flex-arm hang

Was there a funnier moment in high school than watching the girls do the flex-arm hang?
You older babes remember it. I'm assuming that this exercise has gone the way of the dodo, but in olden days (for you young'ns and any guys who weren't fortunate enough to catch the show), when it came time for yearly P.E. testing, they made the girls do the flex-arm hang.
It was brilliant. It consisted of having the girls jump up onto the pull-up bar (with or without the aid of a boost), and...hang. That's it. No, really. A gym teacher would be standing nearby with a stopwatch, scoring how many seconds it took each girl to drop. And let me tell you, a lot of them came nowhere near double digits. It looked like nothing so much as flies under a huge can of Raid.
The first time you saw the show, you thought your leg was being pulled. They made us XX types pull ourselves up, an exercise that might actually prove useful one day, when the bridge collapses and you need to haul your own body weight in order to preserve your miserable ass. How much more passive an activity could one concoct than the arm hang? It's the perfect exercise for someone whose ambition is to bide their time waiting to be rescued. It's embarrassing, and i trust that girls like Gabrielle Reece have sent this chestnut to the scrap heap of history.
And no, i'm not picking on the girls. No, it's not their fault that thousands of years of male dominion turned them into little more than cattle. Don't bust my chops, i was a pissed-off feminist when your mommas were wipin' your noses.
But funny is funny. And that flex-arm hang was some funny shit.
The process of returning to women the emotional and physical strength that millenia of slavery have stripped from them, well, this work is only just begun. Standards of beauty still promote weak women (anyone want to place bets on how many seconds Eva Longoria would last on that bar?). Skinny is not attractive. Weakness is not attractive, and if you find a man who thinks that Serena Williams is unattractive, you've probably found a man who is deeply afraid of something.
But that flex-arm was some funny shit.
(P.S. I'm not entirely sure whether there was the teeniest, tiniest element of playful oversimplification in what i just wrote, but somebody's gotta rile the bats out of the cupboard...)