Modern Primitives. Raves. Extreme Sports. The Trickle-Down Economic Theory.
Bodybuilding.
They were all big for a time, but ran out of steam in the New Millennium. That’s not to say they’re necessarily extinct. More like extant — trends still practiced by a devoted subculture of acolytes well after their mass appeal has played out.
Musclemen are seeming rather dated now. Almost quaint, really — the stuff of Sword & Sandal epics, Playgirl, and low-rent musclehead gyms where they’re still venerated as earthbound gods. I can’t say I particularly think of bodybuilding as a sport. Like golf, bowling, or non-competitive cheerleading, it’s more of an activity, and its virtues don’t necessarily translate that well across all strata as much more than novelties.
I’ll admit to having a yen for bulky men with a natural curvaceous mass, but the image of grotesquely disproportionate, emaciated hulks with distended silverback gorilla abdomens and the hue of rotisserie chickens does absolutely nothing for me.
I’ve long contended that bodybuilders are just the male variations on beauty queens; Miss America and her ilk are relics who’ve long overstayed their welcome and can’t get arrested in Hollywood anymore, so they’re now settling for gigs as entertainment correspondents, athletes’ trophy wives, and Republican props.
Mr. Universe? He used to go to Italy, put on a toga, and fight cyclopes, but his apex came in the ’80s and ’90s with the advent of the action star. Now, Arnold Schwarzenegger went into politics along with half the cast of Predator, Sly Stallone looks like dehydrated jerky, and Chuck Norris is worrying about whether Mary would’ve aborted Baby Jesus as he threatens to spin kick the commies.
Plenty of straight men still idolize him, but they have to know that the age of the uzi-wielding hardbody has waned. Weight jockeys’ sights have lowered; now they have to jerk off on webcams, strip, escort, and do gay porn to fund their endeavors because there aren’t enough endorsements and championship titles to go around. Plus, American Gladiators was canceled.
Bodybuilding and porn have long traded favors, but porn stars have started muscling in on the competitive circuit and the fitness modeling industry, and increasingly more participants on the other side have some foot in the gay for pay scene. Aspiring Arnolds like Christian Boeving, Bruce Patterson, and Chad Bannon — who still vehemently denies spreading that muscle ass in Behind The Barn Door — have all had their porn pasts brought to light. Mr. Muscles has had to diversify.
Action stars are really moot at this point because virtually every photogenic actor you can think of with better range manages astonishing physical transformations for movies, with stars like Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Adrien Brody, Bradley Cooper, Gerard Butler, Ryan Reynolds, and Jake Gyllenhaal poaching parts that used to call for a readymade muscle hero. Such make-overs have become so common that you could almost believe the male body is akin to Stretch Armstrong — infinitely malleable, sculptable, and pneumatic. Physical limitations of height, weight, proportion, and age are surmountable. We are our own Promethean figures of clay.
Almost.
I can’t believe that the Brendan Fraser of today and the one circa George of The Jungle and Gods & Monsters are actually the same person. Bale didn’t get Batman-ready by gorging on pizza, ice cream, and milkshakes, nor am I convinced that actors are bulking up thanks to the go-to response for accounting for such marvelous results: eating tons of ground-up cow round the clock.
Even someone like geek heartthrob Joel McHale –who just three years ago would’ve been utterly cynical of the big macho Hollywood centerfold — has himself fallen prey to such preening, ditching his lanky look for a more generic Soloflex physique. His transformation — fittingly enough — for this year’s Community action movie spoof episode found him ridiculously pumped up, and I actually winced when I read his way-too-pat justification for the conversion: too busy to go to the gym, he simply starved, ate nothing but eggs and salad, did push-ups, and chased the kids around (!).
Oy, this is the kind of pablum I’d expect to hear from one of the dead-eyed pin-ups from Twilight — or frankly, a nipped/tucked actress — and it’s nothing if not revealing how vanity has gotten the best of men, even the smart ones.
If bodybuilding ever really was about genetics, that time is long gone. Synthetics are what truly fuels muscle culture, and their availability is the root cause for it spreading itself way too thin. Men’s measurements have significantly inflated since the ’60s, and as the look began turning up with increasingly frequency in every social tier, it began to descend into ubiquitous parody.
Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone contributing editor Paul Solotaroff analyzes the retrograde in his book The Body Shop, chocking it all up to an “adolescent fantasy of masculinity” gone off-the-rails. Solotaroff’s retrospective on his own forays into bodybuilding suggests arrested development is key to muscle worship: boys wanting to emulate Hercules and Flash Gordon, equating physical might with American supremacy, the linkage of success with physical reinvention, the desire to transform into superstud sex objects, and the seeking out of surrogate father figures in neighborhood gyms. The edifice became too elaborate, though — too overdeveloped to hold — and the male physique just can’t support the upgrades forever.
