I was talking about this topic with two male friends recently. We had all re-watched Gladiator for a movie night, and one of the things that stood out to me is that in 2000, Crowe's body was considered muscular but not...overbearing in its aesthetic. It was a fit body. A body meant to do work, not be possible due to dehydration, endless hours in the gym, or, because we all know they use it, testosterone. Both my friends talked about how inadequate they felt compared to current male swole standards and how a body like Crowe's isn't seen as enough has an impact.
We don't have that anymore for men now unless you look like you've superglued sixteen hotdogs to your stomach and haven't been able to fit through a doorframe since puberty; you're disgusting, slovenly, undisciplined, you're like a woman. Swole culture is just misogyny in a different package, the need to be so diametrically opposite to women that we've essentialized and aestheticized what it means to 'be a man.'
This issue makes me think of Kumail Nanjiani, who swiftly went for being celebrated for his transformation from softish need to jacked Avenger Bod to being mocked for looking TOO jacked (possibly by enhancements, or not.) Like women, there are unwritten rules for guys about how the transformation happens, if it’s “honest” or not.
If we could post pictures on SubStack comments, I would include some photos of the way Spiderman and Batman are portrayed in my kids’ books and action figures. Spider-man in particular— if he’s just a teenage boy under that suit, how come his thighs are twice as wide as his calves?
This article really hit home for me. I am an older millennial and body insecurity was so common with myself and friends that it was just normal. My best friend growing up was a thin and tall guy who was obsessed with gaining muscle because he never felt he was enough. I remember that he used to take all kinds of supplements when we were in high school and college. He ended up injuring his shoulder so bad in college from weight lifting that he still hasn’t fully recovered in his mid 30s.
I had the opposite issue, I was overweight growing up and had some really bad body image issues and (I believe) body dysmorphia. I wanted to be thin and slender, not muscular. I used to run for hours a day and starve myself to lose weight. I went from 220 to 143 over the course of about 8 months. It was weird, my body was strong but also incredibly weak at the same time. I could run 8-20 miles a day, but sometimes would collapse when just walking. It was a horrible time that I’m so glad is behind me. There was just no acknowledgment of men and boys having eating disorders back then, I hope that’s changing.
What a great pop cultural summation of a phenomenon that I totally missed! I like that Emily’s book title evokes the name of Guy Fieri’s TV show, because that guy comes a lot closer to my ideal of a real man than any of the dudes in her essay.
God, the protein obsession, though. I have heard people (men _and_ women, really) just obsess about protein intake for so much of my adult life (and sometimes _at_ me, in a pseudo-questioning kind of "but how do you get enough PROTEIN???" way -- because I've been vegetarian since I was a teenager) and it's like...people, if you don't have a medical condition that requires it, you aren't starving/malnourished, or you aren't in serious training to be a pro-athlete or bodybuilder or the next superhero, you really don't need to be mainlining that much protein! It's not a big deal!
I remember a visit to an MD years ago. She was a gerontologist and I was 50 years old and as buff as Brad Pitt in Fight Club. We started out gratingly because she pre-judged me for being so buff. "He wants lots of one-night stands with sweet young things. NOT.
I was training to be an Alpinist. I wanted to climb the Eiger in wintertime, in 48 hours, and survive, along with my climbing partner. At the time, I was buff like an older Rafael Nadal. 6 feet tall, 180 lbs, and capable of doing 12 pull-ups (not chin-ups).
No cruising for cougars in Walnut Creek though. Just more training for das Eiger.
I had no time for girlfriends at all. My last girlfriend was a swimsuit model, but what mattered was that we were BFF's. No marriages at all unless everything changed. Unless she decided to finish her Phd in particle physics at CERN. Unless I got a broken collarbone on the Eiger and had to rappel off in agonizing pain.
This was a really good piece, thank you for sharing it. It's something I've struggled with a bit during the pandemic- more free time to narrowly focus on that aspect of self and "cultivate" it at the expense of overall well-being. Anne, I think you had a good line on it the other week in the shopping/consumerism piece, about how capitalism makes everything a work in progress you need to improve on. I actually bought some muscle milk for a few weeks and was thinking, "Yes THIS is the boost!" But then realized it didn't really do anything...
