison Brie. And her positioning, in spite of her big bump, somehow formed an elegant diagonal line from the tips of her fingers to the ends of the satin slippers.
The DVD cover beckoned: Stay long, toned, and graceful during all 9 months. Whoever this Mary Helen Bowers was, her posture made it look so possible.
And then I spotted the words that sealed the deal. MARY HELEN BOWERS Trainer to Natalie Portman in Black Swan. BLACK SWAN! A film so dark, so intense, so horrific…one of my all-time favorite movies. And this MARY HELEN BOWERS played a part in that. I whipped out my credit card like it burned a hole in the pocket of my high-elastic-waistband maternity lounge pants.
And, let me tell you, this online DVD purchase really delivered. Honey-voiced pastel-clad Mary Helen looked like an angel, but her tendus, leg lifts, and one-legged bridges burned my ass like the devil’s pitchfork. Sometimes I could only survive ten or fifteen minutes before collapsing onto the sofa, but I enjoyed the movement, the fantasy of being a dancer, and regaining a modicum of control over my mutating body.
I credit Fit & Graceful Pregnancy, particularly its seated core exercises, along with the splendor of an epidural, for the relative ease of my childbirth experience. Instead of agony, adrenalin, unadulterated raw power, electrified my body. I activated my ab muscles, kegel-ed up. And with a few pushes, Francine’s first cry echoed across the delivery room, busting out of her mighty lungs.
I swapped CNN and the New York Times for Page Six. I lived in a bubble. I could not and did not want to see the outside world.
After the twins’ birth, I didn’t need workout videos because I got jacked wheeling them around our hilly neighborhood in a double stroller a couple times a day and hauling car seats up and down the stairs of our building. Fifteen months and a third girl later, I upgraded to a triple stroller and gained even more definition in my muscles. My once-beloved Fit & Graceful Pregnancy DVD collected dust in a storage closet until I wiped it off and donated it to a thrift store during a bout of spring cleaning.
I all but forgot about Mary Helen until a year or so after COVID when ads for a Ballet Beautiful streaming service popped up on my Instagram. Oh, the memories of pregnancy - Mary Helen’s lilting voice, that classical piano music, those movements that strengthened me up for one of the most important moments of my life. Also: AS SEEN IN VOGUE. I had thirty pounds of pandemic weight to lose, and so again I yanked out my credit card and signed up for more Mary Helen.
I became obsessed with the program: a mix of longer workouts filmed at Mary Helen’s house in North Carolina and then shorter in-studio videos with those familiar Chopin waltzes. I created detailed spreadsheets of the challenges on the Ballet Beautiful site, mapping out sequence of workouts to complete and recorded the dates I completed each one.
In the mornings before my commute and during my lunch breaks, I fit in five minutes of Swan Arms here, ten minutes of standing abs there. I kept light dumbbells and fitness bands in my desk. My bed frame and the side of a long table in my classroom became impromptu ballet barres. I even bought a Spandex turtleneck leotard and wore it several times a week under my work pants and cardigans.
Once a week, I did the hour-long videos on Friday afternoons at the gym, a pick-me-up just for me after a long week of lesson planning, grading, and stressed-out teenagers. In the little back stretching area of the gym, I planted myself on a mat in front of the wall of mirror in the little stretching area, popped in my earbuds, and fired up a livestream Full Body Mat workout on my phone, which I propped on the mirror.
My fellow union members protested in freezing temperatures while I cried into my yoga mat over my toxic relationship with Mrs. GOP.
At the outset, the usual parent and teacher worries ticker-taped around my brain, but Mary Helen’s ethereal voice took me out of my anxious mind and into my body.
Really turn out your thigh.
Keep your hips square to the mirror.
Neck long.
Lift-down-out-in.
While focused on Mary Helen’s concise directions, I concentrated on precision, and then, as I properly aligned my bones and muscles, I had to tolerate the intensity of the repeating movements.
This is really starting to burn.
MARY HELEN! This burned sixty-four reps ago! I talked back to the screen, joking around with my old pal. She ignored me. She directed and counted to eight, again and again and again.
After the video ended, I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply in a corpse pose. I stood up, faced the mirror one last time. The workout elongated my posture, glowed up my skin, and painted a Mona Lisa half-smile and soft eyes on my face. I had become the calm, strong woman I wished I could be all the time. You look great, sweetie, I told myself, before heading to the locker room for a long hot shower and few minutes in the steam room.
