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Why are queer men hyper-focused on body image? It may involve a social philosophy called objectification, which is the act of treating persons as objects or things, dehumanizing them, and making them sexual "objects" instead of real people. Gay men, more so than heterosexual men, tend to self-objectify and place higher importance on physical attractiveness.

Body image issues aren't unique to queer men, but toxic thoughts pertaining to self-worth and physical care are dangerously prevalent within the community. Open an app like Grindr and you'll be greeted with body-shaming phrases so familiar and cliché that straight people even know about them, too.

[James shows the following text on screen as he says the phrases.]

"No fats. No fems." "Gym fit only." "I work out. So should you."

This incessant need to achieve a "hot body" has become incredibly prevalent. With even men with literal superhero-level bodies complaining about feeling fat on Instagram.

[Quotes below shown on the lower third of the screen under James.]

The pressure can trigger more than just social media jealousy, though. Research published in 2019 by Dalhousie University found that —

"social demands placed upon gay men to eat healthily and achieve a perfect body are linked to anxiety and depression and have serious mental health consequences."

The National Eating Disorder Association also says that —

“LGBTQ+ identified folks experience unique stressors that may contribute to the development of an eating disorder.”

One such stressor? The “inability to meet body image ideals within some LGBTQ+ cultural contexts.”

Approximately 84 percent of gay men say they feel under intense pressure to have a body culturally defined as "hot." Not "healthy" or even "fit", "hot". They are three times more likely than straight men to have body image issues. Only one percent stated that they were "very happy" with their appearance, and those unhappy with their appearance continue to struggle with it well into middle age and beyond.

Of course, in the social media era, our phones make it easier than ever to fall into the toxic trap of comparing ourselves to others in every way.

This person has a nicer home, this person has a nicer car, that person has more followers, this person seems to look like Chris Evans in full Captain America mode every moment of every day. When the fact of the matter is that Chris Evans doesn't even like looking like Captain America. Part of the reason he was so vehement about his decision to not continue portraying the character was because of the intense demands on his body.

(It's also part of the reason he'd request shirtless scenes in his movies - if he was going to suffer to look like that, he was gonna make sure that everyone could see it.)

Famously, during the filming of Captain America: Civil War, he asked the directors if his shirt could rip off while he was holding a helicopter to a landing pad. They figured it would have been a bit much.

In order to get his body in the kind of tip-top condition that made Hayley Atwell slip out of character for a minute, his daily routine was grueling, and his meal plan was bleak: low carb, heavy green vegetables, and meal supplements. And to boot, anytime you see his body, he dehydrated himself for at least forty-eight hours leading up to the shoot.

People don't just look like that. It is a full-time job, not only to get into shape like that, but to keep yourself in shape like that. And given how imbalanced your nutritional intake needs to be, on top of intermittent dehydration, it's not healthy to sustain that kind of body type for very long. It's not possible to look like that all the time. And expecting someone to look like that at all is a little absurd. How much life do you miss out on by living at the gym that much?

The pressure to conform to a certain body type is even harder to get a grip on when the finish line keeps getting pushed back over time. As a younger gay man, I was told that I was too fat and would never be accepted in this world. Skinny was the only way forward, and I was told that was easy to achieve. I could just eat less and be more active and lose weight.

If only it were that simple.

As I've mentioned in previous videos, I came out pretty young. I was twelve when I first started telling people that I was gay because I was just too damn impatient to wait any longer. I wanted a boyfriend and I wanted one ASAP.

Through my teen years, finding other gay people was near impossible, but when I did manage to find one, I always got the same response: "Ew, you're fat, go away." It was basically those words every time without variation. Sometimes it felt like they'd all gotten together and written a script... which didn't help my body issues at all.

You see, I was sent to a dietitian when I was seven years old. My doctors didn't think that my baby fat was coming off fast enough and wanted it under control. So I was put on a strict calorie-controlled diet that my parents, my friends' parents, and my extended family made sure I followed to a T. Later on, I was told that this kind of dieting at such a young age may have actually stunted my growth, since most of my male cousins are well over six feet tall.