"The men’s media space has transformed — but alongside coverage of trans rights and addiction recovery that you never would have seen in the 2000s, you still find articles to “pack on pounds” and “get jacked.” Media culture traumatized a generation of women in startlingly specific ways — but millennial men didn’t make it out unscathed either."
Absolutely no doubt about it. I'm an old Gen-Xer but I watched the transformation in real time. (Literally - the Texas Rangers had a first baseman named Rafael Palmeiro; he had a good year in the '87 season - the next opening day he came out and he was way more swole. The announcers boggled about it and called it a 'stunning transformation'. They said Palmeiro told them he had worked out all during the off-season to get bulked up. He had starting shooting up steroids, of course.
"I remember a guy friend telling me about dating women after college who followed the 6-6-6 rule, which reemerged in recent years on Twitter: they only dated men who were at least six feet tall, had six-pack abs, and earned at least in the six figures. "
Yeah, that was a form of money grubbing that took off during the 80's. Hard to square with the hearts and flowers and 'true love' aesthetic. Everybody wants the ridiculous.
"The movement for gender equality has often focused on empowering girls. But as Blum sees it, achieving gender equality also requires attention for boys. They too need to know they are not circumscribed by ideas about who and how they should be.
Boys are more likely than girls to die in their second decade of life, and they use more alcohol and tobacco, habits that erode their health as they age, Blum said. But even more troubling, Blum’s team found that boys suffered higher levels of physical violence, neglect and sexual abuse by adults than girls. And the more a boy was victimized, the more likely he was to do violence to others."
A lot of crappy violence in a crappily violent world.
elm
and a lot of people are saying, 'too much is never enough'
This was a great introduction to the millennial problem of body insecurity. I would argue that there are two pieces of millennial media that cannot be excluded from discussions of 90s/2000s masculinity.
First, it’s really important the Dragon Ball manga/anime franchise greatly impacted how a lot of guys born in the 80s and early 90s envision their ideal physique. It might sound ridiculous, but there are probably 20 million men in America who would say Goku was their most impactful tv-based role model. And to this day, Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan references are replete in masculine-oriented hip-hop and popular music. That show saturated millennial men with jacked, hyper-masculine, and always-training characters who ate a ton of protein. And many of those characters were humanized with enough “everyday” moral problems that the show never seemed that fantastical. Young men related to the characters and internalized many of their social tendencies, as well as their muscle culture. Just check out #goku on instagram - the influence of the Dragon Ball franchise is real and long-lasting.
Another body of media that really framed popular idealizations of a “swole” physique for millennials was the corpus of Tupac. Music videos of Tupac rapping shirtless or just a vest were omnipresent on MTV and early Youtube. The dude was “swole” but lean in the same vein as Brad Pitt in Fight Club, but yet his cultural legacy of elevating rap into a highly nuanced art form ended up lionizing his image in much more lasting ways. His music videos and album shotz influenced a generation of music marketers, and all of the audiences that watched them.
Thank you for this article - it really made me think. I hope someone derives some value from my submissions here!
Small quibble. Millennials were NOT the first generation to grow up playing video games. Generation X was. Let’s not forget arcades or Atari. Plenty of Gen-Xers like me grew up playing video games.
Getting swole is pure body-building competition. All pure testosterone, or anabolic steroids (for cheaters). It IS pure male puissance in that male bodies respond differently to steroids than female ones.
Many male bodies respond to weight-lifting with swole bodies. Try 24-Hour Fitness for this. I got my very swole (unwantedly swole), body by doing rough carpentry in my 60's.
In my 20's I got my un-swole yet Bruce Lee-like body by climbing in Yosemite Valley.
Serena Williams is swole; her kid sister Venus isn't. Tournament results are inconclusive.
Conan the Barbarian is swole, Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" isn't.
This is quite the contrast with my own youth long ago: when I was in high school, the 6 Million Dollar Man was a big hit; definitely a different view of what was ideal and how you get there.
