One of the ways boys get interested in other boys is by building up their own bodies. Young men are often much interested in advertisements for bar-bells or similar exercisers which promise big muscles and strong arms and legs. Boys who have inferior physiques are intrigued by the ads which describe how seven-stone weaklings are transformed into muscle men… In some respects this is all well and good. I’m in favour of boys being strong and muscular and healthy. But the trouble is that some get so interested in their own bodies while they are preoccupied with building themselves up that in time they can think of little else. Inevitably, too, they compare their bodies with those of other boys, and they both admire and envy those with better bodies than their own. This admiration can take the form of being sexually aroused by the others, and out of this comes the desire to have sex with the body of another person.
Wardell B Pomoroy, Boys and Sex [i]
The young, almost exclusively male, crowd is in a state of palpable excitement. Many are jumping out of their seats, faces shiny and expectant with joy. On stage, a man completely nude except for a pair of briefs that appear, like his orange ‘sun tan’, to have been painted on offers up his body to their rapacious gaze. On his face a strangely disturbing look of pleasure and pain, expressed in a tight, laboured grin, that stays immobile as he turns first this way and then that in a routine that has been rehearsed a thousand times in front of his bedroom mirror. His movements are vaguely in time to Bon Jovi’s ‘The Final Countdown’ which is huffing and puffing over the PA. Preposterous rock meets preposterous body. Each movement flows into a new pose, framing his body in a fresh way, offering the wide-eyed audience more strained and strained flesh to feast on. They yell encouragement, egging him on; compressed air horns shriek; amidst the clamour a friend shouts ‘Do it Dave!’ The huge veins in his neck throb with the exertion and rush of it all and his whole body flexes and pumps like one enormous, grotesque organ.The throb gets under his skin and extends across his whole body, galvanising his skin like some kind of demented wiring alive with electricity. The throb seems to drown out Bon Jovi, also reaching his own inflated climax, and the man brings his huge frame round to face the audience, bends forward, still grinning at the now completely berserk boys in the auditorium, and brings his arms half-way out from his body, bent at the elbows, hands clenched into and fists and pointing at one another, flexing his whole upper torso, doubling the size of his shoulders, chest and neck, swelling the muscles and veins to the point where it seems he will at any moment explode into 16 stones of Bolognese sauce. This is the ‘most muscular’ pose and the final frightening flourish of his routine. The boys in the audience recognize the finale and are beside themselves now: the cry goes up from a hundred lusty lungs, ‘Beef! Beef! Beef!’
This is the bizarre world of competitive bodybuilding.
The music ends and the vast mound of muscle and gristle leaves the stage punching the air with his fists to whoops and cheers. Now the women bodybuilders take the stage. The young men begin to yawn and chatter amongst themselves; many wander out of the auditorium to the foyer to buy some of the various high – protein snacks and dietary supplements on offer that feature promising ‘enormous gains’. Others peruse the glossy muscle-mags and ‘how-to’ literature with such titles as Rip Up! Muscleblasting!, Posing!, Big Legs!, and Big Chest!, the mandatory exclamation marks hysterically advertising the shots of exciting, naked male flesh on offer.
Pomeroy’s fears, expressed in 1968, when bodybuilding was in its infancy, would appear to have been borne out. Bodybuilding seems to have led to a cult of the male body that brings about obvious homosexual behaviour in young men. The preoccupation with their own bodies, the comparing of them with other boys, the admiration and envy that this entails must lead to sexual arousal and inevitably to ‘the desire to have sex with the body of another person’.
Except this is almost certainly not the case. In fact, body-building does not interest boys in other boys – that interest is already palpably there. What bodybuilding does, ironically, is to allow them to direct that interest in a way that is socially acceptable. Since Pomeroy, bodybuilding has come to be seen as a means by which boys can turn desire into identification. Most of the boys who take up bodybuilding are almost certainly motivated by the same wish to avoid homosexuality that so concerned the sexual ‘liberal’ Pomeroy. The vast majority of the boys attending the body-building competitions like the one described above are heterosexual-identified and few, if any, of their friends consider their antics queer; quite the reverse: they are taken as the quintessence of virile heterosexuality.
It is easy to see where (besides projection) Pomeroy’s concern came from. In his day bodybuilding was regarded as something indecent, something rather perverse. It was associated with sleazy Athletic Model Guild and ‘physical culturist’ magazines; a world of irresponsible young drop-outs and hustlers in Venice Beach, living off older ‘patrons’, who described themselves as enthusiastic admirers of the male form and collectors of Greco-Roman sculpture. For a man of Pomeroy’s generation, to draw attention to the male body in anything other than gladiator movies (the license of exoticism, the justification of historical edification) was considered improper, so it is easy to understand how and interest in the male body would be construed as deviant. Unlike ‘proper’ sports, bodybuilding does not displace the interest in the male body into activity; instead it focuses unashamedly on the corpus virile. Pomeroy’s concern that an interest in their own bodies would lead boys to homosexuality is revealing: it shows how in his time the male body was considered so attractive that it had to be denied, even by those who possessed one; boys had to look away from their bodies or else, before you knew it, they would have their hands down their best mate’s trousers.