But despite the diet, I continued to gain weight. The only explanation from the dietitian was that I must be cheating, or that my parents must be slipping me snacks. The blame was placed squarely on actions, not body chemistry. No tests were run to see if maybe I had a malfunctioning thyroid or anything like that. I was just eating too much, plain and simple.

Eventually, my mother stopped taking me to see the dietitian because I only left there feeling worse about myself every time. And as I grew into my teenage years, I continued to gain weight. On and on the pounds came, until I was well over three hundred pounds come high school graduation. I didn't start losing weight at all until I went on a crash diet during film school, since I could barely afford rent, let alone three square meals a day. I was only taking in about 400 calories, and even on that "stranded in the mountains about to start contemplating eating your friends" diet, I only lost about twenty pounds in six months.

Obviously there was something wrong. Not only did I feel physically horrible since asthma plus excess weight does not equal a good time, but I felt emotionally horrible because I was now twenty-two, had been out for a decade and never had a real life boyfriend.

I "dated" guys online but never showed them anything but my face. In the rare occasion that they'd see my midsection... six months of talking would go out the window as I got blocked. ...So I felt like garbage, and decided to find out what was wrong.

There had to be an imbalance somewhere in my body. So when I moved home after film school, I made my doctor send me for every test he could think of for any condition that could lead to weight gain or difficulty losing weight. Everything came back fine. I was perfectly healthy, except for the extra 120 pounds I was carrying around.

So he sent me to a new dietitian, and three months later following her direct meal plans, I'd gained back the twenty pounds I'd lost in film school and then some. Again, I was told that I must be cheating and not following the plan. The plan was... white rice, steamed chicken with water or black coffee, with a multivitamin.

My mom thought I was crazy for doing it, but I had never in my life been thin, not for one day. Even at birth I weighed more than average. And I would do anything to be able to try on a shirt in a store and not have to walk out of there feeling horribly embarrassed because the triple XL wouldn't button.

I spent another decade dieting, going to the gym regularly, counting calories and watching my weight fluctuate between sixty pounds past clinically defined morbid obesity and eighty pounds past clinically defined morbid obesity.

A new doctor eventually put me on a weight loss medication, a daily injection which works by making you so sick to your stomach that you simply can't eat. I shot myself up every day for months, not taking in nearly enough food to be considered healthy. I tolerated the side effects like extreme nausea and constant shortness of breath, which was actually an allergic reaction to the shots, but I wasn't about to tell my doctor that because this was supposed to help me lose weight.

This is just how toxic the need to lose weight is. I was willing to endure an allergic reaction to a very powerful drug just to try to lose weight.

I lost those twenty pounds again, but that was it.

Finally I'd had enough. [clears throat, suppressing emotion] After my mom passed away, she left me a little money, so I was gonna take that plus my own meagre savings to have weight loss surgery. Specifically gastric sleeve surgery, a procedure in which they remove the majority of your stomach, shaping it into roughly the size and shape of a banana. Irreversible, and well known for complications like acid reflux so bad that you may need throat surgery within a few years.

But I was sick of being fat. I was sick of being ignored by every man I ever found attractive. I was sick of feeling like a charity case anytime anyone I knew said that I looked good.

So I booked the surgery, paid the deposit, booked the flight (since the surgeon doing the surgery was halfway across the country), and started on the all liquid diet that leads up to the procedure. After all of that, I started to ask myself, "am I gonna go under the knife, get a surgery with potential lifelong complications, risk death on the operating table, for the approval of men who may very well be some of the biggest assholes in the world? Was I really doing this?" Did I think so little of myself that the opinions of headless torsos on Grindr could send me to a surgeon who would change the way my body worked forever? So I swallowed the cost of the deposit and I canceled the surgery.

Since then, I've been doing research into how this happened to us. How did our entire society become so obsessed with lean and toned or muscular bodies? It wasn't always this way.

So what happened? The answer might seem very out of right field. The answer is capitalism... and fascism.

Okay, so capitalism is a simple one. You can easily connect the dots to how generating a sense of culture that drives people to desperately conform to a body ideal can result in someone making a profit. But fascism? That's gonna take a little bit of explaining.