I was talking about this topic with two male friends recently. We had all re-watched Gladiator for a movie night, and one of the things that stood out to me is that in 2000, Crowe's body was considered muscular but not...overbearing in its aesthetic. It was a fit body. A body meant to do work, not be possible due to dehydration, endless hours in the gym, or, because we all know they use it, testosterone. Both my friends talked about how inadequate they felt compared to current male swole standards and how a body like Crowe's isn't seen as enough has an impact.
We don't have that anymore for men now unless you look like you've superglued sixteen hotdogs to your stomach and haven't been able to fit through a doorframe since puberty; you're disgusting, slovenly, undisciplined, you're like a woman. Swole culture is just misogyny in a different package, the need to be so diametrically opposite to women that we've essentialized and aestheticized what it means to 'be a man.'
This issue makes me think of Kumail Nanjiani, who swiftly went for being celebrated for his transformation from softish need to jacked Avenger Bod to being mocked for looking TOO jacked (possibly by enhancements, or not.) Like women, there are unwritten rules for guys about how the transformation happens, if it’s “honest” or not.
If we could post pictures on SubStack comments, I would include some photos of the way Spiderman and Batman are portrayed in my kids’ books and action figures. Spider-man in particular— if he’s just a teenage boy under that suit, how come his thighs are twice as wide as his calves?
This article really hit home for me. I am an older millennial and body insecurity was so common with myself and friends that it was just normal. My best friend growing up was a thin and tall guy who was obsessed with gaining muscle because he never felt he was enough. I remember that he used to take all kinds of supplements when we were in high school and college. He ended up injuring his shoulder so bad in college from weight lifting that he still hasn’t fully recovered in his mid 30s.
I had the opposite issue, I was overweight growing up and had some really bad body image issues and (I believe) body dysmorphia. I wanted to be thin and slender, not muscular. I used to run for hours a day and starve myself to lose weight. I went from 220 to 143 over the course of about 8 months. It was weird, my body was strong but also incredibly weak at the same time. I could run 8-20 miles a day, but sometimes would collapse when just walking. It was a horrible time that I’m so glad is behind me. There was just no acknowledgment of men and boys having eating disorders back then, I hope that’s changing.
What a great pop cultural summation of a phenomenon that I totally missed! I like that Emily’s book title evokes the name of Guy Fieri’s TV show, because that guy comes a lot closer to my ideal of a real man than any of the dudes in her essay.
God, the protein obsession, though. I have heard people (men _and_ women, really) just obsess about protein intake for so much of my adult life (and sometimes _at_ me, in a pseudo-questioning kind of "but how do you get enough PROTEIN???" way -- because I've been vegetarian since I was a teenager) and it's like...people, if you don't have a medical condition that requires it, you aren't starving/malnourished, or you aren't in serious training to be a pro-athlete or bodybuilder or the next superhero, you really don't need to be mainlining that much protein! It's not a big deal!
I remember a visit to an MD years ago. She was a gerontologist and I was 50 years old and as buff as Brad Pitt in Fight Club. We started out gratingly because she pre-judged me for being so buff. "He wants lots of one-night stands with sweet young things. NOT.
I was training to be an Alpinist. I wanted to climb the Eiger in wintertime, in 48 hours, and survive, along with my climbing partner. At the time, I was buff like an older Rafael Nadal. 6 feet tall, 180 lbs, and capable of doing 12 pull-ups (not chin-ups).
No cruising for cougars in Walnut Creek though. Just more training for das Eiger.
I had no time for girlfriends at all. My last girlfriend was a swimsuit model, but what mattered was that we were BFF's. No marriages at all unless everything changed. Unless she decided to finish her Phd in particle physics at CERN. Unless I got a broken collarbone on the Eiger and had to rappel off in agonizing pain.
Signed, Jack Donaghey IV
PS Sometimes, form follows function.
This was a really good piece, thank you for sharing it. It's something I've struggled with a bit during the pandemic- more free time to narrowly focus on that aspect of self and "cultivate" it at the expense of overall well-being. Anne, I think you had a good line on it the other week in the shopping/consumerism piece, about how capitalism makes everything a work in progress you need to improve on. I actually bought some muscle milk for a few weeks and was thinking, "Yes THIS is the boost!" But then realized it didn't really do anything...
