I was 16 years old the first time I saw Brad Pitt’s abs. The movie was Fight Club and it would forever redefine the male physique for myself and a generation of men I grew up with.
It probably did more harm than good.
His absurd 5% body fat physique became a subtle benchmark, woven imperceptibly into the fabric of my own body image. I didn’t pursue extreme measures I just spent a lot of time reading articles about how to achieve a similar look. Hoping one day I would have the time, commitment or money to afford a trainer so I could achieve that look.
The arrival of Fight Club in 1999 came at a time of rapidly changing identity for men. Brad Pitt’s character was the trim and toned opposite of the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers that had dominated our screen for two decades, who themselves had been the opposite of the Eastwoods and McQueens from the decades prior, back when what appeared on screen was still attainable to most.
The muscular excess of the 80s action movie has recreated itself in the Superhero genre dominating the box office today. We have fundamentally altered the way we present and understand men and their bodies, both on screen, and in our own lives.
Social scientists have examined the appeal of superhero movies and distilled at least one reason they are so popular. There is a tremendous amount of appeal in a character suddenly imbued with a power and a physique they had to do nothing to achieve, and apparently, have to do nothing to maintain.
With great power comes great responsibility… and little need for a gym membership.
That physical mentality has trickled down into all movies, regardless of genre. Every film with a shirtless male, whether they are a billionaire, werewolf (seriously, do wolves have abs?) or just a guy with a lot of time on his hands, prominently features the washboard stomach of the male lead.
The movies feature characters of tremendous physiques so they can appeal to the vast majority of men who do not have tremendous physiques. We are deliberately creating impossible and unattainable bodies to project to millions of people.
Vanity Fair wrote about it last year.
However, they only covered the struggles of the actors and stuntmen in attaining the expected results of an industry. They did not discuss the effects this is having on the psyches of the millions of men watching these movies.
Those actors, willingly or otherwise, become emissaries of the monastic lifestyle they had to embrace in order to achieve such fitness. Writers and television hosts obsess over the subject in interviews. They fawn over the actor and their ritual. The wake-up times, the grueling workouts, and the food they ate or didn’t. It feels like a right of passage for male Hollywood actors; their first superhero movie, their first shirtless exposé in a glossy magazine.
These actors are individuals of tremendous means. They spend a phenomenal amount of time and resources to look the way they do. They pay trainers. They eat specialty foods at specific intervals. They have somebody count their calories for them.
It is their job to portray a particular visual aesthetic on screen. We have interpreted this aesthetic as attainable because the people we see on screen are in fact human beings… just like us.
But they aren’t. They are focused craftsmen dedicated to a singular pursuit. And they are not just selling movies, merchandise or magazines. They are selling a kind of Dogma: Extreme physical fitness equals self-worth.
Movies have always played a significant role in selling a feeling or even a lifestyle. But they are no longer the dominant distribution medium. They are merely a part of our culture. And we as individuals have become larger actors in as consumers and “content creators.”
We post our own videos, write our own articles, we can even make our own nutritional supplements. To be a man today means working hard on all our exteriors, with little value given to foundational work. And our culture has enabled that.
Fast fashion allowed us to be better dressed at lower prices. The proliferation of gyms made peak fitness accessible. The internet spread information far faster than we could understand it.
Despite what we project, men care deeply. We seek belonging. We crave validation. And we are willing to spend money to acquire it. We primp, we purchase, we deadlift. All with the hope of a feeling of an upgraded self.
Meanwhile, our abs tightened as our emotions withered.
Those of us able to attain a modicum of fitness are so desperate to showcase our physiques we take pictures of ourselves with our shirts off in our bathrooms and post them on social media.
Men suck in, arch, bend, tighten, flexing as hard as possible, coaxing the eyes of peers and strangers.
And I am left with one thought.
How do you feel on the inside?
There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a healthy and physically fit life. A commitment to health for the sake of health is admirable. Feeling social support in your pursuit of your goals can be tremendously helpful. Wanting to look better because it makes you feel better is not unnatural. Genetics make that more possible for some than others.
But the pendulum appears to have swung too far in that direction and we are doing little to combat the creation of the stereotypical male.
As Edward Norton’s character says in fight club while looking at a man in a Calvin Klein underwear ad;
“Is that what a man looks like?”
Apparently yes.
Our current generation of men combats vulnerability with shirtlessness, conflates self-work with a commitment to crunches, and derives self-worth from digital likes.
But in the age of Instagram what we need is not more pictures or videos, but our voices.
There will always be extremes, but our commitment to those extremes has sacrificed the middle ground; a middle ground we are fully able to reclaim. We can celebrate the non-aesthetic. We can demand our magazines and movies be less superhuman and more real. We can demand that what is projected to us more accurately represents the vast majority of people receiving those projections.
We will always crave and need escapism. But we must careful not to confuse fantasy and reality, or the convince ourselves that the latter should look like the former.
We are capable of writing a healthy, more rational narrative. And perhaps the first chapter would look something like this:
The secret of perfect abs is that you don’t even need them.
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