Ihad arrived late and was scrambling. Where were the weights, and how many did I need? Was I feeling confident enough to grab the 10-pounders or should I risk silent ridicule from my fellow Body Sculpt attendees and retrieve a 4-pound set? “That’s my spot,” another student—short, impressive muscles—snapped. It was my first class, and I needed help. After more than three decades, I wanted my body to do something new and hard, but my anxious mind was not cooperating.

I had started to see it everywhere, the message that women need to be stronger. In May, the writer Casey Johnston released a memoir called A Physical Education , about trading constant diets for weight lifting and discovering herself in the process, a real-life counterpart to Miranda July’s fictional narrator in All F

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