"The men’s media space has transformed — but alongside coverage of trans rights and addiction recovery that you never would have seen in the 2000s, you still find articles to “pack on pounds” and “get jacked.” Media culture traumatized a generation of women in startlingly specific ways — but millennial men didn’t make it out unscathed either."
Absolutely no doubt about it. I'm an old Gen-Xer but I watched the transformation in real time. (Literally - the Texas Rangers had a first baseman named Rafael Palmeiro; he had a good year in the '87 season - the next opening day he came out and he was way more swole. The announcers boggled about it and called it a 'stunning transformation'. They said Palmeiro told them he had worked out all during the off-season to get bulked up. He had starting shooting up steroids, of course.
"I remember a guy friend telling me about dating women after college who followed the 6-6-6 rule, which reemerged in recent years on Twitter: they only dated men who were at least six feet tall, had six-pack abs, and earned at least in the six figures. "
Yeah, that was a form of money grubbing that took off during the 80's. Hard to square with the hearts and flowers and 'true love' aesthetic. Everybody wants the ridiculous.
There is also always this as well:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/02/22/why-we-dont-talk-about-sexual-violence-against-boys-why-we-should/
"The movement for gender equality has often focused on empowering girls. But as Blum sees it, achieving gender equality also requires attention for boys. They too need to know they are not circumscribed by ideas about who and how they should be.
Boys are more likely than girls to die in their second decade of life, and they use more alcohol and tobacco, habits that erode their health as they age, Blum said. But even more troubling, Blum’s team found that boys suffered higher levels of physical violence, neglect and sexual abuse by adults than girls. And the more a boy was victimized, the more likely he was to do violence to others."
A lot of crappy violence in a crappily violent world.
elm
and a lot of people are saying, 'too much is never enough'
This was a great introduction to the millennial problem of body insecurity. I would argue that there are two pieces of millennial media that cannot be excluded from discussions of 90s/2000s masculinity.
First, it’s really important the Dragon Ball manga/anime franchise greatly impacted how a lot of guys born in the 80s and early 90s envision their ideal physique. It might sound ridiculous, but there are probably 20 million men in America who would say Goku was their most impactful tv-based role model. And to this day, Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan references are replete in masculine-oriented hip-hop and popular music. That show saturated millennial men with jacked, hyper-masculine, and always-training characters who ate a ton of protein. And many of those characters were humanized with enough “everyday” moral problems that the show never seemed that fantastical. Young men related to the characters and internalized many of their social tendencies, as well as their muscle culture. Just check out #goku on instagram - the influence of the Dragon Ball franchise is real and long-lasting.
Another body of media that really framed popular idealizations of a “swole” physique for millennials was the corpus of Tupac. Music videos of Tupac rapping shirtless or just a vest were omnipresent on MTV and early Youtube. The dude was “swole” but lean in the same vein as Brad Pitt in Fight Club, but yet his cultural legacy of elevating rap into a highly nuanced art form ended up lionizing his image in much more lasting ways. His music videos and album shotz influenced a generation of music marketers, and all of the audiences that watched them.
Thank you for this article - it really made me think. I hope someone derives some value from my submissions here!
Small quibble. Millennials were NOT the first generation to grow up playing video games. Generation X was. Let’s not forget arcades or Atari. Plenty of Gen-Xers like me grew up playing video games.
Getting swole is pure body-building competition. All pure testosterone, or anabolic steroids (for cheaters). It IS pure male puissance in that male bodies respond differently to steroids than female ones.
Many male bodies respond to weight-lifting with swole bodies. Try 24-Hour Fitness for this. I got my very swole (unwantedly swole), body by doing rough carpentry in my 60's.
In my 20's I got my un-swole yet Bruce Lee-like body by climbing in Yosemite Valley.
Serena Williams is swole; her kid sister Venus isn't. Tournament results are inconclusive.
Conan the Barbarian is swole, Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" isn't.
etc etc etc
This is quite the contrast with my own youth long ago: when I was in high school, the 6 Million Dollar Man was a big hit; definitely a different view of what was ideal and how you get there.