But that was before Arnold Schwarzenegger. Through films like Pumping Iron, this five times Mr Universe and seven times Mr Olympia popularised bodybuilding and brought it into the mainstream by exorcising some of its unpleasant and unwholesome associations. With his Republican ‘Mr Clean’ image of upright, responsible heterosexuality, Schwarzenegger taught America that it had nothing to fear from bodybuilding, that it would not lead its boys along the path mapped out by Pomeroy. Instead it became apparent that bodybuilding could be an adaptation of masculinity to the radical changes that had occurred in sexual politics and attitudes to the male body in the 1960s and 1970s that left the essentials – heterosexuality and patriotic conservatism – more or less intact. The bodybuilder in the shape of Schwarzenegger, rather than ignore or blindly resist change, mobilised a new narcissistic but fiercely heterosexual masculinity in support of reactionary formations. In effect, the bodybuilder was the fleshy representation of the New Right regressive revolution: in tune with developments in popular culture but deploying them for a right-wing agenda.
Arnie’s murderous antics in films such as Conan the Barbarian (1985), The Terminator (1984), Predator (1987) and Commando (1985), along with those of Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo and Rocky series, portrayed the bodybuilder to young America as a fantastic warrior/patriot, a role that legitimised gazing at his body at the same time as disavowing any suggesting of passivity: the most active Hollywood stance being, of course, that of the killer. And since bodybuilders had the most passivity to disavow they were invariably the most prolific killers, taking the average body count in in the Hollywood war/action film into the realms of a tactical nuclear exchange. The more exaggerated the musculature, the more it had to explain and justify itself in mounds of dead bodies. The psychopathic individualism of the Hollywood bodybuilder-killer neatly fitted into the Reaganite discourse of personal responsibility and individual liberty and the retreat from public space into the most private space of all- the body (one area where the individual was sure to be in control). This was especially attractive to men who had felt challenged by the advances of feminism and the gay movement. The genre of bodybuilder-killer films represented an attempt to restate masculinity in terms of the most hysterically exaggerated ‘masculine’ signification, a signification that would have been regarded as ‘camp’ a decade earlier.
So in Commando, directed by Mark Lester, Schwarzenegger waddling around barely able to walk due to the over-development of his quadriceps (leg muscles),his rumpsteak body smeared with camouflage paint and carefully always on display either through cute cut-off combat jackets or helpfully denuded by high explosives, is presented to us as a ‘crack’ soldier. On top of his muscle drag he dons even more macho accessories; putting on a flak jacket laden with munitions and slinging an armoury of weaponry around his torso until he resembles nothing so much as a walking advertisement for the insecurity of 1980s man. Then we witness him despatching an entire South American army single-handedly with his – inevitably – enormous gun. As the bodies of the South American soldiers pile up, the American bodybuilder-killer proves his racial and sexual superiority over the wop weaklings. All this is done ostensibly to rescue his daughter from an enemy who wears leather pants, a moustache and a tight net vest. Thus the enjoyment of the spectacle fof Schwarzenegger’s sweating muscles is drawn into a heterosexual plotline, one that nicely emphasises the boundless power of the heterosexual male body next to the helplessness of the female, its virtue next to the homosexual, as well as illustrating the fantastic, phallic killing machine’s touching human capacity for ‘tenderness’.
The breathtaking gall, and the astonishing achievement, of films like Commando is that men’s bodybuilding – the obsessive interest of men in men’s bodies – and the appropriation of gay macho drag by heterosexual men became both a reassertion of the masculine body’s ‘natural’ superiority over the female and a disavowal of homosexuality.
The paradoxical heterosexual reassurance/homoerotic enjoyment that the muscular male body offered popular culture had been a mainstay of comic strips for boys since the 1940s. But Spiderman and Superman were closeted bodybuilders: they wore bodysuits that decently covered flesh and masks that disguised their identity; their lives were rigidly divided between body-less bourgeois respectability and muscular super-hero fantasy; they led a ‘double-life’ that no one knew about and were never seen to be at the gym. In the 1980s the bodysuits and the masks were discarded and the bodybuilder was presented naked and shameless, flaunting his private vice to the world.
Hollywood got in on the act with Masters Of The Universe (1987), directed by Edward Pressman, a film version of the He-Man cartoons. Dolph Lungdren in the title role, wearing a posing pouch and leather thongs, battles for control of the universe with the evil Skeletor. Right comely muscular manliness, He-Man, is thus contrasted with wrong repulsive unmuscular unmanliness, Skeletor/skeleton (whose body is never shown). As with Commando et al, the female character, in the form of She-Woman (not a bodybuilder) helps both to heterosexualise the muscle man in the leather thongs and to further exaggerate his manly attributes. And again the baddy is coded as a queer threat to He-Man’s heterosexual virility: ‘I’ll have He-Man kneeling at my feet!’ he vows and plots to steal He-Man’s gigantic sword; when He-Man falls into his clutches he has him flogged with an electric whip. He-Man, the upright hetero bodybuilder, refuses to kneel before this parody of a man (in fact he seems to almost enjoy the whipping) and breaks free for the fight finale, in which he and Skeletor battle over the outsized sword – the key, need it be added, to control the universe. He-Man wins the day and thrusts his sword into the air, shouting, ‘I have the power!’ as white lightning squirts out of its tip. This was kids’ entertainment in the 1980s.
In Britain in the 1990s the adult and childish interest in bodybuilding came together in a TV programme called Gladiators (based on American Gladiators). With names like Hawk, Wolf, Warrior and Saracen, the cartoon mythology of the bodybuilder-as-hero was translated into prime-time TV with real rather than fantasy flesh on display[ii]. And like the bodybuilder films of the 1980s Gladiators was a stage for the male bodybuilder. Unlike its American equivalent the British version’s first season did not employ female gladiators who were obviously muscular; instead feminine glamour was, once again, cast to flatter the phallic power of the male bodybuilder.