In the culture of today, I don't really like talking about fascism. I have to talk about it, however, because I'm learning that analyzing media in this day and age inevitably results in hosting a discussion about fascism. That's just the culture we live in.

As a wise woman once said, "Thanks, I hate it."

But one of the difficulties about talking about fascism and sorting media into categories of what does or does not support neo-fascist ideology, is that fascism itself is hard to describe. Because a definition of fascism does not really include the way that fascism is as much of a process of government as it is a method and a model.

The history class description of fascism as "communism is the far left, and fascism is the far right," it's a little bit too simple.

Even though the word fascism comes from the Italian for bundle of sticks, much like another f word, it represents a concept that is actually notoriously difficult to define.

For instance, in 2013 a right-wing newspaper — that had supported fascists in the past — published an article claiming that the United Kingdom Independence Party, a British right-wing party, was fascistic.

However a center-left newspaper proclaimed that —

"compared with the Golden Dawn party in Greece - who do have fascist credentials - and other fringe parties evident in hard-hit areas of the EU, the United Kingdom Independence Party is pretty mild."

We seem to treat fascism like an asymptote, where there's a point where a political group may throw out any number of fasc-y red flags, but it's impossible to collectively label them as fascist.

Culturally, we have decided that the Nazi party of Germany was fascist, which means that it doesn't matter how a political body may draw cues from the Third Reich, as long as it is not the Third Reich as it manifested from the late 1920s to early 1940s in Germany, it is not fascism.

Using the Nazi party as the gold standard of evil has consequences like this. By treating them as this sacred measure of maximum evil, we have a standard by which, if something is not as bad as the Nazis, then it's fine, or at least tolerable.

Or alternatively, when something is as bad as Nazis, it is taboo to acknowledge it, and for that reason we cannot discuss Rwanda, or Sarajevo, or any number of massacres that have happened in the last century because it makes us uncomfortable to think that the Nazis weren't just a one-off fluke of evil political evolution. Stalin, for instance, was responsible for far more ethnic cleansing than Hitler was.

And a third consequence is that we cannot treat contemporary Nazis as seriously as we should. Right-wing pundits who have spent their entire careers comparing every liberal and Democrat to Hitler have suddenly done a complete 180.

We have self-identified Nazis openly walking around with swastika armbands, but the culture does not condone violence against these Nazis because they're not the "real" Nazis.

Part of this is due to the fact that our functional definitions of fascism are rooted in anecdotal examples of where fascists appear, usually in retrospect. Because as demonstrated, you could call yourself a fascist while still being ignored. It really shouldn't be so surprising... that self-identification isn't enough for a centrist.

A re-evaluation of fascism would require us to remove it as a method of government and more so focus on the ways that fascist governments enforce their ideology, and the kinds of values from which fascist ideologies emerge. So often, we are told what fascism is, what it looks like, why it begins, why it's bad. In our essentialist thinking, we look for those specific markers - the swastika armbands, the skull and crossbones, the Hugo Boss - and we don't take these markers and consider how they could be reapplied into a contemporary context.

To me, I think the what and why of fascism are less important to identify than the how... and the who.

Who is fascism promoting as the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Who should the public idolize and how does the governing body enforce these values? But these are much more abstract and unquantifiable than listing a collective set of characteristics that manifest in fascist states, or how fascist states arise.

For instance, one of the more common assumptions about fascism is that it limits the public's freedom of speech. And that is true; the government wants to control how the public thinks, so they restrict what the public can say. It makes it more difficult to spread ideas that may not align with how the state wants the masses to think.

And no, freedom of speech does not apply to being able to say whatever you want on social media. Just like a store manager can have you escorted off the premises for violating profanity guidelines, a private business can block what you can express on their social media platform. Freedom of speech simply means the government cannot persecute you for saying whatever you want about it with your mouth. It was designed to protect the press so that it could accurately report about the government.

In America, there are no official exemptions to freedom of speech, however in Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms also include freedom of speech, but this freedom does not extend to hate speech that may target any particular ethnic, racial, religious or sexual minority. (At least in theory).

