A Man's Guide, To Blood & Muscle

kgreg31
18 hours ago
8 min read

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great winter break to take some time away from all of the stresses of college/work and got to spend some quality time with the people who are closest to you! I know that I usually cover music on my blog-- and no doubt that I will continue to do so because I have been listening to so much more music over break, so be prepared for a really good blog next week. However, I wanted to write about something that is a little more personal and something that I see now, has been affecting many young males over the course of a few years, including myself.

Have you noticed that over the past few years, particularly starting around the year 2020, more and more men have been “locked in” on going to the gym? You may ask yourself, “So what if people want to be healthier and more active, what's the problem with that?” Admittedly you're right, there is no problem with people wanting to better themselves by taking up a harmless habit of eating healthier or going to the gym. However, that is not what I am talking about. More and more men have been obsessed with getting as large and muscular as possible, at times to the detriment of their health. The term that most accurately describes this behavioral obsession is called Muscle Dysphoria or Bigorexia.

The reason why I wanted to write about this isn’t because I want to tell everyone how hard it was to deal with this kind of obsession, as I feel like that would be a personal slap in the face to the any person who has dealt with a serious eating disorder like Anorexia or Bulimia, but rather to shed light on the predatory nature of “gym culture” and how its widespread recognition of influencers on social media platforms have been poisoning the minds of young men; and in turn, affecting their personal views on women and their expectations of them.

Now, the particular subcategory of lifting that I am talking about is called bodybuilding (focusing on physique or “aesthetic”), which many of you may have already heard or been exposed to in the recent years. Some of the most important professional body builders that have been popularized as of recently, have been so for their insanely muscular physiques, but one in particular has stood out as a benchmark for masculinity across generations and is still widely considered one of the most influential figures in the sport. And yes, if you’re a big movie buff or have even a rudimentary understanding of the sport of bodybuilding, you would know that I am talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was initially famous for being a seven-time champion of the international bodybuilding competition Mr. Olympia, but then went on into acting, starring in movies like Predator, Conan the Barbarian, and being the icon of the Terminator franchise.

[All images from Pinterest]

Since the time of Arnold, which is commonly referred to as the golden age of bodybuilding (1970s - 1980s), there have been many scientific advancements in performance enhancing drugs: human growth hormones and other supplements/methods to gain as much muscle mass as physically possible in the shortest amount of time. This was about pushing the human body to its utmost limits, towards the apex of muscularity, creating mass monsters that stood on stage at 300lbs of dangerously lean muscle (lower than 3%). Some of the most renowned “mass monsters” from the 90s to early 2000s were Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, and Dorian Yates.

[From Dravel Nutrition, Iron Company, and Essentially Sports]

All of these men undoubtably had impressive physiques and did attain those results with a combination of effort, genetics, anabolic steroids and extreme dieting. This is not me trying to downplay the achievements of these impressive athletes or even to say that bodybuilding is inherently an evil sport that alters men's perception of what masculinity should be. My claim is that body building has transformed from once a legitimate sport to now altering the public perception of masculinity and body image due to its mainstream popularization throughout platforms like Instagram and TikTok, ultimately serving as a pipeline into conservative ideologies for young boys.

Okay stay with me now, I know that I just made a big jump from bodybuilding to politics and for some that may seem crazy, but for others, you may connect the dots almost instantly based on your own experiences with the culture and the type of people who you may think of whenever you think of popular influencers that center around masculinity and men's fitness.

Let's take a step back for a second and look at how social media has altered the perception of men's body image and even how or why so many young men have fallen victim to Muscular Dysphoria. So, one of the explanations for this is that usually people who hyper-fixate on curating a masculine or muscular physique are doing so to compensate for a lack of power, control or feeling of helplessness during early childhood development when experiencing trauma or abuse. This type of coping mechanism is unhealthy for people because it is easy for others to market ideologies that play off of your insecurities, and it is one of the ways that I have personally seen people adopt conservative ideologies. One of the ways that many men have unconsciously dealt with this deep-rooted insecurity is falling into misogyny and giving way to conservatism because it gives them a masculinizing sense of superiority. Now my gripe with this is that nobody outwardly admits that they’re a misogynist; however, the people who are, show it in their actions, their language, and their belief system, and I will elaborate more on this later.

