Image: Jacques Nieuwoudt. Image by Jake Weisz.
In this powerful essay, Jacques Nieuwoudt speaks about the unhealthy relationship gay male culture can have with the gym, toxic internalised male beauty standards, and muscle dysmorphia.
Nieuwoudt asks if there is a way to find balance with male beauty standards – particularly when surrounded by the yacht parties, circuit parties, and insatiable thirst for gay male beauty in the Sydney scene.
He asks if there is truly a point of contentment in the middle, somewhere between being proud of a healthy body and constantly trying to attain the unattainable: perfection.
(Why) do you even lift?
I am thirteen when I first step inside a gym. Overweight, inverted nipples, and wearing a T-shirt two sizes too big. My soon-to-be personal trainer enters the consultation room.
“Let’s get you massive,” he says.
His bicep is bigger than my head.
We hit the weights hard. We sort my nutrition, though all I’m really hungry for are the veins pouring down his forearms. We never discuss how “massive” and “healthy” are not the same thing. Nor that gay men and bodybuilders are two of the highest risk groups for developing Muscle Dysmorphia.
My training continues more or less into uni, by which time my eyes have absorbed a lethal dose of “inspiration” (#bearmode #yoked #fitnessmodel). The resulting tumour is malignant, shaped like Mr Olympia, and metastasising in my optic nerve. I can no longer see the sex appeal of normal bodies.
The homogenous hotties of the Sydney gay scene don’t help. It seems to me the ticket to any one of their yacht parties is a six-pack. I’m sure what’s left of my belly is inadmissible. The Daily Jocks speedo I try on agrees.
I Google ‘Trenbolone’ for the second time. I am scared. Scared because this time, the long list of side-effects, “neurotoxicity” and “advanced brain ageing” among them, doesn’t scare me.
But this pull. This gravity I’m feeling. It isn’t just the product of toxic beauty standards or wanting to fit in; it’s limbic. A lust I feel in my own body.
Unlike the cis straight man, I experience homoeroticism. I don’t just want my dream body. I’m attracted to it. While the cis straight man sexualises women, an ontological other, I sexualise men, the grouping I belong to. So when platforms like Grindr, Instagram, and Twitter routinely reduce men into sexual objects, I learn to reduce myself.
“I wish my pecs bulged out like his”, “I wish I had his v-line”, “Why can’t my calves look like that?”. I learn another man’s sex appeal is just a deficit in myself. And it only takes a sideward glance by the dumbbells to see I’m not alone.
But it isn’t all bad. Sometimes I enjoy being a sexual object. Especially when I get to appreciate a fat pump in the mirror – or better yet – when it scores me a lingering glance in the changerooms. So I keep lifting.
By 24, I am 100 kilos and only 11 per cent body fat. Straight girls at the club start calling me superman. Circuit parties are a sea of men staring at the veins pouring down my forearms.
But still I’m not muscular enough. Still, my reflection in the heat-smogged bathroom mirror is a checklist of “to-dos”.
But resistance training is much easier than training to resist.
So I tell myself it’s okay to want to look “fit”. I constantly reiterate the enormous health benefits of weightlifting. Endorphins this and discipline that. I insist bodybuilding isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s a sport.
I spin eloquent meta-narratives about the beauty of the process, about pushing oneself, about progress, endurance, and hitting new performance limits. I am persuasive.
But then I ask myself what came first: the lifting, or this legitimation? Are these neatly woven reasons really why I train? Or are they true because I need them to be? Because if I can’t convince myself I gym for healthy, normative reasons, I’ll be forced to stop altogether?
Right now, I’m dating a boy who, like me, wants to get massive. And, like me, he already is. The hairs below his jawline grow in in a little spiral pattern, and yet he squirms when I stare at him like a Van Gogh. He is articulate and contrarian, but regularly returns the day after a debate with a changed mind.
The two pillars of muscle running down his lower back seem shaped for my hands to hold (not to mention where they lead).
When this boy glances past the cables at some grunting mass and tells me he wishes he were bigger, I am stupefied. I want to shake him.
“You are overwhelming,” I want to say. Just looking at him floods me with so much awe that it tickles my sinuses. And yet, even this boy can look at himself and see inadequacy.
But what makes me the most angry is I’m in no position to correct him. My biceps, swollen as he says these things, are themselves an endorsement of the mindset we share. Bigger, bigger, but never big enough.
I wish he had never stepped foot in the gym.
It is at this moment I realise I am no longer comfortable being an apologist for resistance training. It’s time to answer the question I’ve lobbed excuse after excuse at, but that, really, I’m afraid to approach with a ten-foot pole.
I go to the gym because I want a fuckable reflection. Because I enjoy the countless benefits of ‘pretty privilege’. Because I’ve spent a decade internalising warped standards of male beauty. Because I want muscular men I don’t know or care for to look me up and down like a piece of meat. Because, due to the wonders of homoeroticism, I can’t decide if these are men I want to befriend, bed, or be.
A confession from inside the cult of dysmorphia. Wouldn’t that be an easy place to finish this article.
Unfortunately, resistance training has done me immense good too.
For one, the food-loving kid inside me can finally eat seven meals a day and not hate himself for it. The meniscus tear in my knee is no longer a source of instability or pain, and I have an understanding of physical health and nutrition that I never would’ve sought out otherwise.
And, as much as I hate to say it, I do enjoy the process (‘endorphins’ this, and ‘discipline’ that). I’m even finally proud of my body (at least, most of the time).
But does that make it right to parade my musculature around as a monument to resistance training? All while knowing the dissatisfaction, obsession, and superficiality that went into building it? All while knowing some kid might find himself looking at the veins pouring down my forearms, and decide he wants to be a monument too?
Gym and I haven’t broken up. As with any tumultuous long-term relationship, I’m hoping there’s a balance to be found. Though I wish the boy I’m dating had never met gym, the two are well-acquainted now, and I imagine our little dysmorphic throuple will go on for the foreseeable future.
But it isn’t all doom and dysmorphia.
I do know one thing: taking a step back and examining my drives has allowed me to reclaim some autonomy. It has allowed me to invest a bit more into the parts of me that will actually outlive my remaining ten years of beauty.
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