My Ballet Beautiful routines felt more essential then ever when the whiplash changes of Trump’s second term began. My job as an ESL teacher? Classes bursting with new arrivals? My once-thriving career became a distant memory. By September 2025, eighty-plus students a year dwindled down to thirty-three. My classroom felt like a ghost town. You’d think fewer students meant less work, but it didn’t.
During a Wikipedia jag, I uncovered devastating information about my teacher: Links to President Trump…Republican…the Heritage Foundation…Lindsay Graham. Her husband was the architect of Project 2025.
Anyone who watches or reads the news knows the violence and vitriol that MAGA vomits onto migrants and most US-born non-whites. Xenophobia and English-only initiatives have always existed in schools. Migrants have always struggled with all the adjustments of reinventing their lives. But, for my students, it seemed in the past those struggles lived alongside hope for building a more prosperous life in the United States: dreams of college, job opportunities. Dozens of my students over the years shared the same sweet wishes: I want to build a house for my mother. I want to build a house for my grandmother.
This school year, I’ve witnessed more tears, panic attacks, anger, overeating, undereating, sleeping in class, and defiance than ever before. The Boston Public Schools and the City of Boston have firm laws and policies around public safety for migrants. But the school system slashed funding for social-emotional learning initiatives at the end of the 2025 school year. And, so, teachers working with these populations have been left to navigate the impacts of trauma on our own.
Still, I soldiered, continuing with the same instructional routines of years gone by. Even if schooling no longer led students towards a real future in the United States, I still believed that rigorous academic demands could at least serve as a distraction from the real world.
Despite being the old Mrs. Dines at school, the Jennifer outside its walls really started to change. I had once been a serious woman striving for an awareness beyond my whiteness and its accompanying privileges. I attended screenings of The Cost of Sugar and Born into Brothels. I ball-point penned essay annotations in the margins of Rethinking Schools and Mother Jones. I poured over Reading Lolita in Tehran, Mountains Beyond Mountains, and A Different Mirror.
I didn’t want to know anything anymore. It all seemed so…vulgar.
But at the start of the 2025 school year, I swapped CNN.com and the New York Times for Page Six. And I fell into a rabbit hole of media about the most glamorous lives of the 20th century. Podcasts about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s divine feud. Multiple Doris Duke tv biopics. Books about the histories of media empires, art heists, and luxury department stores.
Forget doomscrolling. I glamscrolled, staying up later than ever on my phone, combing over Wikipedia biographies of celebrities of yesterdays. I zoned out during any discussion of current events, but if someone asked me about Jason Robards’ alcoholism or Zsa Zsa Gabor’s emotionally abusive marriage to Connie Hilton…well, to tell you the truth no one ever inquired. I even built a capsule wardrobe of grey skirt suits, which I paired with a long white coat and beige pumps a lá Kim Novak in Vertigo. It was my own little world. You could say I lived in a bubble, but it was more stepping into a balloon shellacked with gold glitter. I could not and did not want to see the outside world. I used the idealized sparkle and shine of the past to block the devastation lurking outside the latex.
I leaned into Ballet Beautiful more than ever. I started doing longer videos during my break instead of eating. After school, with ten minutes between the final bell and meetings or homework help, I wedged four minute Posture Stretch segments.
But, the week before Halloween, during one of my longest late-night Wikipedia jags, I uncovered a devastating piece of information, the catalyst for my slow break-up with Mary Helen and Ballet Beautiful.
There I am in bed, wearing my hot pink sweatpants and Future Corpse t-shirt, munching on goldfish crackers. Failing to conjure up the name of some long-dead celebrity, I pop MARY HELEN BOWERS into the search bar of Ye Olde Wikipedia.
As is my custom, I scroll right down to PERSONAL LIFE. There’s only a single sentence: She is married to Paul Dans, with whom she has four children. Yup, her kids! In one of the livestreams, Mary Helen pointed out a purplish-green chunk of goo on her gray wool sock. While her chunky cat Missy meowed at some birds chirping out the window, she explained how her kids left homemade slime on the kitchen floor, and she’d stepped in it. Relatable!
Paul Dans. Who’s this guy now? I click on his name and…BIG MISTAKE! HUGE!
My eyes dance frenetically over the blue links in his bio.
President Trump…Republican…Project 2025…the Heritage Foundation…Lindsay Graham.
