I am not muscular man. In fact, many people would say I’m fairly-if not worryingly-thin. My French teacher recently needed to define “svelte,” and he just pointed at me and said, “like him.”
So I wonder: is this a problem? Would it be better for me to have a big, nice-looking body?
A very unscientific study I’ve conducted among my female friends produced the unanimous answer: image doesn’t matter. But I take this initial answer with a grain of salt. Every time I’ve tried to come to an understanding of the preferences and behaviours of even one member of the opposite sex, I’ve been wrong. Moreover, when it comes to drawing out a subconscious preference from a human being, the short answer to a straightforward question more often than not only skims the surface.
If image doesn’t matter and there’s no preferred body type, why is the same type of physique repeatedly reinforced as the male ideal? How is it that Mr. Calvin-Klein-magazine-ad-model resembles Mr. Gillette-television-ad-model, who in turn resembles a topless Brad Pitt? There is a commonality, without a doubt: sculpted shoulders and biceps, rolling, defined abdominal muscles, and no sight of the bones that would be visible on a scrawny body.
Whether these repeated images have any real bearing on sexual preference or not, these muscle men exert their influence in daily life, too. One can’t help but feel inadequate next to one of these guys, who has muscles on top of the muscles I didn’t even know were muscles.
I have been though two job interviews lately where the guy on the other side of the table looked like he could have been the captain of his high school football team. In that situation, my being small and his being big just made the hurdles of impressing him that much harder to jump, because without having spoken a word, I already felt less impressive than my interviewer.
I know that muscle men of all dimensions hold sway over the rest of us because I see their influence played out in the gym. Some guys are in there for hours on end. And I know cultivating image has replaced boosting strength as the goal when I see them look in the mirror or at their own body as they work it, searching for instant results.
I think it’s a terrible trend: the more pervasive the ideal male body image becomes, the more that ideal will exert pressure on the average man to fit an impossible body type.
So I know what we svelte, skinny shmoes should do. We really ought to ignore all those silly ads, ridicule the muscular stereotype, and stare down that brawny job interviewer, in spite of the fact that my handshake didn’t burst a single one of his blood vessels.
But it’s not as easy to be a skinny, body image-ignoring rebel as it sounds. The mirror in the weight room is hard to ignore.
