Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah hits the gym and dabbles in swordplay while teaching ‘Resistance Summer School.’ Her goal is to become ‘strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.’
Karen Attiah, the Israel-hating Washington Post opinion columnist best known for celebrating the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, remains at the Jeff Bezos-owned publication for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. New leadership at the Post has tried to encourage its left-wing activist employees to resign or accept buyouts to leave the paper. Meanwhile, Attiah has routinely accused her fellow employees of subverting democracy and promoting white supremacy.
When she isn’t writing columns attacking Republicans for trying to reimpose racial segregation, getting denounced for threatening to exact violent “revenge” on white women, or accusing Texas governor Greg Abbott of having “slave-catcher energy,” Attiah branches out into other fields.
She launched a “Resistance Summer School” earlier this year after her alma mater, Columbia University, canceled the class she was scheduled to teach on “Race and Journalism.” It resembles an online reeducation camp for anxious liberals—mostly Boomer white women, by the looks of it—who are eager to put in the “intellectual and emotional labor of building a liberated future.” Subjects include “The History of Race” and “Global Anti-Semitism,” not to mention informal lectures on how to look fierce.
“We’re teaching the resistance and we’re gonna look cute!” Attiah said in a recent Instagram video. “The world is falling apart but mwah, mwah, mwah, look at our lip gloss.”
Attiah has also been hitting the gym and bulking up. Her stated fitness goals include becoming “hotter and more lethal” as well as building “legs strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.” Her most recent Post column is about what she learned after gaining 20 pounds of muscle in 3 years.
You don’t actually have to read it. Just imagine the sort of academic nonsense a liberal activist with degrees from Northwestern and Columbia would write in a (nearly 2,000-word) column about the political significance of female strength training. It’s that, only more so.
“It is a deeply feminine act of self-consciousness,” Attiah writes of lifting weights at the gym. “At a time when the rights of women, particularly Black women, are under attack, we need to return to the basics — to be grounded in our agency, physical power and transformational energy. … This is how we build the power to birth a better world.”
Attiah urges more women to take up weightlifting as a form of “social resistance” to a patriarchal culture that enables “male violence” against “weak” and “underfed” homemakers, as opposed to buff gals like Chyna, the pro wrestling icon Attiah admired growing up. She boasts that her “DMs” are full of people complimenting her jacked physique. She can’t decide whether a popular hashtag—#MuscleMommy—is an empowering ode to female strength or a problematic dog whistle for child abuse, female subservience, and “Freudian ick.”
Like any self-respecting Ivy League grad, Attiah makes sure to acknowledge her weight privilege. “I understand, certainly, that focusing on bodybuilding is a flex of privilege,” she writes. “Being single with no kids means my full energy can go into working, resting, eating, training, repeat. I am lucky to have had no major injuries or physical limitations. I can also afford gym memberships, vitamins and enough nutrient-dense food to eat in a surplus.”
Alas, the columnist’s most recent foray into self-improvement raises some troubling questions about cultural appropriation. Attiah recently traveled to Los Angeles for an intensive training program with “progressive martial artists” who taught her to “move with elegance and beauty through sword, wushu and tai chi.” That’s right. She dabbles in swordplay and plans on utilizing these news skills for “liberation, beauty, and community defense.” Don’t miss Karen’s forthcoming column about reclaiming the bladed phallus as an instrument of feminine grace and anti-colonial liberation.
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