Crocodile Tears?

This interesting article The rise of the sadboi bigman: From John Cena to Jason Mamoa, our most muscular movie stars are increasingly our most vulnerable too from Vox magazine, was served up to me in my news feed. There is some good analysis here, though it seems to me that the author, Emily St James is missing a very big idea that demands further exploration. St James makes the argument that these muscle-men action-hero’s are asexual and un-erotic. She attributes this primarily to the association of sculpted male physiques with gay porn, or at least its forerunner in less open times, namely the physique and fitness magazines which were often bought for homosexual titillation rather than fitness tips. Her argument is that due to our cultural homophobia, these male icons are effectively desexualised. She then goes on to suggest that another factor is the lack of vulnerability that these hulking characters traditionally enact in their presentations. While both of these factors may be true by degrees, I personally have a slightly different reading of these men and their bodies.

It is impossible for me to consider these bodies without being aware of the huge amount of time, effort and discipline (and steroids?) it has taken to create these “perfect” physiques. This leads me to suspect a duality of insecurity and narcissistic tendencies which drive these men to such extremes of physical self-control and self-amplification. Ironically then, while it might be true to say that we rarely see these man-mountains openly exhibiting vulnerability, they actually embody vulnerability with the mass of their muscle being a self-made armour that functions to protect them both from a world they feel ill-equipped to deal with otherwise, but also against the inner critic that tells them that they need to be bigger, be stronger, be better; to look “ideal”.

It is also worth considering that the type of muscle that is usually honed by these men is as much aesthetic as anything else, sculpted from hours and hours in the gym doing specific exercises to create the right “look”, whether that is the inverted triangle of the back and shoulders, pecs you could park a bike between, or calf muscles like bowling balls. This is not functional muscle developed for, or over years of unavoidable labour, or an adjunct to another primary athletic pursuit, or from hours and hours of work in the ballet studio. This is muscle for muscle’s sake, the appearance of strength over functional strength, the surface. In terms of sheer strength, the men that enter strong-men competitions would often trump the pumped, more defined physiques of male cover-models and movie stars, while also looking more like thick-set manual labouring dads than over-inflated underwear models.

So rather than lacking vulnerability, I see these men’s physiques as symbolising a lack of inner confidence. The focus on appearance, on the surface and their outward physical presentation and presence speaks to me of a desire to impose control on a world that seems threatening. And this is where the narcissism is revealed, exposed by the desire to dominate and control, to be assured in the belief that one has achieved some state of perfection. Being a straight man, it is not my place to represent a queer perspective, but far from being de-sexualised for this audience, perhaps these hyperbolic men are still sex symbols? Just as they might have been in their forbears’ media genesis that St James deftly describes. Likewise I cannot speak for women, but could it not be also that instead of a lack of vulnerability, it is actually the lack of inner confidence and the self-absorption that neuters these particular specimens of men? And when these inner flaws are expressed so visibly in the hard, bulging flesh with such crass self-objectification, is it surprising that some women might not go weak at the knees? But then others might, and who am I to judge. Certainly though, I am confident that a quick survey of anglophone mainstream media would quickly reveal that culturally we are still more ready to accept the objectification of female bodies than of male ones; that it is more acceptable for men to objectify others than it is for women to do so.

Of course, the lack of expressed vulnerability in our subjects could be seen as a symptom of the lack of inner confidence, just as the bodies themselves are a symptom. And it is for this reason that in and of itself, I do not see these attempts at emotional nuance as revolutionary in the way that St. James posits. I would never argue that all men that have, or who cultivate these types of hyperbolic physiques are without emotional sophistication and depth, but symbolically at least isn’t it the case that these crying hulks are supposed to represent an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms: a “masculine” body with “feminine” tendencies, or so our prejudice would have us believe. In my reading then, the dissonance generated in some viewers (such that it is) when these hyper-males display vulnerable emotions is far from revolutionary, but rather confirmation of the ingrained polarised gender binary that remains rife in anglophone culture. There are, I understand infant dolls for sale as children’s toys that will piss and poo and even cry, they do however remain only dolls.