By the beginning of the 1980s the ‘out’ bodybuilder was so acceptable as a role model that the killer/warrior disavowal was no longer necessary. Thus Schwarzenegger played a guardian angel role in Terminator II, protecting a mother and her child, in contrast to his original 1984 bad guy role (significantly, the baddy in Terminator II is not a bodybuilder). In less than ten years the bodybuilder had gone from demonic alien threat to self-sacrificing angel. Now he launches ‘Arnold’s fitness for kids’ and merchandises a hero myth to explain his life-long love affair with his own body:
Young Arnold watched helplessly as his best friend in class was beaten up by a thug of 13… ‘At that moment I made up my mind that I, too, would make myself fit. I would work hard to develp a body like our school bully’s – but I would use it very differently.’
The Sun, (7 April 1993)
In keeping with this trend the bodybuilders of Gladiators are promoted to their young fans as upright citizens (the bizarre is used to shore up the mundane again) with an anti-drugs, pro-decency stance. Like the appointment of Schwarzenegger to health spokesman by the Bush administration, this demonstrates the key importance of bodybuilding, once regarded as something distinctly deviant, in socialising young people – young boys – into acceptable paths of development. As Tom Green writes about Venice Beach and gymnasia in his biography Arnold, ‘Two decades ago, most of the people who today flock to box offices to buy tickets to a Arnold Schwarzenegger movie wouldn’t have thought those places very savoury.’ Two decades ago these same people would have been shocked if they caught their boy with a magazine with a picture of Arnold in it; now they think nothing of their son’s plastering posters of him on his bedroom walls, reading his Education Of A Bodybuilder religiously, and spending all his pocket money on gym membership and food supplements.
But while the appropriation of bodybuilding to buttress the image of an increasingly unstable masculinity appears to have been phenomenally successful, it is itself inherently unstable, its unsavoury past always threatening to gatecrash its new-found respectability and expose masculinity’s own scandalous secrets. As Corinne Sweet and Peter Baker wrote, in an article on steroid abuse and violent crime:
‘While the English federation of bodybuilders estimates that there are 200,000 bodybuilders in Britain, Bodypower magazine puts the figure at closer to 500,000 – and 80 per cent of those at competition level are believed to be on steroids. Several needle exchange schemes have found that up to half their clients are body builders’. (Guardian 6 August 1992)
That serious body building and drug abuse go hand in hand is widely accepted, but this reality is conveniently forgotten in the deployment of bodybuilder as super-hero. It is a testament to the tremendous disavowal at work in bodybuilding (and masculinity) that the terrific, not to say unnatural , muscular development of the modern bodybuilder image used to promote Truth, Justice and the American (and now the British) Way is largely dependent upon the abuse of anabolic steroids. Once this disavowal breaks down and the phenomenon is opened up to enquiry, psychopathic tendencies emerge. According to one Detective Inspector interviewed in the same Guardian article, steroid abuse is frequently associated with rape and murder as a result of what is termed ‘roid rage’:
‘One man told me he was a pussycat before steroids and a monster with a permanent erection after. In my opinion, there’s strong evidence that steroid abuse can directly relate to sexual and violent crimes’.
The heroic image of modern bodybuilding is so volatile that it always threatens to invert itself. Presenting a picture of health, clean living, personal cultivation and conservatism, a modern religion for kids, it contains within itself the potential to topple over into its opposite: madness, sleaze, self-abuse and criminality. Like masculinity, it advertises a superficial strength which turns out not to bear close examination.
But there is something much more pervasive and even more dangerous than drugs that bodybuilding threatens to tip over into.
I couldn’t let this go on any longer. ‘Is this a gay gym?’ I asked.
‘Look honey’ he replied. ‘All gyms are gay’. I examined the men by the machines. There Austin seemed right. ‘But what about them?’ I asked, pointing to the free-weight lifters.
Austin laughed out loud. ‘Especially them’ he said. ‘They just don’t know it yet’.[iii]
Although Pomeroy’s suspicion of bodybuilding is certainly outmoded it has not disappeared, nor is it likely to. While the efforts of Arnold and Co. have done much to convince the world that body-building is impeccably heterosexual it cannot erase the fact that its use as a way of socialising young males into heterosexuality is utterly predicated upon its homoerotic appeal. This is the contradiction which no clean-up campaign will ever dispense with because if it did there would be no bodybuilding.
Pomeroy was right to suspect that bodybuilding involves the eroticisation of masculine attributes, but wrong to believe that this leads necessarily to homosex. In fact it employs the desire for the manly body against homosexuality. For the masculine attributes to be eroticised, in other words for them to remain masculine, it requires the banishment of homosexuality (although its potential remains like a spectre haunting the proceedings).
In his autobiography Muscle: Confessions of An Unlikely Bodybuilder, undoubtedly the best account of the world of serious bodybuilding, Sam Fussell attempts to clear the air in his description of his very first visit to a gym. By putting the queer suspicion in the mouth of the swish fag Austin, Fussell slyly discredits it, making the queer suspicion something innately queer itself. Also deftly introduced is the presumption that gay and straight bodybuilders can be easily distinguished: ‘I examined the men by the machines, there Austin was right’. The gays are easily spotted, both by their appearance (unmanly) and by their activity (sissy machines instead of butch weights). The real bodybuildersm and hence the real men, are equally easily spotted, and, of course, they are also instantly recognisable as straight. Fussell leaves nelly Austin for the free-weights men. But the unwitting irony is that Fussell, in rejecting homosexuality (unmanly men) and its association with bodybuilding, does so on the grounds that it does not provide the manly men/attributes he is seeking. Thus in his first visit to a gym Fussell succeeds in vanquishing fags but not the fag thing.[iv]
His own tale reads like a Pomeroy nightmare made flesh. A pigeon- chested 26-year-old Oxford graduate discovers bodybuilding through a picture of Arnold, ‘every muscle bulging to the world as he flexed, smiled and posed’. Inspired by admiration and envy to possess a body like Arnold’s , he immerses himself in a world where male bodies are ceaselessly displayed and compared to other male bodies. For four years he has what he calls ‘the disease’ , without even a girlfriend to chaperone him and only one recorded (failed) attempt at sex with a woman.