By literal definition, this would mean Canada is more fascist than America in this regard. However, in practice, this is abundantly untrue.

And of course by removing fascism from its existing definition, we run the risk of oversaturating it to the rest of the world. Suddenly any encroachment of someone controlling your actions becomes fascism. Which, if you let your brain pickle in this kind of nonsense for too long, you run the risk of irreversible brain smoothing, otherwise known as libertarianism.

But the problem remains, if everything is fascism, then nothing is fascism.

Funny enough, insofar as political movements go, we can put a soft start date on fascism. (And yes this is going to lead into what body image has to do with it, I promise).

Fascism as a coherent form started in Italy under the leadership of Mussolini in 1919. After the infamous March on Rome and with the help of the conservatives in 1922, he came to power. By 1925-1926, his government had quickly become a dictatorship. All of this happened after the first World War, which many Italians didn't want to join in the first place. On top of that, Italy was facing a crisis because it wasn't industrializing fast enough. This led to a period of revolution known as the Two Red Years, basically a two-year period when socialists were gaining ground in the country because of horrendous working conditions.

But the fascist reaction quickly drowned out this [air quotes] "radical" left-wing government. In 1919, there were only a few true Italian fascists, however by '22, they had won the support of the rural bourgeoisie and were running large parts of the country. By the end of that same year, the national fascist party had a quarter of a million members. When Mussolini's March on Rome happened, big businesses, conservative politicians, and the army decided to give power to the fascists wholesale, instead of giving it to the socialists, who were far more popular among voters. This made it possible for Mussolini to become the leader of Italy in 1922.

But fascism as a way of life was just as contradictory as it was an idea. This happened because fascists in power were being pulled in three different directions. Conservatives joined the party because they wanted a more authoritarian version of the old system; they wanted the pyramid scheme of feudalist power, just without the infighting brought on by the myriad of city-states.

There were also nationalists who wanted even more authoritarianism without more violence. And there were also more radical fascists who wanted a second violent revolution. Mussolini eventually sided with the most extreme fascist group, which is something we're seeing play out in American right-wing politics right now.

If you begin leaning into radicalism, but you don't side with the most radical group, you become a target. The centrists have the ability to just leave - in this case the Italian conservatives - but this is applicable to all governments. If the centrists leave their positions, even if they can't stand the far right, that would mean giving more political power to the left.

Also not unlike Republican voters refusing to vote for Democratic candidates against absolutely abhorrent Republican ones because they'd rather elect the Devil Himself than someone who wants to protect their Medicare and Social Security...

Anyway.

Basically, the beginning of fascist ideology can be seen as a rejection of the modern Progressive age. Inclusivity bad. It became a coherent ideology of extreme conservatism in Italy, and then emerged in Germany after a period of crisis, but was only allowed into power after the rich permitted and facilitated it. Fascism, capitalism.

Okay, yes, but... what does that have to do with being fat?

There are several patterns you see in fascism (when we decide to spot it). Rule of one figurehead, hero worship, master race, purging undesirables, etc, etc. We've been to this rodeo before. We talk about all of these things, all of the time. But if we're looking at patterns of how totalitarian regimes deploy fascism, there are some other weird patterns.

There's usually a focus on art and ideals of beauty, and this is where we can arguably see fascism most clearly: when the state uses force and manipulation to consolidate the public interest around a single standard of beauty. This other major tenet to fascism is (and this was especially true for the Nazis) something we might today call body fascism, which is simply defined as —

"extreme views of how somebody should look, especially what shape and size they should be."

(Grindr.)

This is present throughout all forms of fascism, but especially the ones based around the myths of Scandinavia. The Nordic Superman, the Aryan, the Ubermensch. Which is most of the fascism that has spurred on the men's rights groups around North America and Western Europe. Even though the vast, vast majority of them do not fit the description of what they would describe as the "ideal male body".

Which, focusing so much on the ideal male body kind of sounds pretty gay to me if you ask me. Granted, the blonde-haired blue-eyed poster boy for Nazi propaganda befits even a contemporary model for desirability. "This could one day be you... or your son, or your nephew." The Nazi party very strongly associated itself and its success with physical beauty.

