The Curious Case of the Repentant Bro and Gym Rat Rebel
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I began exercising —regularly at the age of fifteen. Before the age of fifteen there was nothing athletic about me. I was a closeted gay adolescent and the most athletic thing I did was to walk home from school. I loathed and feared gym class and I ate poorly. I wasn’t overweight but I didn’t have the casual leanness of a typical youth. I was soft and could easily probe my belly. Then, during my sophomore year the district changed what constituted gym class. They gave us a choice. We could choose walking, lifting, aerobics, or what had, until then, constituted regular gym class—dodgeball, kickball, football, and a whole other slew of ball play. I opted for walking once I learned that it entailed being allowed to use our forbidden electronic devices during the school day, and that our teacher was going to lead us out into the beautiful, crisp fall sunshine, culminating in a walk to the water ice stand at the end of that gym cycle.
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Until that time I had never done significant walking, but I made a mix tape and packed my Walkman. At the end of the cycle I was walking outside of school, taking late night walks around my neighborhood listening to music, and I had lost my belly. I had become a lean, sinewy American youth, like a boy from a Levis ad. During the semester’s second cycle I decided to do something very different for a gay closeted loner, or so it felt to me, and that was to sign up for weightlifting. Entering the school’s spartan gym felt like some wild revelation. This was where all the jocks and bullies worked out. The stale scent of sweat hung over the air, mingling with the strange coppery smell of rusting metal. Metallica blared from the speakers. The equipment, which I had feared, turned out in its use to be surprisingly intuitive, especially with the crude little illustrations provided by the manufacturer. I began to feel hard, and I began to feel hardened. I still recall the first time I felt a perceptible muscle flex in a way that shocked me, pleased me, and somehow made me feel proud. I signed up for the same experience the third cycle of the semester, and then I asked my dad to fix up the old home gym in the basement, where I nearly killed myself one evening when I could not force the bench bar back and had to ease that bar, bearing 185 pounds of murderous weight, down onto my own sternum, then squirm out from underneath it. I bore a monstrous violet bruise across my chest for weeks, and then asked my dad if he could add me to the membership at his health club. By the end of the year I was a very fit, moderately muscular gay teen with an admittedly narcissistic preening love and pride of his body. I was fascinated by what it felt like to be hard, to be athletic, to be, dare I said it or thought it, to be hot. I was a hot boy, and that felt very weird and very liberating and delightful. Girls began to notice me and I still refused to notice them.
Fast-forward twenty-years, and I wonder what happened to us all, and how I can even begin to explicate those changes in this short fluff piece. The truth is that I cannot. The changes that powerful forces have wrought on us are almost beyond explication. Worse yet may be the truth that even if someone was able to do so it wouldn’t really matter, because I can’t be the only one who feels that virtually nothing really matters anymore, and even when it does it passes only for a breathing space before the next global or national emergency arrives. I mention this though because social media is part of the conundrum I see before me, which is, as I see it, a national crisis of narcissism. We have become a world of narcissists with cameras.
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We laud and worship grown-men simply for being very physically fit. This is sick, and weird, and deeply, deeply unhealthy. We know nothing about these men other than their body fat percentage and the sculpted nature of their physique. They could be racist. They could, frankly, be Nazis. They could be Trump supporters. But who cares, right? Because they look great naked. Gay men following straight men, who are probably homophobes, probably think of their followers as sick jokes, simply because they look great naked. Makes sense, right? Sending them money on OnlyFans because they look great naked. If I don’t think too hard about it then it makes sense. Maybe.
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Scroll through Instagram and there is an entire army of lean hard men out there willing to offer up exercise advice. These men saturate their own market, and one wonders about their private, sordid lives. One imagines all sorts of dark and dreary strip mall American dreams, rusting, gutted American dreams. Because any degree of deception is possible on the internet. There are services that will, for a fee, allow aspiring influencers the chance to pose on sets mocked up to resemble private jets, lavish hotel suites, and other must-haves for the fake-it-until-you-make-it crowd. I imagine men with single digit body fat percentages and broad suit jacket measurements who have $39 in the bank and need it for their next round of protein shakes, so they can keep swelling until they make it, until their work out plans propel them into fame and fortune. I imagine these men perversely lonely, and I imagine them hungry for a chance. And all the while fostering an illusion. They will sponsor coffee brands, underwear brands, protein shakes, biotic supplements, and fitness chains. They will post that they are soon bringing fire new content, but each time I wonder how afire it will be, because isn’t it always the same? A cliché of a cliché of a cliché of a shot Bruce Weber or Steven Klein once made on a beach? Such that these men are chasing the fame once conferred officially by gatekeepers?