All these boorish proper nouns flicker in the dark like a strobe light, stabbing me in the eyes with the pain of betrayal.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Should I keep reading? I have to keep reading.
I open my peepers and scroll through subheadings, stopping at Heritage Foundation.
Dans is known as the architect of Project 2025.
Well, that’s it for me. I shut off the phone, nearly slamming in down on my nightstand. I pop a Unisom from my nightstand. I put on an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I doze off during a segment about the death of George Reeves.
It took the death of Veterans Association nurse Alex Pretti to snap me out of it.
In more cognizant days, I’d read a little bit about Project 2025’s fascist vision of America and its fetish for criminalizing migrants. Dans name wasn’t familiar to me, but I knew right away he was evil. And his neoconservative fantasy was coming true. Abrego Garcia came to mind, taken by ICE while in the car with his five-year-old son, right in my hometown of Baltimore, and shipped off to an El Salvadorian prison. It seemed like ICE might come for my students, their families, the many many immigrants in my community any day now.
Mary Helen’s marriage hit me like a ton of bricks. How could my friend be…sleeping with the enemy? A better version of me would’ve grabbed my laptop, unsubscribed from Ballet Beautiful right away. My $40 a month might as well be a donation to the Department of Homeland Security.
However, breaking up with someone you’ve known for over a decade isn’t so simple. I associated Mary Helen with the birth of my daughters, one of the most important moments in my entire life. I didn’t really know Mary Helen, but when you look at a person and listen to their voice multiple times a day, the relationship with them feels personal.
Ballet Beautiful was a major part of my sanity preservation, until it wasn’t. I quit the classroom workouts cold turkey; I couldn’t bring Mary Helen into that space anymore. At home, I joked with my husband about my GOP workouts, but he didn’t find it funny. Still, I continued in my living room and with those unmissable Fridays at the gym. While I loaded Ballet Beautiful onto my phone, I tried out all the classic techniques of denial.
I normalized: Everyone drinks coffee. Everyone wears cotton. Both are products of slavery and child exploitation. I’m not much more of a hypocrite than everyone else.
I self-pitied: It’s not fair. Why can’t I just do my workout without a moral reckoning?
I rationalized: What am I? Some big campaign donor? Forty dollars? Hah! A real SuperPAC, right?
Still, something that made me feel beautiful and in control increasingly made me uglier and uglier. Ballet Beautiful wasn’t working anymore, and I started peeking at the real life news again. I read a little bit more each day. The more I read, the more my cheeks, the ones on my face, reddened when I thought about Mary Helen and especially after a Ballet Beautiful workout. The shame burned more than my muscles ever had.
Since I quit the program, I’ve gained a few pounds. But I’m not spiraling into a spiritual crisis either.
My fellow union members protested in freezing temperatures while I nearly cried into my yoga mat over my toxic relationship with Mary Helen. ICE murdered Minneapolis mother of three Reneé Goode while I fantasized about Mary Helen taking her children and leaving Paul because she didn’t want to lose me. It got to a point where the workouts didn’t even feel bad. Instead, I felt numb, a nothing person who’d really lost her way.
It took the death of Veterans Association nurse Alex Pretti to snap me out of it. If the Department of Homeland Security had no shame about killing an American white man, ICE would stop at nothing. An hour after I heard the news, I logged into Ballet Beautiful and closed my account.
A few days later, ICE snatched a man from his car only a couple feet from the grocery store I visit multiple times a week. But I wasn’t funding a GOP business anymore. I even agreed to be photographed for a news story about ICE’s effect on Massachusetts schools.
Since the breakup, I’ve gained a few pounds. But I’m exploring some new free workouts on YouTube. The instructors are no Mary Helens, but they don’t have me spiraling into a spiritual crisis either.
The $40 a month. I should probably donate it to some worthy cause. Then again, I could save it just to blow it on some trip to an amusement park with my family. Quitting made me a bit of a better person, but I’m still not that good.
ANTM please, all day every day.
I want the ANTM and JFK Jr. stories! I get it, though—it can sometimes feel like piggy-backing, but I think it's more about how small and connected the world is. I've been grappling with this for a week with the ongoing "discourse" about Lindy West's book. I had an incident with her and her husband two years ago that makes their reaction to the discourse unsurprising. I've mentioned it in a few discussions, where I thought it seemed to fit, but it all feels a little ick. But life is a little ick most of the time.
Can't wait to read Jenn's piece after doing some writing I've been procrastinating!