With the popularization of bodybuilding on platforms like Instagram, it made it so that everyone was looking to become the next Arnold or Ronnie Coleman, posting their physiques and the type of efforts that they were making in order to achieve this goal. The problem was that many people wanted to claim that they had such impressive physiques without the use of performance enhancing drugs, trying to claim that their physique is “naturally attainable” and that “anyone can make this change,” when in fact they were using steroids or other performance enhancing substances to attain it. The way in which this lifestyle was marketed just seemed like all you had to do was to dedicate yourself to working out and eating right so that you would have the same physique or image, hiding the fact that many people who are posing as “natural” lifters or those who would not speak on the substances they were using, were in fact using steroids at the detriment to their health.

This gave way to influencers doing blood work tests in order to prove their natural status, but many adolescent and young adult men were already exposed to what social media's expectation was for a masculine physique, giving many unrealistic goals of what they could achieve naturally. This led to many people who wanted this body type caving into using steroids or human growth hormone, slowly building up their use of the drug to emasculate themselves or resorting to extreme dieting.

This type of mentality and hyper fixation on body image is not only harmful to the men that are experiencing this but more so it enforces an expectation that they set on women as well. Since these individuals are so concerned with their own body image and the media that they are consuming also reinforces this mentality, it normalizes methods like extreme dieting to make drastic physique transformations. In the way that these men hold their body to such a high standard, they expect that women can easily do the same thing and place a woman's “value” on their attractiveness or their body. One of the disgusting examples that I have seen of this is when I was in high school walking in the halls during lunch with one of my friends, who I no longer talk to, who was also heavily invested in social media gym culture; completely unprovoked, a girl who had a bigger frame walked by and he said “God, I hate fat bit*hes, all fat bit*hes gotta die,” with hatred in his voice. Now if you are a man reading this, yes, I know that not all men who go to the gym are like this, but coincidentally, I have found more men who share this mentality, going to the gym, than just randomly on the streets. In this instance in particular is one of the many that I’ve experienced being in male dominated circles or friend groups. The demonization of overweight women in gym culture is sickening and telling of what this culture’s expectations of women are. Expectations that force eating disorders like bulimia or anorexia on women in order for them to hold some kind of arbitrary value in society based on their looks or body image.

Not only can this culture be predatory towards women but also to young boys as well. One term that I remembered that had gained a lot of traction in the community was the prospect of “victim weight.” The general “rule” of this term was that any weight that was under 200lbs was considered to be in the “victim” category, under the assumption that there is another man out there who is bigger, stronger and is able to hurt or sexually exploit you. This language is yet another part of the culture that plays off the vulnerability or the trauma that someone may have experienced throughout childhood. While I have never experienced sexual abuse, I know many people close to me who have, and have been, told the kind of grip that it has on your perception of relationships and your own body expectations. I could only imagine how this type of rhetoric would affect someone who has experienced sexual assault, so for now I will only speak on my own experiences of how this kind of media played on my own insecurities.

I grew up as a small and skinny kid, and experienced a lot of situations where I felt frail, helpless or weak, at home, at school, with friends, and as I got older this deep rooted insecurity made me feel like I needed to prove to others that I could be taken seriously, that I could be a masculine man. I soon started hyper-fixating on my appearance and physique, trying to gain as much muscle mass as possible, forcing myself to eat as many protein dense calories as possible to the point of sickness. Every lift felt like I was trying to kill a weaker version of myself on the premise that If I had been more assertive, more of a man, then maybe I could have done something to ease this feeling of inadequacy. No matter how much progress I saw, no matter the numbers that I saw kept increasing on the scale, I still saw in the mirror, the frail, weak, and helpless little boy that sat in his room, scared. The worst part of this is how I could have seen myself easily fall into right wing ideologies like misogyny or racism, that could have made me feel superior for being a white man, to cope with my insecurities. Luckily I had, and still have people close to me who try to guide me in the right direction, toward being a better person, toward being a better man. Which is why I wanted to write out my experiences with gym culture and how it led me to try and be as empathetic and understanding as I can in order to not let down those who've brought me this far, and continue to do so.

So if you have someone who you’re thinking about reading this, like a friend or a brother, don't hesitate to be that person to help them before it's too late.

I know that this was kind of a depressing blog today and I'm not going to be all mopey and in depth like this all the time, because I still want to write about the many things that bring me joy and happiness, but I still would like to write more personal opinion pieces in the future so be prepared.

ALSO next week I'm covering more death metal so be prepared for some good album recommendations if that's your sort of jam! : -)

A Man's Guide, To Blood & Muscle

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