But Fussell’s story, rather than illustrating Pomeroy’s anxiety that bodybuilding might lead to homosex, actually demonstrates how bodybuilding might work to prevent the translation of interest in men’s bodies into sexual activity with them, and yet shows how problematic that process actually is and, more importantly, illustrates the wider problem of what it means to be a man.
The point of the following investigation is not to pathologise bodybuilders or bodybuilding – which as an activity has, I am sure, plenty to recommend it – but to show how every time men try to grasp something consolingly, sturdily, essentially masculine, it all too easily transforms into its opposite. Bodybuilding gives an insight into the flux of masculinity right at the moment it is meant to solidify it in a display of exaggerated biological masculine attributes.
Make Me A Man!
The bodybuilder by definition is someone intent on creating a body that he desires (and often escaping from one he loathes). The ‘science’ of bodybuilding, through its apparatus, regimes and drugs, can work the magic of giving a man the flesh he desires to possess.
‘Here’s the kind of new men I build!’[v] announces Charles Atlas over a picture of a desirable young man with a perfect physique. Then the homosexual appeal is converted to one of narcissistic identification: ‘Do You Want To Be One?’ Just send off the form ‘… And I’ll prove in just 7 days I can make you one!’ Alas, Mr Atlas’ science, unlike Franken Furter’s in The Rocky Horror Show, is not powerful enough to actually make NEW MEN for you, it can only turn you into one. The heterosexual bodybuilder must hammer homo-desire into identification and make do with a diet of narcissism.
But whenever I locked the door behind me and quickly peeled off my shirt, I had to stifle a wolf whistle. How my beanpole figure had changed in the last year![vi]
He stopped a foot from me to point at his legs and scream, ‘Look at those fuckin’ gams, Sam! These are manly gams, goddammit!’ He quickly flexed them in the mirror and caressed them with a loving hand…[vii]
The heterosexual bodybuilder, in contrast to Frank N Furter with his creation Rocky, makes himself his own love object in lieu of another man.[viii] Hence the vital importance of mirrors and posing in bodybuilding; hence the loneliness of the ‘sport’; hence the unashamedly sexualised descriptions of the personal pleasures of bodybuilding: as Arnold puts it, ‘A Pump Is Better Than Coming’ (with whom?).
Freud outlined four possible types of narcissism; a person may love:
a) What he himself is (i.e. himself)
b) What he himself was
c) What he would like to be
d) Someone who was once part of himself[ix]
Type c), ‘what he would like to be’, is very close to a type of homosexuality, especially since it suggests a narcissistic desire that may attach itself to others who represent ‘what he would like to be’. Freud argues that it is through social conditioning and upbringing, specifically through the effect of the critical voice of his parents, teachers, public opinion and fellow men, that ‘large amounts of homosexual libido are drawn into the formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and satisfaction in maintaining it’.[x] The ego ideal, or super-ego, thus comes to stand in for homosexual libido; in other words, the subject’s sense of social responsibility/respectability is founded on the turning around of homosexual desire into the ego.
This is the purpose that Arnold and the Gladiators appear to serve: they become living representatives of the ego ideal (hence the fantasy/mythological element so often associated with them), which are shared by thousands of other boys.
The ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation.[xi]
The homoerotic power the bodybuilder super hero represents to young boys, by encouraging identification with him and the emphasis on social virtue, functions to redirect their homosexual libido into narcissism in which their own ego comes to substitute for the ‘lost’ love object; narcissism, regarded as the precursor to homosexuality, is actually employed against homosexuality to socialise young boys. The super hero becomes the super ego:
‘Arnie rules. If he picked up his Conan sword and took over the country tomorrow I swear to God I would fight for him. It sucks that he can’t be president’. [xii]
And so Arnold, the ‘ultimate male’[xiii], is firmly established in the psyches of millions of young American boys, their desire for him becoming the prohibition against it. In his biography we learn that large crowds turned up every day on the set of Commando, just to catch a glimpse of his lens-lovely physique in the flesh. ‘Most are young men’, admits Green. ‘No surprise. Who loves Arnold most? They stand behind the crew rather attentively, almost referentially, and try to compare their builds to the bare-chested Schwarzenegger’.
And so we find Fussell living alone in a flat unfurnished except for an exercise machine and ‘a cardboard cutout of Arnold with loin cloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian’. Thus the heterosexual bodybuildrer’s relationship to homosexuality is revealed as a sad kind of insubstantial shadow of it, a kind of mourning, a ghostly kind of love. This is the lovelorn marriage of bodybuilder to ego ideal: ‘With this ring I thee wed. With my body I thee worship’.