So though the perfect male body has been an element of fascism from the very beginning, never was it more prevalent than in Nazi Germany. Because Hitler was obsessed with the art of classical Greece.

To understand what I mean, just watch the famous opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl’s two-part film Olympia, which documented the Berlin Olympics.

To a soundtrack of dramatic music, the camera pans across the ruins of the Acropolis, before lingering on several celebrated ancient sculptures, offered up as ideals of beauty and artistic prowess. Eventually, against a misty backdrop, we see one of the most famous Greek sculptures of all: a statue of a stooping, naked athlete preparing to hurl a discus.

Its surface glistening with oil, as though ready for competition, the sculpture suddenly fades away. In its place appears a living athlete adopting the same pose. Slowly he starts to swivel back and forth, before hurling his discus with all his might. The chilling message is presented with stark, poetic efficiency: the glories of Classical Greece are reborn in Nazi Germany.

Professor Ralph Michael Schneider of the Ludwig Maximilian University said,

"Without the Classical tradition, the Nazi visual ideology would have been rather different. The perfect Aryan body, the white colour of the marble, the beautiful, ideal white male: to put it very bluntly, it became a kind of image of the 'master race' - and that's what the Nazis called themselves."

But Olympia isn't the only place that we see the [air quotes] "ideal Nazi body." We see it in most of Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, to be fair. Slim but defined, not too muscular as that would be unsightly, the ideal man was close to six feet tall, clear white skin, clean shaven with little to no body hair. For examples, please see Calvin Klein ads.

The fascism here (or the fasc-y elements) aren't the presence of a beauty standard. As I mentioned with Greece, there have been very strong beauty ideals for all of mankind. Funny enough, the Greek standard favored the chunkier, sturdier men. The slimmer statues were meant to be associated with youth - boys. But where the Nazis differed is just how specific the beauty standards were. It was like you needed a textbook to really sort out all the nuances.

This was mostly because Nazi propaganda was facilitated on the myth of the Aryan race, and... that the Aryan race was inherently superior by genetic determination. In order to do this, the Nazis required very strong visual indicators to demonstrate that the German man was stronger, heartier and, most importantly, more beautiful. Leaning heavily into phrenology, the now debunked study of the various elements of how the skull was shaped being an indicator of personality traits, specifically intelligence.

Mythologically speaking, and this was part of Hitler's domestic policy, the Aryans were the descendants of the gods, specifically the Æsir. They prided themselves on looking the part.

Furthermore, due to the fact that a fat German man spat in the face of their master race propaganda, there was a precedent for punishing those who did not conform to these standards. There have been plenty of historians^who? who have even postulated the idea that Ernst Roehm, Hitler's gay BFF while he rose to power, and the man who ran the progenitor of the SS, the SA, was executed not because of Hitler's anxieties or Himmler's disdain for gay men, but... because he was fat and therefore didn't fit the ideal image of the Aryan man.

Which honestly kinda checks out? Nor would it be the last time that the Third Reich shot itself in the foot because something practical didn't line up with their aesthetic philosophy. If Hitler himself was a homo, I think it would be starkly on brand for him to purge the only competent member of his cabinet because "no fats, no femmes". Retrospectively, probably for the best.

Suffice to say, with the Brown Shirts out of the way, Hitler had carte blanche to sculpt his own hot gay boy summer — I mean secret police.

And the Nazis did do whatever they could to make sure that the SS, the face of the party... would be a very pretty face. These perfect Nazi soldiers became a trademark of the regime across the world. As the globe suffered from malnutrition due to the food shortages of the Great Depression, or fattened up because the only food readily available was nutrient poor and extremely high in carbs, seeing these svelte attractive Germans marching down the streets of Berlin in newsreels created an air of inferiority for many, especially in America.

Which in no small amount contributed to the massive signups when America joined the war. Remember, America was attacked by Japan, not Germany, but American boys across the country signed up to fight in Europe. They had to show these "perfect Germans" that they weren't so tough. And as it turns out, they weren't, and the Allies won the war in half as much time as it took America to realize the Iraq War was a lost cause.

