For many gay men Melbourne’s lockdown has been nothing but agitation. Closed are our clubs and bars, our spaces to meet, dance, flirt; weekly activities that feel core to our history, identity and wellbeing. But, upon refreshing my feeds, it would seem that it’s perhaps the closure of our gyms that might be causing the most collective anxiety.
Many are unhappy about the stagnation of their fitness, the prolonged effect this is having on their mental health. Many are also worried about the changes to their physique – lost definition, reduced muscle mass – that accompanies six months of slowed activity. This too can impact the psyche.
In time for this year’s Mardi Gras the ABC published a story investigating pressures around body image. It reported that “gay men have a much higher level of body dissatisfaction than other people”, that for the gay community “appearance can be currency”. Research presented by The National Eating Disorders Association shows that although gay men represent only around 5% of the total male population, they make up 42% of males who have eating disorders.
A particular issue for young men is muscle dysmorphia, or “bigorexia”, “like that preoccupation with thinness, but taken to the other extreme with muscularity”, Dr Scott Griffiths, who leads Gay Bodies Worldwide, told newsGP.
It’s no surprise that the gym has become a bastion of gay culture. A meat market of both exhibition and voyeurism where men work to shred and sculpt their bodies, becoming abject objects of their own desires. Confidence is built, validation is earned, but limited access means that only those with enough income have the most to gain.
The buff, toned gym phyisque continues to feature on gay club promotional posters, glossed in magazines, and outnumbers all else in gay porn, Instagram #thirsttraps and OnlyFans content. But it is insidious that only a limited number of body types and tones are afforded explicit desire. Some bodies are idolised, others are not … What does it say about how our desires are constructed?
This tension is captured in a newly-released song from Troye Sivan. STUD opens with an immediate disclosure of desire: “Hey stud, you can come, you can come and meet me out front, you got all the muscles and the features I want” before blooming into Sivan’s nervous intimacies around sex and body image, “what’s it like to be so big and strong and so buff? Everything I’m not but could I still be a hunk to you?”
“I was feeling really insecure about myself and my body. Weirdly, I still have a secret Tumblr where I just followed porn and hot guys, right? I constantly was seeing the same body type that wasn’t mine,” Sivan shared in a profile for Vulture. For someone of Troye’s fame and status – with millions of adoring fans – this anxiety feels important.
This championed appropriation of a hyper-masculine aesthetic makes sense when considering gay men’s experiences with homophobia and abuse. The flex into masculinity: a combat against the latent stereotypes attached to an assumed “camp” or “pansy” queen. Our bulging muscles tell a history where men were brutalised by police and homophobes, the gym became our personal barracks.
But I fear that our flirtation with fitspo also exposes the intrinsic femmephobia that runs rampant in the community. The fear of being read as feminine, because femininity means weakness.
I fear that we’ve come to silo our desires, chiseling out hierarchies of bodies with a pair of pecs perched on the top. This constant reproduction of expectations around body image becomes a mirror – one which reflects the prolonged stare of the male gays’ male gaze.
When, I wonder, will we loosen the choke-hold that muscle men have over our collective desires and communal anxieties?
Our current focus around bodies is far too individually-minded. The “body positivity” movement, invented as an extension of fat liberation, has become hijacked by brands and corporate interests that sell our empowerment back to us. At its best it’s been moderately successful in disrupting traditional conventions of what could be considered beautiful – while still centring beauty and attraction as fundamentally important. The movement looks to find celebration and empowerment within the flesh, but has ultimately become a permission slip for the most normative bodies – white, toned, able-bodied – to take up the very spaces that were always theirs to claim.
With gyms closed and the public stare of a male gaze largely absent, an extended lockdown is perhaps the perfect opportunity to heave off the heavy weights of our cultural expectations.
“Body neutrality” might provide a remedy; a movement that deprioritises the substantial power we give to appearance and attraction, and how they temper our external judgements and personal worth. By neutralising the body we’re taught to better appreciate its achievements, its potential, the limits of what it can do for us, far beyond our perceptive desirability and the socially reproduced standards of beauty. Body neutrality may help topple the body hierarchies that dictate our desire and diffidence.
How do we do this?
Perhaps we demand more representation from our gatekeepers: the photographers, filmmakers, producers that archive and curate gay culture. We demand to see more body diversity represented in print and screen as unquestioned focal points of sexual desire. We remember that our desires aren’t fixed, they’re mutable, shaped by the culture we wade through and reproduce.
Perhaps we dial down our public commentary on bodies. In doing so, we stop supporting the physical idealisations that push and punish our self-esteem. We’re far too good at deploying our words as foot-soldiers to our collective anxieties. Even in the most innocuous comments – “great butt!” – lies a firm message on what should constitute greatness and what should grab attention. By changing our language, by acknowledging the person behind the parts, we might have a shot of canceling this long-running membership we’ve all signed up to.
And as lockdown loosens perhaps it’s time we place our weights on a new set of values.
Dejan Jotanovic is a freelance writer based in Narrm/Melbourne whose words typically spin around feminism, gender, queer theory, policy and pop culture. Twitter: @heydejan
