Dear Andrew:  I'm interested in what's changed in men's fitness in the last
50 years. I feel like we're in a strange place in that the ideal man we are holding up on the pedestal in magazines and television is thin, chiseled, and photoshopped, whereas the muscle men of yesteryear were more diverse:  broad in the belly, not as cut in the muscles. We've always had bodybuilders, but I'm comparing the beefcake on TV these days with older physiques, such as, Sean Connery's (in his James Bond years), Brando's in his tight t-shirt days, 1960s Kirk Douglas and the like.  --Charlie

I'm going to speculate wildly here and place the blame squarely on the shoulders of two very particular actors who became box-office stars in the '80's:  Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Men of my generation--guys who, as teens, flocked to theaters when Sly and Arnold were at their peak--are pretty much responsible for the fact that, to this day, from April to September, all you ever see in movie theaters is Things Getting Blown up. 

Yes, you have us to thank for that.  Save your hate mail, I feel bad enough about it already. 



Stallone was an actor first, and gave some good performances in his time:  in ROCKY, of course, but I think he also did good work in FIRST BLOOD ("You just can't turn it off!"), which at the time of its release was considered an ultraviolent blood-fest but today would probably show up uncut on the History Channel.  As time went on, the scripts Stallone chose got worse and worse (STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT, anyone?), but worldwide, it didn't matter:  people kept going to his movies.

Schwarzenegger never really carried a good movie; he just rolled through each one like a tank, reading his lines with the same oft-imitated Teutonic non-inflection in movie after movie, and teenage boys (like me) ate it up until we reached our early 20's and either got girlfriends or just got sick of him.  His implacable single-mindedness was put to best use in THE TERMINATOR, a role that pretty much summed the man up, on and off-screen:  as the embodiment of unshakable--and unstoppable--will. 

But the fact that Stallone became less concerned with his diction and more with his delts, and Arnold never really learned to act at all, meant that the focus of both men's films fell squarely on their physiques.  How could it not?  The characters they played weren't intelligent, romantic, sexy, resourceful, witty ("I'll be back" was the best Arnold could do), or, indeed, posessed of any of the characteristics you'd associate with male movie stars before or since. 

They didn't have to be--there was hardly a woman in sight!  Rambo or Matrix or Conan or Kaminski could never abide a feminine form competing with them for the audience's gaze.  A woman would require them to emerge, dazed and choking, from their solipsistic, narcissistic haze, and put their attention somewhere else--and neither man seemed capable of that, which is why they always seemed to be acting by themselves.  As actors, Sly and Arnold were only their bodies. 

Whatever the reason--Reagan and his tough-guy, movie-inspired rhetoric, the end of the Cold War stand-off, backlash against a '70's-era androgyny and wussiness (was it a coincidence that both men were die-hard Republicans?)--the 80's were the era of the mesomorphic movie star.  Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mr. T, The Barbarian Brothers, and Hulk Hogan all made modest successes of themselves in this era as well, while bona fide stars like Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and Sean Penn started becoming beefier versions of their former selves whenever they showed up onscreen. 

Interestingly, though, we don't remember those guys primarily as beefy:  we remember Ford as roguish; Eastwood as wry; Gibson as mischievous; Penn as mysterious.  Their bodies, pumped up in one movie, wiry in the next, were still part of their performances.  For Stallone and Schwarzenegger, their bodies were their performances.

And that's what did it:  the big guys with almost nothing to say--the anything-but-meek--were inheriting the Earth.  The message was that muscles--not brains, charm, or any real skill to speak of--could literally save the world. 

It was, of course, a fantasy, but I and many others bought it, at least for two hours every few months, and thus are not only responsible for two decades of dismal summer movies but for the fact that a perfectly respectable actor like Robert Downey, Jr. has to pump serious iron and eat soybean curd for six months in order to play...a military industrial tycoon.

I've come to find it funny that every man who takes his shirt off in a movie now has to be pumped and ripped:  the English professor!  The computer nerd!  The quadrapeligic!  All of them jacked at 5% body fat.  It's the same with actresses:  I watched THE BREAK-UP a while back (don't ask why) and wondered why there was no explanation for the fact that Jennifer Aniston, playing an ostensibly corporate type, also happened to be built like Cory Everson.

Perhaps even more maddening--for actors, anyway--is the fact that truly athletic actors often don't make the grade as onscreen athletes in Hollywood:  shortly after he graduated from Harvard, where he played football, Tommy Lee Jones was told he was too small to play an Ivy-League football player.  Will Ferrell has made a career out of showing off his plush physique to comic effect, but in real life is an accomplished triathlete.  True athletes come in all shapes and sizes (check out this blog entry for more on that), but in Hollywood, they all look the same.

The legacy of Sly and Arnold is that if you don't look like a bodybuilder, you aren't athletic.  And if you take your shirt off on screen and haven't been dieting, pumping, plucking, and waxing, you better be doing it for laughs. 

And of course, all that media hype finds its way from Hollywood, the city of insecuroids, onto the cover of Men's Health, and right into the sad, reptilian brains of guys like you and me, Charlie, who just want a decent job and maybe an occasional date with the girl in accounting once in a while.

An unfortunate series of events, to be sure, but what guys are experiencing these days is really just a tiny fragment of the pressure women have felt about their looks since the dawn of time.  Maybe for that one small blessing, and the tiny flicker of compassion it affords guys who usually laugh at women's obsession with "looking fat in this," women can at last be grateful to the muscle guys.  

Who, ironically, they almost all find repulsive.