Not permitted to desire another man’s penis, the bodybuilder phallicises that which he is permitted to desire: his own body. The old adage, ‘big muscles small dick’ is without foundation, but the implied phallic substitution is spot on. The body is ‘pumped up’, ‘rock hard’, and ‘tight’; the fashion for ‘vascularity’ calls for minimal skin fat (often special drugs are taken for this purpose) so that the road map of veins is clearly visible, standing out from the flesh in a fashion alarmingly reminiscent of an erect penis. After a successful appearance on stage at a competition, Fussell’s training partner compliments him: ‘like a human fucking penis’! [xiv]
As with the phallus itself, size is the overriding issue and everything is constantly subjected to measurement and the tyranny of the tape-measure: necks, calves, chests, arms, legs; the inches measure the man. Extending ordinary male aspirations from between his legs to his whole body, the ‘human fucking penis’ entertains fantasies of infinite growth that merge with ceaseless desire for ever more ‘male’ attributes (the ego ideal is by definition unattainable and this encourages ever greater efforts to reach it). ‘I saw my chest growing to such gargantuan proportions that no shirt on earth could contain it…’[xv] As the bodybuilder’s chest swells, so, quite literally, does his ego: the more manly the man’s body the more he can direct his homosexual libido towards himself.
Of course fantasies of infinite growth cannot be sustained. But the science of bodybuilding does its level best to maintain the illusion that it can be. Through the use of anabolic steroids, or artificial growth hormones, the bodybuilder is encouraged to believe that he can continue his swelling and stave off his fear of failure to satisfy the ego ideal (failure to satisfy the ego ideal has the tendency, according to Freud, to ‘liberate homosexual libido and this is turned into a sense of guilt’).
The serious bodybuilder will often use steroids as a matter of course. Those entering competitions have little chance of winning without recourse to drugs. Unlike in the world of athletics where the benefits of steroids are debatable, bodybuilding has long depended on them. They promote increased strength and offer remarkable increases in the rate at which the body can metabolise nitrogen into muscle. But the pressure of competition is not responsible for the deepest appeal of these drugs. Their most powerful attraction to the bodybuilder resides in the nature of them, and the symbolism of that ‘nature’.
Most of the steroid class of drugs were designed to emulate the effects of natural anabolic agents like testosterone, for administering to those who are deficient in male hormones. Thus steroids are used to combat the lack of physical ‘manliness’- precisely the condition the bodybuilder always finds himself in. Because of the unattainability of the ego ideal, a man already weighing 16 stone and with a 53-inch chest can, like a reverse anorexic, look in the mirror and see himself as chronically deficient in manliness.
Again, this has an interesting parallel with the sex lives of gay men. C.A. Tripp, an anthropologist opposed to psychoanalysis, explains the dynamic of the eroticisation of manliness by other men in The Homosexual Matrix in a way that sounds remarkably familiar: ‘Eroticisation always tends to raise the value of the items it touches, not only by exalting them, but by keeping a person’s aspiration level soaring ahead of his own attainments, between what he has and what he would like to have’.[xvi] This perceived distance is the standard by which everything is judged, it is ‘the contrast implicit in the distance which determines a person’s appetite for same sex attributes and, consequently, his readiness to admire them, to eroticise them, and to import still more of them’.[xvii]
One of the ways in which the homosexual male ‘imports’ these attributes is through sexual intimacy and affection. [xviii] The avowedly heterosexual male, however, is only permitted to import them in a non-sexual fashion, through identification and sublimation: e.g. bodybuilding. So the appeal of steroids to the bodybuilder is not just that they help the process of building muscle but that they represent an actual importation of same-sex attributes, direct route rather than the indirect one of lifting weights. (The appeal of steroids as a means of importing same-sex attributes and further evidence of the wide-reaching importance of bodybuilding as a young male phenomenon is provided by the revelation that an estimated twelve percent of all American senior high school boys have tried at least one cycle of steroids.)[xix]
The ‘importation’ of the masculine attributes in the form of steroids takes on a telling symbolism. Tagged ‘the juice’, Fussell describes two friends receiving its benediction:
Nimrod withdrew the needle from the vial , slapped Bamm Bamm’s naked ass once, then plunged the syringe an inch and a half deep into Bamm Bamm’s flesh.
‘Jesus Nimrod, it feels like a fuckin’ garden hose, Are you sure that’s a new one?’ Bamm Bamm asked querulously… When he pulled the steel dart out of Bamm Bamm’s ass, the tiny hole spurted forth a stream of blood which landed with a splat on the plastic covered sofa.[xx]
When Fussell’s turn comes to receive ‘the juice’ he discovers that his fear of ‘needles’ results in him reflexively tightening the muscles in his backside (perhaps indicating that at least one part of Fussell knows full well what all this signifies), making the injection extremely painful. But he soon learns the best way to take it: the ‘only proper way to receive the syringe was to relax the ass cheek and jab the needle in quickly, all the way to the base…’ The bodybuilder finds that ‘taking it like a man’ enables him to acquire more quickly those characteristics which will make him more like a man; he finds himself echoing, albeit pathetically, the gay male’s sexual importation of masculine attributes.
This is a ritual that will not be unfamiliar to anthropologists. David D Gilmore, drawing on the work of Gilbert Herdt, describes a ritual enacted by the Sambia, a tribe in New Guinea, ‘obsessed with masculinity’:
… the youngsters are forced to perform fellatio on grown men, not for pleasure but in order to ingest their semen. This then supposedly provides them with the substance or ‘seed’ of a growing masculinity. As one…Sambia ritual expert instructs, ‘If a boy doesn’t ‘eat’ semen,he remains small and weak’.[xxi]
Here, overt homosexuality as opposed to the symbolic ‘homosexuality’ of steroid injections, is considered to be the normal route to manhood and is later superseded by an adult life of ‘full heterosexuality’.[xxii]
But the most remarkable and instructive scene that the bodybuilding anthropologist Fussell reports is that of a father who acts as trainer to his son, Lamar, injecting him with ‘the juice’. Lamar ‘offered his enormous white ass to his father… despite the jolt of the needle Lamar looked up at his father in tenderness’.