But like any time Americans go traveling in Europe, they make sure to bring home some souvenirs. Mostly... Nazi scientists, but also they brought back body fascism.

You see, before World War II, a lean, muscular body was not idealized. In fact, by many it was looked down upon. If someone had a ripped, toned body, it meant they were a physical laborer, a gardener or construction worker, someone who didn't have enough money to not have a ripped body. Because physically intensive jobs were the only ones that uneducated poor people could get.

In fact, softer, unfit bodies, to a degree, were considered more attractive because it meant that person had the money to buy lots of food. But the fat had to be well distributed all around the body, not just the belly, because belly fat was a sign that you probably ate a lot of cheap bread or drank a lot of cheap beer. And really skinny bodies meant that you couldn't even afford the cheap bread, so you're probably gonna die soon.

But after World War II... that all changed.

Suddenly being healthy wasn't a priority. It was being fit. Not strong - fit. Look at Charles Atlas, who for a long time was considered to have the best body in the world. Today we'd probably say he has a dad bod, because he'd look fat next to the rippling abs of Instagram models.

How did this come about? Well, soldiers coming home from World War II had seen the ridiculous bodies of Nazi soldiers and Nazi propaganda and the mythical bodies that Nazis held up as perfection, and thought, "ohh, I can do better than that." And so a small subsect began trying to attain these bodies, creating diet plans low in carbs, high in protein, with lots and lots of exercise.

There was a bit of a distraction once the Cold War started up because the enemy didn't look like the Ubermensch. Soviet soldiers were always shown bundled up in winter jackets, so seeing how fit they were was kind of hard, so it had far less of an impact on the psyche of the western Army boys.

But the idea of gorgeous male physiques started floating away from the military in the decades following World War II (since America was busy shipping off anyone without flat feet to fight wars in East Asia). Instead it drifted toward the well-off, the rich, the bourgeoisie.

Because your typical man wasn't working in labor jobs anymore, attaining strong muscles and ripped abs. Instead they were standing on production lines or sitting in offices, growing flabby. So appearing soft was now associated with the middle class, so the rich began working out, creating a market for personal trainers, fancy diets, and exclusive gyms. Well-off housewives now wanted to look like the women on their TV sets - Farrah Fawcett or Suzanne Somers. Fascism sets the cultural anxiety; capitalism uses it to make a buck.

And then in the 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution and the popularization of commercial debt, everyone felt like they could be as rich as the Carringtons or Colbys. So everyone started hitting the gym, and fitness centers took off as one of the most profitable businesses of the decade.

And it wasn't just because people were signing up for a year-long membership on New Year's Day and then giving up. People actually went. The 1980s was a decade of excess, and excessive dieting and exercise was no different. One of the reasons cocaine was so popular was because it suppressed your appetite and gave you more energy.

But gay men had been way, way ahead of the curve on the diet and exercise thing. We'd been hitting the gym hard since the 1950s. Partially because when our gay soldiers went over to Germany and saw the sexy German soldiers, we didn't just want to beat them - we wanted to be them.

(We didn't want to be Nazis, not necessarily. Well, we ignored the ones that did... Do...)

In the 1960s and 70s, you were far more likely to see gay men with defined abs and pecs than straight men. It was even considered a way for straight people to spot us. If a man at the beach looked like he lived at the gym, he was probably gay. Because not only were we trying to attain these bodies for ourselves, but the gym was a great place to find other people trying to attain those bodies. And a great place to hook up.

Straight men were actually warned away from going to gyms in major cities because you never know what might happen in the locker room. Yeah, queers and locker rooms have been a straight scare tactic for just that long.

And then after the rise of AIDS, gay men wanted to look as ripped as possible so as to not appear sick, since people with AIDS, especially advanced AIDS, tended to have muscle wasting. We even started using steroids because some witch doctors in New York and LA started telling gay men that steroid use would slow down the progression of the virus.

