adventures in machismo: body building
About eight years ago I worked for a chain of health food stores in Melbourne’s CBD. The store was divided roughly into two sections: vitamins, staffed by naturopaths and nutritionists, and sports, staffed by personal trainers, athletes and most interestingly, body builders. I trained up to work with the vitamins but through understaffing and my natural curiosity I spent a lot of time on the sports side of things. Admittedly I was drawn to the illicit, the stories of steroid abuse and weird illegal substances ‘imported’ from Thailand or the US. One of the guys I worked with would take regular month-long trips to Thailand just to do weights and get on the juice. But I was also fascinated by the culture of masculinity that was obsessive, competitive and unbelievably vulnerable.
Gender in body building is weird, to say the least. In the ‘60s and ‘70s male building was associated with homosexuality and sex work. Now this image of masculinity is normalised, perhaps in part due to the prevalence of women builders reestablishing the gender roles. There is fear on either side—the men avoid taking any soy-based proteins in case it causes them to grow breasts, and women get breast implants to give their muscular physiques a more feminine look. Women go to great lengths to feminise their appearances (including salon-styled hair, makeup and high heels) to offset any perceived masculinity.
I no longer work in retail. I’m friends with some of my old colleagues on Facebook, though none of the body builders. Whilst Googling I stumbled on a body building forum thread topic: ‘What kinds of girls are attracted to you?’ The responses were in turn hilarious, disturbing and confusing. One man said he gets both ‘sluts’ and ‘non-sluts’—a seemingly impenetrable dichotomy echoed throughout the thread. One 18-year-old guy tells an obviously fake story about a woman pinching his butt in a supermarket. It didn’t really matter what type of girl was into them, it was that anyone was into them. Looking beyond the sexism and occasional misogyny, most of these men (or boys, as many were still in school) were just striving for validation. This form of masculinity was the tool they used to make women notice them (sluts and non-sluts alike), to make men respect them, and they wanted their online peers (muscles popping in their avatars) to accept them.
Lurking in this forum reminded me of working with my body builder colleagues and customers. Sometimes it got desperate—like the small wiry guys who would come into the shop and spend hundreds of dollars on dubious products in the hope of transforming into something big and hulking. I’d be working in the store on my own when young men would come in and ask me, ‘I wanna get big. What makes you big?’ They wanted to put on muscle, but also size in general, and they wanted to do it fast. They’d deal with stripping off the fat later. It amused me that they would ask me—a woman who clearly doesn’t exercise. My product knowledge was good, but by no means expert. Most of the time I just paraphrased product labels and clarified dosages and instructions. I think they just wanted some support, some rationalising, for putting their faith in products that will only make them fat, sick or broke if they don’t put in the hard work or if their bodies just can’t do it. I’d listen to my co-workers meticulously pick apart their bodies for faults, and the next minute brag about the girl they picked up on the weekend.
It is disarming to gain such access into the psyches of men, whose confidence and self-image is in a stranglehold by the demands of hyper-masculinity. In pop psychology male body building is viewed as the sort of inverse of anorexia and bulimia—where women strive to make themselves smaller, men need to get bigger. I don’t think it’s nearly as simple as that, and there are a lot more contributing factors in making something a disorder. There are also a lot of straightforward reasons why building can be good, healthy and fun.
It’s curious, though not surprising, that beneath one of the most visible forms of masculinity lies such fragility. I feel sorry for the boys whose self-worth is tied to the size of their muscles (as girls fret about their thigh gap), as the competitive element of male spaces combined with a phobia of sharing emotions makes this environment particularly stifling. Browsing these forums all afternoon, I’m reminded that patriarchy enslaves everyone, and that gender essentialism and these rigid gender roles are no good to anyone.