Male Masochism And Bodybuilding
No pain; no gain! – Bodybuilding slogan
In ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, a text that has been at the centre of the ‘return to Freud’ movement in cultural studies, Freud expounds his theory of masochistic fantasy through a child’s account of a common dream in which he/she is being beaten by the father. Freud attributes this to a need to be punished for incestuous guilt (desiring the father) but the child also finds this fantasy pleasurable and may substitute the experience of punishment for incestuous desire. In males, Freud analyses the beating fantasy as being based on the negative Oedipus complex, and in girls on the positive. The negative Oedipus complex for boys consists of identification with the mother and desire of the father and corresponds to the positive complex for girls.
But Freud states elsewhere that the ‘simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form’; instead he posits a ‘more complete’ Oedipus complex which is essentially bisexual, including both the positive and negative forms:
That is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude towards his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother.[xxiii]
Thus in ‘The Economic Problem Of Masochism’ Freud describes the wish to be beaten by the father as ‘standing very close’ to the male’s desire to take a passive sexual relation to him and characterises it as only ‘a regressive distortion of it’.
As we have already seen, the heterosexual male bodybuilder’s desires ‘stand very close’ to that of the homosexual (the negative Oedipus complex). In fact in his underdevelopment of the homosexual libido he could be said to represent ‘a regressive distortion’, bringing bodybuilding, with all its terrible goading and punishment by the superego, very much into the realm of male masochism.
In her influential book, Male Subjectivity At The Margins, which sheds much needed light on the phenomenon of male masochism, Caja Silverman argues that up till now the significance of Freud’s assertion that the super-ego is always ‘a substitute for a longing for the father’ has been missed. [xxiv] She suggests that the implications of this are ‘staggering’. Essentially this is because the dissolution of the male Oedipus Complex, the origin of the superego and the lynchpin of a man’s adult character, is now seen to be about ‘the male subject’s homosexual attachment to the father’.[xxv] (This is the personal aspect of the super-ego discussed earlier in its social context).
But as Silverman points out, the only way of overcoming this incestuous desire – becoming the symbolic father – is precisely what the super-ego forbids: ‘You cannot be like your father in all respects,’ it says, ‘some things are his prerogative’; this is the unattainability of the ego ideal again.
The super-ego ends up promoting ‘the very thing that its severity is calculated to prevent, a contradiction which must function as a constant inducement to reconstitute the negative Oedipus complex (identification with the mother and desire for the father). ‘ The prototypical male subject wants both to love the father and to be the father but is prevented from doing either.
This impasse produces a fascinating outcome. The ‘morally masochistic’ male gives up altogether on the paternal ego-ideal and turns to his mother, identifying with her instead. ‘However’, writes Silverman, ‘he burns with an exalted ardour for the rigours of the super-ego. The feminine masochist …literalises the beating fantasy, and brings this cruel drama back to the body’.
The gymnasium is the stage on which this ‘cruel drama’ is brought ‘back to the body’ on a daily basis. It is a high-tech dungeon where the weak flesh is punished by the willing/wilful spirit. Gleaming machinery and neatly arranged racks of free-weights have replaced instruments of torture. But the agony and the ecstasy do not end with the four hour work-out infernos Fussell and his brothers-in-sorrow joyously inflict on themselves. Apart from the feat and pain of the injections, the terrible piles that result and the horrific poundages squatted (more anal punishment?) , there is the endless discipline of the merciless diet (combined with forced feeding, an ingenious innovation of modern masochism), and, come competition time, devout fasting (to reduce skin fat) which leaves them barely able to walk. The literature celebrates the suffering: ‘Hardcore Bodybuilding: The Blood, Sweat and Tears of Pumping Iron’. [xxvi]
But Fussell’s strict, uncomplaining observation of the iron law of the three D’s (Dedication, Determination, Discipline) which bodybuilders must live by earns him the respect of those around him, especially his mentor/surrogate father, Vinnie: ‘Like a freight train from hell, baby! Oh yes!’ he screamed, ‘I got myself a real training partner’! A ‘real training partner’ is one who relishes punishment. Before attempting a heavy squat, Vinnie urges Fussell to ‘do the right thing!’ – which turns out to be bodybuilder code for a fist in the face: a common technique , apparently for encouraging that little bit extra sacrifice (‘Do the right thing!’ Is this not the voice of the superego?).
Steroids enhance the masochistic pleasure. ‘When you’re doin’ the juice’, one American teenager tells Sky magazine, ‘it actually feels good to get hit. The whole part of your body goes, ‘Ahhh….’[xxvii] On these drugs the masochistic pleasure can reach giddying heights. In an Esquire article on Ray Michalik, winner of Mr Universe 1975, we learn how:
He invented a training regime called ‘intensity insanity’ which called for 70 sets per body part, instead of the customary ten. This entailed a seven hour workout and excrutiating pain, but the steroids, he found, turned that pain into pleasure: ‘a huge release of all the pressures built up inside me, the rage and the energy’.[xxviii]
The tricks that male masochism can play on you! Fussell claims he took up bodybuilding because he no longer wished to be a ‘victim’. But in order to achieve this he became a victimiser: ‘Without being fully aware of it myself I became the kind of man I once feared and despised. I became, in fact, a bully.[xxix] But he was his own victim.