Gay culture is really part of the problem here; in the ’80s, we bought into fitness and muscle worship to our own detriment in an effort to fill voids of our own. This was the point where we came to believe we could be what we coveted, and as we adopted muscle culture as our bodily paradigm in the form of porn stars, fitness models, and Chelsea Boys, it in turn was co-opted from us. Pro athletes, wrestlers, Guidos, straight party boys, douchebags, mandana-wearing Reality TV fixtures, and even high school kids have turned to anabolic boosts. Steroids — once a gay party and club drug — evolved into the elixir of numenistic machismo.
Now bar bodies, Synthol biceps, and implants are on every dance floor. Gyms stopped being dens strictly for hardcore muscle disciples. Every gay porn star is a jacked-up bodybuilder now, and more of them seem to be dropping dead from “undetermined” causes that result in their bodies just shutting down. Gay and straight body ideals are practically indistinguishable. Chelsea and West Hollywood are prime sectors for giving rise to a gay(er?) American Psycho who’s nothing but a monstrous cipher with 3% body fat and a home tanning bed.
The body may be a temple, but the muscle gods who occupy it are a fickle and uncaring breed, and many is the mortal man convinced he can ascend that lofty pinnacle to tread in their shallow footprints.
© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
…never been a fan of the pumped up look, they always look like they’ve got small privates (thank you jennifer saunders, abfab ‘the orgy’)…no, i’ve always prefered a much skinnier fucker, the scally i suppose…but like attracts like…and i fancied the arse off that type long before it became another thing that has been fetish-ized (if that’s a word)…i didn’t know until later that i was ‘a bit of rough’ and that being Northern was a turn on, but hey, i can handle that!..someone who’ll fuck your brains out then rob your telly afterwards, as someone i know so beautifully put it…the ‘muscles’ look too much like a cartoon, and they can’t run like we can, and to be honest, i don’t like orange unless it’s on a Masters of the Universe toon…nah, much prefer blokes like this skinny fucker, whoever he is…now, where did i put me trainers?…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAPeMMp4Rhk
All this and no mention of the tremendous impact of Frank Frazetta?!
That man’s pneumatic nymphs and stack-of-turkey-rolls heroes on the cover of the best sci fi and fantasy novels (along with the series of Conan the Barbarian flicks, which were production-designed to be faithful to the Letter of Frazetta’s aesthetic law, if the Lance Laspina documentary, “Frazetta: Painting with Fire,” is accurate)are probably responsible for more of the nerd/geek makeovers in this country than Tim Gunn, home gyms, Queer Eye, and the amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (women have the legal right to work outside the home — better bulk up to keep yours).
Oddly, Frazetta, who created Arnold Schwarzenegger: Movie Star, wasn’t any muscle god, himself. He was “everything — in moderation” as some old swords-and-sandals-era fogey said. And his females, though they were literally all of the different races (mermaid, half-bird, alien, fairy, pixie, goblin, gremlin, human, faun-ette, centaur-ette), and all different colors/nationalities, to go with his men, were all drawn from the same template: his wife.
The rest was his imagination.
Maybe it’s the decline in imagination — the notorious “Rule #34″ of the Internet in all its mind-numbing glory (why think it up yourself when you can Google it and have it right there on the screen?) — that makes men want to become the physical avatars of masculinity. Why play at Musclemen in Love when you can become it?
Maybe it’s the decline in the cachet of being able to imagine vividly — CGI and the latest status toys and software can do it for you, and poor is even uncooler than ever: let the electronic “help” serve up the imaginary life — that makes people hide and eventually cause the atrophy of the most important sexual organ they have.
After all, you need at least an a limbic system to function sexually without outside help.
The repetition of the same old themes has been a complaint of many a culture on the brink of death from lack of ingenuity. But imagination, like anything else, is a lot of work. There’s a great deal of heavy lifting involved if you want to flesh out your niche in the World of Imagination. So may I humbly suggest we all start by… Pumping Iron?
I think you’ve hit on something interesting and true — that the moment when these plastic action figures were being held up as some sort of physical and sexual ideal is finally in the past, and not a moment too soon. I remember in the early 90s asking a friend if he was into guys with muscles, and he replied, “Anything that you can see through clothes is TOO MUCH.” I was never interested in guys with big muscles, and had honestly wondered if something was wrong with me (I was young, okay?), so his statement seemed wildly subversive and revolutionary. Now I think such a statement would be a pretty normal thing to hear a gay man say.
I wonder when exactly the story the the Big Bicep Boys were the ne plus ultra of hottt-ness began to fall apart. Certainly the rise of bears had something to do with it. I have a suspicion that the increasing availability of amateur and pseudo-amateur porn, along with the Treasure Island phenomenon and its imitators, played a role too, but that’s just a hunch.