And then, as a community, gay men just kept up with the same regimen. We go to the gym and eat crazy diets, despite not having to show that we're not dying. We go to the gym, despite being able to hook up just about anywhere. Because we still want those perfect Nazi soldier bodies, whether we call them that or not.

But those soldiers were paid and required to look like that, but a switch has flipped within the community. It's no longer that we find those bodies an attractive option and would like them for ourselves.

Now, if you don't have that body, you're worthless, you're shunned, you're subhuman. Sound familiar?

And we say, "well, you can't shame people for what they're attracted to," but we do shame people who say "only whites" in their Grindr profile, or whatever combination of disgusting racial screening tactics they may use. So why not shame those who actively perpetuate an unhealthy body standard?

As I mentioned before, research shows that social demands placed upon gay men to eat healthy and achieve a perfect body are linked to anxiety and depression and have serious mental health consequences.

A gay fitness instructor told GQ Magazine,

"Working in this industry, I can tell you that looking good is not enough anymore for some gay guys... They don't just want to look good - they want to look the best."

To illustrate his point, he said he has clients who started off doing basic bicep curls in front of the mirror but are now competing in fitness-based competitions like Turf Games and Crossfit.

"A gay friend said to me that it's hard to look fuckable these days." he said

"And I guess he's right: there are so many fit guys out there that some guys feel the need to step up their game in order to feel visible, accepted, and appreciated."

If they're not addressed, queer men's body image issues can easily magnify into more serious mental health problems.

Severe depression among gay men has actually increased since it's become more acceptable to be out because now that the world sees what some gay men look like, the impression becomes that all gay men must look like that, and if you don't well, you better get to work.

This has led to the abuse of steroids and illegal drugs to try and build muscle and satiate appetites, anorexia and bulimia... and even giving up... with suicide.

We hold up certain body types as the goal and even the expectation for what beauty inside the gay community is, but not everyone can achieve those bodies no matter how much they diet or work out. And not just because biology sometimes works against you, like with thyroid issues and rare food sensitivities.

This past summer I found out that I lacked the enzymes required to properly digest carbohydrates, which meant my body was holding on to every last carb I ate. The long delayed explanation for why I couldn't lose weight, no matter how healthy I ate. The condition is called hyperinsulinemia. And I also have a generalized carbohydrate intolerance, it turns out. It's incredibly rare and related to diabetes. Surprise, I have that family history and I've been warned by doctors since my teens to be on the lookout. It's not diabetes though, it's just diabetes-adjacent.

It was...... one of the strangest feelings in the world, after I'd been dismissed by nearly every medical professional as just cheating on diet plans, to after three decades on this planet be informed that there is an actual reason for it...

I have to try to not think about what my life would have been like if any doctor or dietitian had decided to run the weird tests... instead of just telling me to eat less and exercise. Maybe the reason it's so rare is because doctors are... well, they can be very quick to say that you being fat is the root of all your health problems, when in reality maybe being fat is just a symptom of the real problem.

I was lucky enough to have a doctor who looked at my chart, listened to me when I told her what my diet for the last ten years had been like, that even when I was doing the starving student thing I still lost almost nothing. She looked at my medical records and said, "I want to bring you in for one more test." The medical community itself is stuffed with very fat-shame-y sentiments. Only they don't call you fat, they call you "unhealthy".

Now I don't want to generalize all doctors like this, but from someone who has gotten the same shade from a lot of them, the medical community is very rooted in promoting beauty standards. Given how slim their BMI charts are, I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of people are either overweight or obese.

I'm not sure which SS twink they used as a gold standard, but there is some seriously unrealistic expectations about what a body should be. How many teenagers develop eating disorders just because they stepped on a scale in their doctor's office?

And they lean right in to meal plans and specialists and dietitians, supplements and shakes. Some of the more enterprising doctors will even have spas or wellness centers and will push their diet subscriptions onto their patients, which... that isn't illegal, but it sounds like it should be.

We are told to trust doctors and many of us do. That's a lot of power given to someone who's trying to sell you what may very well amount to snake oil. And doctors have a very easy time diagnosing someone as fat, especially given how many tests and hoops they make you jump through to get anything else diagnosed.

