“‘We’ve idolised this athletic warrior type, but it’s been accepted that most people didn’t aspire to be that,’ explained Timothy Baghurst, a specialist in male body image at Oklahoma State University. ‘Portraits in the 16th century aren’t of tough soldiers – they are more commanders and leaders whose physique isn’t that important.’ In post-subsistence industrialised societies, brains and birthrights have always trumped brawn.”
“In a 2005 study of pastoral nomads of northern Kenya, Harrison G Pope, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, and the psychologists Shaun Filiault and Benjamin C Campbell at Boston University discovered that perceptions of masculinity hung not on muscle mass but on other forms of overt virility, such as raiding, and protecting livestock. In the US, by contrast, the overt use of physical force is now unacceptable in society. Muscles, and the lionisation of sport – essentially a tribal pursuit – have risen to fill the gap.”
“Few iconic characters exhibit this shift towards beefiness better than James Bond, the secret intelligence officer, code name 007. As envisaged by his creator, the British writer Ian Fleming in the 1950s, James Bond was debonair and sophisticated, with an appeal derived from wit and charm, and inhabiting a world in which women were little more than secretaries and sexual temptresses. In the later film adaptations, Sean Connery as Bond looked good in a suit but he was never stacked. Then came Daniel Craig and that scene in Casino Royale (2006) in which he strode out of the sea in a pair of skin-tight trunks, ripped chest streaming with water. Ostensibly, it paid homage to Ursula Andress who did the same in Dr No (1962). But it also announced to the world that male bodies would now be just as fetishised as female ones.”
“But who is doing the fetishising? Not women. In 2000, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a telling experiment led by Pope at Harvard. College-aged men in Austria, France and the US were asked to choose both their ideal male body and the body they believed women preferred. In all three countries, men picked an ideal on average 28 lb (12.7 kg) more muscular than their own – and they believed that women wanted a male body 30 lb (13.6 kg) more muscular. The men consistently overestimated the appeal of brawn, while women, when asked, preferred an ‘ordinary’ body without the added muscle.”
“A knee-jerk reaction to obesity might be another reason: for much of society, ‘fat’ signals a lack of discipline, loss of control and laziness. Sharp abs, by contrast, patently manifest the opposite traits: you can (literally) see the work that’s gone into honing them.”
“In Australia, Dion Nucifora, 28, works out six times a week; meanwhile his father, a construction labourer, maintains his own fitness, strength and masculinity by more gentle means: swimming laps. At the end of the week, while his dad’s generation might choose to let off steam with evening drinks, Nucifora, an insurance worker and part-time model, goes back to the gym or to boot camp with his co workers – knitting together male relations in the same way as alcohol once did.”
“In a piece on the rise of the spornosexual, Mark Simpson recently told Esquire magazine that men have ‘learned that in a visual world if you aren’t noticed you just don’t exist’.”
“‘It’s all about first impressions; people who have the leanest body and are well-groomed are the ones who get the most attention,’ Nucifora told me. Dating apps such as Tinder, in which you choose a mate based on a photograph, swiping ‘right’ to denote interest and ‘left’ to reject them, have only increased visual currencies. As Nucifora put it: ‘If you haven’t taken care of your appearance, you are going to be that person swiped left every time.’”