Tonight, dear reader, I will be living your fantasy.

I hurry now to finish this post, knowing that you are the only thing standing between me and a private club that I recently joined.

The doorman will flash me a smile as I slip him my card. I’ll descend into the basement and past the kids who are already going at it. I’ll follow a corridor into the heart of the club and find myself surrounded by dozens of half-naked women. They will be readying themselves for the effort to come - adding jewelry and adjusting their complicated lingerie.

Welcome to the Club Med gym.

Cloob Med is the city’s largest chain of fitness centers, and the site of tonight’s continuing anthropology fieldwork. I observe as the natives try to adapt to this curious new technology.

Behold: the female approaches the Stair Master. She walks twice around, sniffing, and gingerly mounts it from behind. The hair is perfect, her makeup fresh. She climbs for fifteen minutes on level 2 without breaking a sweat. She remains the picture of perfect aloofness, even while a jewel-encrusted string (I am not making this up) carves a new trench in her backside.

What (really--I’m asking) is up with French women and their lingerie?

A recent study confirmed that they spend, on average, 20% of their clothing budget on lingerie – an estimated 2.6 billion euros per year.

I’m not knocking the general idea, mind you, but at the gym?

For my own part, I’ll be riding tonight in my sensible whites. For there’s nothing worse while working on cardio (and mentally rehearsing your next karaoke triumph) than the cold hard feel of rhinestone in your ass.

Or so I suspect…