Finally, in light of this essay, go back and reread the section on muscles in David M Halperin’s 1997 book Saint Foucault — it’s aged well! And Shawn, if you haven’t Seen Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, RUN DON’T WALK. I think it’s on Netflix streaming. Do it RIGHT NOW. Seriously.
Well, if we have moved away from this, it’s only to a leaner, younger, and no less unnatural version–the ridiculously cut, gym-toned, waxed, tanned twinky-boi-wannabes of the Sean Cody mode…
Every time I log in to Manhunt, I am veritably bombarded by headless torso shots of this type–their ice-tray abs testimony to their committed ability to withstand near-starvation better than any Orange County trophy-wife.
To this day I still periodically commit a certain number of man hours hunting for Bruce Patterson clips in the web. A similar effort was rewarded this year of my finally finding a 20-minute clip of Sonny Markham and Gianfranco in “Trying It On For Size.” The Bruce Patterson clip I’m looking for is of course the only one, “Playing With Fire,” the first one. Don’t care much for Bannon, but Christian Boeving? OMG! Really?! Please someone upload a clip of him pounding another muscleman. I’ll hunt it down and snare it if it’s the last thing I do!
This is sad, but I don’t buy it completely. Alpha male worship is here to stay. The biological instinct to sexualize hypermasculinity is older and much more adaptive than sexualizing young boys. Not to be confused with the very old practice of making young boys wear girls clothes so they can substitute for girls. Conan the gym Bunny is just being outshined at the moment by the blinding brilliance of the youthful but false and even shorter-lived starburst of the twink twinkle — Zack Ephron, Robert Pattinson, Lauter, C Crawford, etc. And even god forbid, Bieber of the Bieber Shot fame. Blame photography, film, TV, female fans, and of course the internet.
@SRJ: Blaming Frazetta? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Then blame Michelangelo, or the Ancient Greeks. There’s nothing wrong with an athletic body. Modern bodybuilding has strayed far from the ideal of the late Fifties, ideal Steve Reeves physique, however. But I’d still rather see men who take care of their bodies and work out.
@Manny E
Boeving appears (as Lance Bronson) in “Posing Strap” from ’94 or ’95. He looks a lot different, but he does get blown and rimmed by Zak Spears, who confirmed it was indeed Boeving he was paired with when he tried to deny it down the line.
Bruce Patterson was stunt-dicked in “Playing With Fire” but went all the way for All Worlds in “Like Father, Like Son” a year or two later.
Actually, the writer of this article sounds like a guy that got sand kicked in his face at the beach, or got beat up for his lunch money.
Fuck you, “Flint Ten.” It may surprise you to know that many homosexuals were, in fact, regularly bullied and assaulted as children. Because we were effeminate gay boys. If you’re the kind of man who has sex with men, and enjoys all the benefits of the last forty years of the Gay Rights Movement, and yet still thinks that girly faggots deserve to be beaten up, then I hope your dick shrivels up and falls off.
@Grrg: So, bitter much? I don’t think anyone deserves to be beaten up, and you have the right to be as girly as you want, I guess. Have fun with that! Yay!
@ Grrg: Saying someone sounds like they might have “got beat up for his lunch money” is a far cry from saying “girly faggots deserve to be beaten up”, so I’m frankly not worried about any body parts withering away, thank you very much.
@Flint Ten
It was a very lame cliché on your part. If anybody cares, I’ll go on record saying that I’ve never been beaten up or punched. One kid with a huge head who was a loud talker kicked me in the back once, and the closest I ever came to killing a person was my asshole soccer coach who cowered like a frightened animal in a corner. I also only fight when I absolutely have to. My credo in life: you can say whatever you want, but nobody ever touches me.
I’m not really sure how you can infer physical frailty from what someone writes, but since you want it butch and hard, I can step it up.
Your gender stereotypes are tired and hackneyed, so…fuck you?
Tired and hackneyed…kind of like your writing. I used language I knew you could understand, but judging from the eloquent ‘fuck you’ response, I guess I could have toned it down a notch. And speaking of stereotypes and cliches, your article is chock full of them.
Now that’s just the shriveled dick talking, or maybe your father didn’t love you enough.
Hey, don’t project your life on the rest of us! LOL
“Hey, don’t project your life on the rest of us! LOL” = “I hate you Daddy! You never hugged me, and now I’m reduced to haunting gay porn sites, denigrating writers as sissy boys, and using teenage girl IM slang! You made me this! I’m glad you’re dead!”
Christian Boeving scene with Zak Spears can be viewed and downloaded below:
http://www.4shared.com/file/221972457/c57d0836/Boeving__Christian_-_Posing_St.html