Is gym culture fascist?

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the massive surge in gym culture in Sydney over the past 5 years or so?

All this lifting, running, lifting, black spandex and lifting while being yelled at by personal trainers made me think: is gym culture a type of fascism at the micro level?

(For example, check out this video of the latest fitness regime called Crossfit that prides itself on taking things up a few notches... till you vomit)


One of my favourite passages from cultural theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is the following description of what fascism might look like. I found this passage very insightful on the point that when we think of fascism, we tend to think of nasty bad dudes (and we usually think of dudes) in uniform like Hitler at the Nuremburg Rally. But what about the desire of so many of us ordinary people for fascism in everyday life? As D&G point out:

What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.  American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighbourhood... fascisms spare no one.  Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression?  The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure.  Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc.  Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segementarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination...  It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar [i.e. large scale] level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.

 So is gym culture a type of "microfascism"?