As Theodor Reik argues in Masochism in Sex and Society, masochists become both their own victims and victimisers, dispensing with the need for an external object. [xxx] This is the meaning of the bodybuilder’s narrative of refusing to be a weakling who gets sand kicked in his face. ‘I would work hard and develop a body like our school bully’s’ says Arnold, ‘but I would use it differently’ – that is to say he would use his body on himself.
This may go some way to explain the origin of what had been called ‘Roid Rage’, where bodybuilders on steroids have been known to go into mad binges of assault and rape. These bouts of sadism, are, perhaps, nothing more than unsatisfied masochism spilling over into its projected variant, sadism, providing an equivalent pleasure to the more usual one offered by the most rigorous workout ( ‘a huge release of all the pressures built up inside me, the rage and the energy’). Or as Fussell puts it: ‘ I wasn’t just aching for a fistfight – I was begging for one’.
The theory of masochism also sheds light on the pronounced show-business aspect to bodybuilding. Exhibitionism or ‘demonstrativeness’ is an indispensable feature of all masochism, according to Reik. The terrible litany of suffering that the bodybuilder inflicts on his body, real enough in its private pain, is always intended for public consumption, whether in the gymnasium with roars and yells, or at contests, sweating and posing with a silent beatific smile. ‘In the practices of masochists, denudiation and parading with all their psychic concomitant phenomenon play such a major part that one feels induced to assume a constant connection between masochism and exhibitionism’.[xxxi]
Fussell’s aptly named ‘Confessions’ are as much a part of that process of ‘denudiation and parading’ as any bodybuilding contest. Although the world of bodybuilding is renounced, that renunciation itself is transformed into part of the same process of exhibitionism. Here also is the key to understanding the obsession the bodybuilding world has with exclamation marks. ‘I can make you a man!’ ‘Arnold!’ ‘Posing!’ This big-tent showbusiness style is a hysterical demonstrativeness.
The masochism of the committed bodybuilder is without doubt the modern-day equivalent of the religious zealot who flogged himself in the street. The Life of Fussell: His Confessions!, having become a bestseller, is a more public scourging than any medieval masochist could dream of.
Born into an ivy-league family and with a comfortable academic future mapped out for him, Fussell turned his back on the world and his parents – especially his father – and set about mortifying his flesh. Most alarmingly, like all those using serious quantities of steroids, he was threatening himself with liver cancer and heart-disease. This quasi-religious self-destructive urge was elucidated by Freud when he wrote that to provoke punishment from the super-ego the masochist must ‘act against his own interests , must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence’.[xxxii]
In Arnie’s perhaps most popular films, The Terminator and Terminator II, the male masochistic logic of self-annihilation is starkly obvious. In the first he plays a cyborg, a seeming-human robot, that takes fantastic punishment: gunshots, explosions, fireballs, speeding articulated trucks, and yet keeps coming for more, with a look of bright, fierce joy in his inhuman eyes which remains undimmed until those he pursues oblige him by crushing him to nothing in a hydraulic press. But before this compacted climax can be reached we see his ‘suffering’ strip away his human appearance (and sex) altogether and ‘he’ is reduced to a ghastly array of gleaming pistons and electrical innards. The sequel, aptly subtitled Judgement Day, provides more of the same, but this time Arnie plays the ‘good guy’ and another cyborg is drafted in to provide scenes of appalling mutual mutilation even more destructive than the first (expensive special effects provide the audience with new ways to enjoy the human body’s miseries). ‘At last!’ you can almost hear Arnie declare, ‘A Real training partner!’ At the film’s climax Arnie achieves complete corporeal dissolution, hurling his body into a vat of molten metal.
In a similar vein, the frenzied yells of ‘Beef! Beef!’ at bodybuilding contests summon up the ultimate image of sacrifice and the primal myth. Cannibalism, noted by Freud as being closely related to sadism/masochism,[xxxiii] provides the most extreme and yet most descriptive metaphor for the consumption/mortification paradox of bodybuilding: the bodybuilder wishing to consume maleness/the father and be consumed by it. Freud points out that ‘as a substitute for longing for the father, it [the ego ideal] contains the germ from which all religions have evolved’.[xxxiv]
Transfiguration
‘Here’s the kind of NEW MEN I build!’
It should be clear by now that in building up the male body the bodybuilder is in fact attempting to shatter it. Nothing less than transfiguration is what the committed male musclebuilder is after. Through the religious magic and science of bodybuilding he hopes to effect a resolution of the conflict that the super-ego has imposed on him. As we have seen, unable to either be or love the father, the feminine male masochist tends to abandon the paternal ideal and to turn to an identification with the mother instead. The science and religion of bodybuilding can make this identification corporeal.
Jokes about bodybuilders needing bras for their chests are common enough, but in fact the jokes contain a certain truth. The prolonged use of steroids causes a condition known as gynecomastia or ‘bitch tits’, the growth of a bulbous swelling under one or both nipples as a result of the body’s oestrogen level rising to counteract the massive dose of what it takes to be testosterone. But this is perhaps the least important of the transformations that the steroid user can look forward to. With prolonged steroid use testicle atrophy, penises shrink and erections become infrequent or cease altogether. In other words, the bodybuilder using steroids is effecting his own castration.