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Of course there is the constant whiff of imperial decline about all of this. Variously the Instagram Swole Boy reflects the age of decadence that characterizes dying empires like the United States of America. The dying empire limps away from, smothers, murders, and rejects intellectualism, and what could be less intellectual than a fully-grown man who only posts about his body, weightlifting, and video games? Ah yes, the video games. So we have a paradigm where grown gay men will financially support the lifestyles of adult boy children who invite them to watch them variously jerk off and play video games. Such a decadent and diseased society cannot stand. I see these young men on Twitter and the hollowness of their lives, the vacuity, fascinates me. Watch me on Twitch. Join me on Twitch. Forgot my headphones lol. Leg Day. Chest Day. What order do you like to structure your workouts in? If I was your gym partner what would you do? If you were to walk in the gym and see me like this, what would you do?
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Chest day and I forgot my headphones. 7000 likes. Nothing about this is surprising, either. Nothing surprises me about the fact that in an empire as decayed as ours seven thousand people liked this poor soul’s music-free chest day. If you were to walk in the gym and see me like this, what would you do? Probably leave, because you’re straight and I have my dignity.
Why else do they do it? Probably because the ruse of late stage capitalism is up, and as the pundits love to note, nobody wants to work anymore. Why would anyone want to work? Why would anyone want to work when we know that the real way, in fact pretty much the only way to make money in 2021, is to have money already? Or to weave a web of salacious, salable lies? Or to be very young, very attractive, and white so that such a person can gain a whole nation state of followers whom they can then influence? To be very young, very good-looking, and white and post topless dancing lip-synching videos on Tik Tok? After all, not everyone can do that. It takes a lot of talent to be born young, white, and very good-looking, as well as to master the art of lip-synching for a several second clip. Do I sound bitter? Because aren’t we all? I don’t want to go to work either. But I have no desire to become one of these people either. Maybe I have too much dignity. Maybe I believe too fervently in the old world. Maybe I just miss a world where things were deeper, murkier, more nuanced, where art still mattered and where edited topless lip-synching videos weren’t held up as art or any form of accomplishment.
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There’s more. The narcissism is deepening, calcifying. There is a sense to me of the Spartan, that a dying empire breeds amateur warriors. We now have spin class warriors. These white collar professionals leave their cubicles and through their cosplay—elaborate, expensive, garish gym gear—they engage in shocking acts of war, such as riding a spinning bike for an hour, maybe less. They redeem their shameless complicity in the moral and practical failure that is the modern economy and the horror that is office culture. They bare their teeth. Nothing can stop them, nothing, that is, until this empire finally collapses and they find out how much they can endure. Grown men lift weights and post photos because what else do they have to offer the world? They inhabit no communities that they themselves undergird as pillars. They do not have strong families. They are shamed in illegitimate debt—student loan debt—that they lack the political and social imagination to overthrow at the ballot box. They are overworked and underpaid and they also lack the social and political imagination to change that paradigm, but they can get swole. Muscular, they cower in the sweat-stained nightmare of late stage capitalism. They are still little boys on an adventure quest. They have no intellectual core in a country that always eschewed intellect, eschewed it for so long that one day the nation just discovered that whole thing had become vestigial and chucked it in the trash. Watch me on Twitch. Join me on Twitch. Forgot my headphones lol. Leg Day. Chest Day. Imagine trying to parse these statements in some future benevolent and advanced civilization.
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I still work out five to seven-days a week. I run. In my twenties I took up Muay Thai boxing. I still thrill when I walk in the gym. I feel, still, despite all these misgivings and my own personal repulsion, that I am conquering some small part of myself each time. I still feel a sense of minor accomplishment. I still reject any notion that everyone shouldn’t engage in some form of regular exercise in a nation where 42.4% of people were obese as of 2018, and where nearly ten-percent of the population were severely obese. I still enjoy the narcissistic thrill of looking great naked. But I shudder to think how alone I feel in longing for a more intellectual world. I shudder to think how excusable we have made the idea of spending so much time in the gym sculpting oneself into an ideal while nurturing no inner terrain. I still shudder to think how much this culture therefore excuses flagrant personal immaturity, especially in young men, such that many are little more grown emotionally and mentally than they were as high school freshmen. I shudder to think about how this all may end: a nation of Swole Boys marching off the Imperial cliff.