It's easy for someone to make money off of fat people when the entire culture they live in drives them into crippling anxiety and puts them under extreme pressure to just not be fat anymore. Especially when the culture has a more limited ideal of body standards. Not even perfection. On some of my infrequent forrays into heterosexual social media, it is plastered with cringe-worthy declarations about what the opposite sex should be.

And yes it comes from men and women. Because neither group really knows how the other group's body works.

(Okay, somebody's got to say this): gay men are not alone. There are a horde of ladies out there who do think that it is perfectly reasonable to expect men to have that superhero body all the time.

In fact, Tenoch Huerta, the MCU's Namor, came under a degree of criticism for not having the body. You know, the one that Captain America has. Ironically, not from the gays, who thirsted after him, his nose ring, and his man pearls from the get-go; these were women and straight men who were upset... about his back. (Oh well, more for us.)

At least for the gays, we have groups that tolerate a range of ways to be fit or attractive, and the more thick fellows we depict as sexually appealing in media, the more we will seek that desirability in real life.

Conversely, Warner Brothers Executives in 2021 (at least the ones who were there at the time) were having a collective meltdown leading up to the release of The Batman. It turned out Robert Pattinson was struggling to put on the bulk that Christian Bale had. Because they wanted to have that shirtless Batman shot. And Pattinson did look good for his obligatory shirtless sequence, but it was far from what stood out most in the movie. In my opinion, I don't think the world's greatest detective and ninja needs to look like Brock Lesnar.

But back to Namor: The matter of the fact is that Namor's body isn't really something that would feel out of place on a rugby field. It was a subverted expectation for the swimmer's body he has in the comics, which I think is perfectly okay. But that said, it wouldn't make sense at all for any aquatic superhero to have dehydrated abs.

The swimmer's body is, for some reason, the body type that the gays (and a lot of straight guys) default to. Author and queen Eric Shaw Quinn has said,

"There's not enough swimming pools in Los Angeles for all the men who say they have a 'swimmer's body.'"

Personal trainers and training apps get this kind of request all the time, as if people think they can just morph their body like that. Sorry, but that in itself would be a superpower.

People's bodies are the way they are and they can't control the distribution of muscle mass or their bone structure. There is a version of fit that they can accomplish, but it might not be a swimmer's body.

Another thing that happens is skinny guys wish they could bulk up to have a rugby build, which also probably cannot happen. There's a kind of athletic determinism when it comes to fitness. We look at swimmers and say, "all that swimming has given him a swimmer's body," but the truth is actually the inverse. The person had the right kind of body to be able to succeed in competitive swimming. It's more accurate to say that 'he is a swimmer because he has a swimmer's body'.

This isn't always the case, but in most cases people tend to gravitate to the sport that they do because their body type thrives in that environment. Whereas a thicker or chunkier guy would struggle in the water because he's not built to accommodate fluid dynamics.

And the health industry preys on this. They will make these promises and they will take your money, and then another health industry will be happy to take your money when you get disillusioned with the first one. That's how the industry is built. Fascism, capitalism.

But again, some bodies aren't designed for ripped six-pack abs. Some people will always be a bit bigger... like me.

Even after figuring out after 25 years that my body really was working against me, I know that once I do lose the weight, I'll never look like those Instagram models and I'll probably never live up to the expectations of some of those headless torsos on Grindr.

But I'll be able to go into a store and buy a button-up shirt that fits. I'll be able to go for a run without feeling like I'm about to have a heart attack. I won't look like what the expectation is for multiple reasons: my head is too round, my chest is too broad, my legs are too thick. As much as it would break my teenage self's heart, I'll never be a twink.

And that's okay. You shouldn't have to look a specific way to meet the bare minimum body standards for this community. So I think a healthy way to move forward is to aim to be exactly that: healthy. As a community, that should be our goal. Not ripped, but healthy. Make that the standard for the community, and that'll even take some of the pressure off of the gym bunnies and hopefully end the epidemic of eating disorders that queer men have been suffering from for decades.

Fight back against the rising tide of body fascism. Because fascists suck. Why would you want to look like the type of person... that Hitler thought was perfect?