This is the unavoidable logic of the bodybuilder’s long-term scourging of his masculine body. After years of abuse with drugs and ‘intensity/insanity’ routines ‘Mr Universe’ Michalik found his body finally taking the hint and effecting the final transformation:
His testosterone level plummeted, his sperm count went to zero and all the oestrogen in his body, which had been accruing for years, turned his pecs into soft, doughy breasts. Such friends as he still had pointed out that his ass was plumping like a woman’s and tweaked him for his sexy, new hip-switching walk.[xxxv]
Of course, the bodybuilder reacts with horror to this development, but that is just the horror of the caterpillar finding itself pupating: it knows not that this is what was meant to be and what its whole life so far has been working towards. The bodybuilder does not understand that he was destined all along to be a transsexual butterfly.
Suddenly, the painstaking removal of all body hair by daily shaving, the use of depilatory creams and electrolysis makes sense. In Fussell’s own words, musclebuilders are ‘illusionists’ and ‘the decorating of the body to such an extreme’ is ‘essentially a feminine exercise’.[xxxvi] And so the contents of Fussell’s gym bag before a competition read like those of a tranny’s handbag: Professional Posing Oil, Muscle Sheen, Pro-Tan Instant Competition Colour, sponge applicator tips, matte black competition briefs, and mousse.
Women bodybuilders have traditionally been ridiculed, especially by male bodybuilders for rebelling against their ‘natural’ sex characteristics, for being ‘mannish’ and ‘unwomanly’. But now the secret can be told: this is merely projected anxiety. In the female bodybuilder, overcoming in her own way her social designation as ‘lack’, the male bodybuilder, the kids’ superhero, sees his own fate. As Fussell remarks: ‘she wasn’t quite a woman and she wasn’t quite a man, but she was, unmistakably, a builder’.
The male bodybuilder dramatizes in his flesh the insecurity, the uncertainty, the enigma of masculinity. He is a living testament, not so much to the capabilities of the male body, its phallic power, its massive irresistible virility (‘I saw my chest swelling to such gargantuan proportions that no shirt on earth could contain it’), but rather to the scared mystery of sex and gender, the fluidity of the categories male and female, masculine and feminine, hetero and homo and the fabulous, perverse tricks they play.
Pangua, lingua, gloriosi
Corporis mysterium
(Sing, my tongue, of the mystery of the glorious Body).
St Thomas Aquinas
[i] Wardell B Pomoroy Boys and Sex (London, Pelican 1968) p.59
[ii] Comparisons made in the press with the 1970s TV Game Show It’s A Knockout only serve to demonstrate just how California-ized Britain has become. Eddie Waring on steroids with a UV bed tan in skimpy lycra? I think not.
[iii] Sam Fussell, Confessions of An Unlikely Bodybuilder (London, Abacus 1992), p 38
[iv] The imperative to keep homosexuality away from bodybuilding to preserve its manly visual pleasures for its heterosexual disciples is shown later in the book in Fussell’s account of the professional bodybuilder Bob Paris’ posing programme at the 1989 Arnold Classic: ‘Paris concluded his posing program with The Dying Gaul’…It was met with an uncomfortable silence and angry suspicion, the latter confirmed months later when he revealed his marriage to his ‘husband’, male model Rod Jackson, and the joy they shared in their ‘children’, two dogs and a macaw named Barney’ (p195), Bob Paris is the only out professional bodybuilder.
[v] Picture Post, advertisements
[viii] Is it merely coincidence that the bodybuilder boxer fantasy that Stallone created for himself a few years later also had the same name?
[ix] Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction Penguin Freud Library (London:Penguin, 1984) Vol II, p84
[xii] Teenage roid heads, Sky Magazine, December 1992
[xiii] Tom Green, Arnold! (London, WH Allen, 1988)
[xiv] Fussell also chose the sountrack to the film Shaft for his accompaniment: Shaft! Isaac hayes sang on the soundtrack, as I made my final counterclockwise turn, crunched my abs, flexed my legs, and pointed at my calves’ (p212).
[xvi] C.A. Tripp The Homosexual Matrix (NY and Scarborough, Meridian 1985)p78
[xviii] The gay man is, of course, also very often a bodybuilder: this exemplifies the way in which desire and identification are not discrete categories and the way in which gay men can ‘import’ male attributes via both routes.
[xix] Teenage roid heads Sky December 1992
[xxi] David D Gilmore, Manhood In TheMaking: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (Newhaven and London, Yale University Press 1990) p147
[xxiii] Freud, The Ego And The Id (Penguin Freud Library Vol II) p372
[xxiv] Caja Silverman, Male Subjectivity At The Margins (London Routledge 1992) p194
[xxvi] Robert Kennedy Hardcore Bodybuilding: The Blood, Sweat and Tears of Pumping Iron’ (New York, Sterling 1982)
[xxviii] Esquire November 1992. The injection of the steroids themselves can take on the appearance of Nazi torture: ‘they filled enormous syringes with a French supplement called Triacana and, aiming for the elusive Thyroid gland, shot it right into their necks.’ This echoes a scene in Universal Soldier (1992) in which Dolph Lundgren and Claude Van Damme play zombie bodybuilder soldiers who are regularly injected in the back of the neck to keep up their inhuman strength. Needless to say, the finale of the film requires the two soldiers to inflict horrific injuries on one another, which they happily endure.
[xxx] Theodor Reik, Masochism in Sex and Society trans. (New York: Grove Press 1962) cited by Silverman in Male Subjectivity at the Margins
[xxxii] The economic problem of Masochism Penguin Freud Library vol II p425
[xxxiii] Freud, Three Essays on the theory of sexuality
[xxxiv] Freud, The Ego and the Id p376
