The idealised male body has become bigger, bulkier and harder to achieve. So what drives a generation of young men to the all-consuming, often dangerous pursuit of perfection?What do you think?
Of course, all things done by young men are chiefly about attaining the attention of young women, gay men excepted but with a similar substitute motivation. They strive for the ideal because that's how you attain the attentions when you're young, before your blood cools and you learn to really appreciate the other aspects of human love. If this is what you present to them, it's what they'll go for -- provided, that is, that it's a plausible thing that young women really do seem to like. If you try to convince them that the real ideal male body is squishy and flabby and fat, they'll notice quickly enough that you're full of it when the girls don't take notice of their physique.
But ask any young man who has begun lifting for a while if the girls have started to notice him. He'll blush behind his downy mustache, nod, and perhaps say a few shy words to affirm it.
So that's why young men are doing it. But the bigger response is: What's wrong with it?
Ok, illegal supplements, dangerous drugs, damage to the body, granted. Those things work in terms of attaining size and 'cut,' but they make it so easy that you fail at developing the real virtues that come from the hard work to get there. They substitute ease of success for both virtue and health. So don't do those things.
All the same, a man can go a long way on this road -- enough to enter the top 1% of human strength -- without reference to such things. If you get focused on having the perfectly sculpted body, you'll make some basic errors that will lead you away from what it takes to have the strongest body. To whit:
That's accurate. Bodybuilding will make you look (somewhat) like Arnold; but if you want to be strong, you'll want to look more like Halfthor. So, in terms of attaining the maximum virtue of functional human strength, Bodybuilding is less effective than Powerlifting, and Powerlifting is less effective than Strongman. (Which has a thriving women's division, by the way.)
By all means get strong. Why not?
4 comments:
When Hollywood wanted to set up a physically imposing male image -- Tarzan -- they went with the swimmer Johnny Weismuller. And recent celebrity Olympian Greg Louganis is similarly well defined without being either blocky or ripped.
Then there are the gymnasts ...
I think weight training / lifting is great and all. But DOING something strenuous with the body, once strengthened, seems to accomplish attractive results, too.
I had a friend who was a gymnast when I was in High School. You're right about how impressive that can be.
I'm not, of course, attempting to argue against getting strong by swimming or gymnastics. I'm attempting to argue against the idea that there's a kind of mental illness ('dysmorphia') at work in young men who want to develop their capacities and become virtuously strong. That seems to me to be a bad bit of framing, and part of the general cultural assault on masculinity as such.
Only along the way am I trying to give some advice to men who might wish to pursue this as to what I think works best. Being able to shoulder and carry a 200-pound+ Atlas stone is a real feat of strength, far more to be sought (I think) than being able to perform a 600+ pound technically-correct squat in the squat rack (although there's nothing wrong with that, and it may be useful on the road to developing the ability to lift and carry the stones). There are other good ways too.
Heck, there's nothing really wrong even with bodybuilding, as long as you don't make the philosophical error of preferring the look to the strength, or the error of pursuing the look in ways that damage rather than strengthen the body and character.
Thing is, Grim, for the most part the article seemed to be explicitly addressing young people who were pursuing the look rather than real strength. Whether that stems from vanity or a dysmorphia similar to eating disorders (where you never look good enough in your own eyes regardless of reality), it's not a love of virtue driving it, and it's frequently not producing a healthy sort of strength.
That frame, Mike, is just what bothers me about it. It reads to me like the 80s articles about Dungeons & Dragons, in which 'this seemingly harmless pastime, which might even be thought to encourage good qualities like creativity' is linked through evocative stories to a series of awful things. Even if they finish up by saying, "We're not saying that every group of young people who choose to play D&D will end up carrying out gruesome murders in municipal sewer systems," the clear suggestion via the emphasis on those cases is that you're all endangering yourself by taking up this weird hobby.
In the current climate of trying to demonize every aspect of masculinity, so too an article painting bodybuilding intensely in terms of self-harm and grotesque, dangerous drugs. Somebody needs to stand up and say, "Hey! You're talking about a fringe element of a basically healthy endeavor with many possible benefits for participants. Quit trying to make this scary to youngsters, and help the ones who want to do it do it right."
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