The Muscular ideal ordeal
I was a big car enthusiast growing up, and one of my absolute favorite things to do was to go to Barnes and Noble and look at the new issues of every car magazine you could possibly imagine. You know what was right next to all the car magazines?
All the Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Hot half naked six-packed celebrities on the cover. “Sexiest Man in the World” this, “How To Lose All Your Belly Fat” that.
Growing up as a little fat kid, you already know that you’re different from everybody else. Everybody else tells you constantly: your friends, your parents, your doctors, teachers, bullies, your inner critic.
“Be skinny, or be worthless. Be Ripped, or be lonely and poor forever.”
I’m obviously being dramatic, but the impression that I received was not only that I was different, but my body made me unloveable, undesirable, and that if I looked like those people on the covers of these magazines I would be happy!
So fast forward to adulthood, and when I was 25 I lost 175 pounds by starving myself and overtraining from 2016-2018, and I was fucking miserable that whole time. Even when I was at my skinniest and most ripped, I still hated myself. So I had to go deeper and ask WHY? I lost all this weight, I did what I thought I was supposed to do to be happy and fit into the world…. But I didn’t. I thought this would make me happy but it didn’t.
So if you’re like me and you’ve had a similar experience, and you also came here asking why, let’s talk about it.
I want to use Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness as an example of the muscular ideal in the United States. Each publication was launched in the late 1980s, and both have been found to have a strong focus on body appearance in their ads and articles (Labre, 2005). In addition to an increase in the objectification of men, the body displayed has become more muscular, lean, and v-shaped, which is what “they” say men should consider ideal.
Here’s a photo of me and a literal Men’s Health Cover model from 2018.
Two incredibly different bodies, but two incredibly hot men.
Men's bodies have been increasingly objectified and eroticized in ways that make men with “normal” or fat bodies feel like we don’t have a place in society looking the way that we do.
In one study, it was found that more than 90% of men from four regions of the United States desired greater muscularity (Frederick, Buchanan, et al., 2007). With this constant pressure to be muscular, it's no wonder that so many guys feel inadequate or resort to dangerous behaviors like disordered eating or steroid use.
The objectification extends to toys too. The Physiques of male action figures (such as GI Joe) have grown significantly more muscular over the last 20-35 years. (Pope, Olivardia, Gruber, and Borowiecki, 1999)
My Personal favorite tidbit of info from that same paper is a study assessed the body compositions of Playgirl centerfold models over the last 25 years and found that the average model gained 27 pounds of muscle and lost 12 pounds of fat (Leit, Pope, & Gray, 2001).
So listen, It’s not your fault that you’ve been taught to hate your body by the people around you and the media you’ve consumed throughout your life. You’ve been bombarded with the idea of what body type is acceptable. Remember, they can’t make money off of you if you don’t hate yourself.
But now it’s up to you to do the work of separating your self worth from the way that you THINK you need to look in order to have the life you want. The way you look now is perfect.
Rob MchElenney Said it best: “Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to.”
We’re allowed to be normal. We’re allowed to be fat and not have abs of steel. We don't have to constantly compare ourselves to celebrities with unrealistic body types to strive for. Give yourself the space to acknowledge that these standards are unrealistic and unattainable for most people. Embrace your meatsack and focus on finding ways to love and embrace it for what it IS, not what it ISN’T.
Together, we can fight back against these damaging standards and create a more inclusive, body-accepting world.
Stay strong and Take Up Space.
Alex Frankel
