Me vs Me

Body Under Mind, Physique Before Psyche

By Marcel Luis Muñoa

With the turn of the century and the globalization of idea and thought, humanity has had no shortage of philosophies, especially those perspectives on what the ideal male figure entails. Entertainment, news, and social media have envisioned the modern man as a revitalized Adonis of a tall and defined stature, their muscle definition varying between romanticization and fetishization. And with the world’s expectation’s beaming into your pocket daily, the social pressure to be accepted has led many men to diets, workouts, or surgeries, all in hopes for acceptance. Referred to as “body dysmorphia,” this upturning trend not only causes physical damages in overexertion, malnutrition, and substance abuse, but severely damages the psyche. “You’re not big enough,” “you’re fat,” and “you’re weak,” are just some basic criticisms that lead men down these dangerous avenues of depleted self-worth. In a short summary, this is I what refer to as the “if you’re not everything, then you’re nothing” mentality.

However, on the opposite side of this mentality there are some who equally preach the “you don’t have to be anything” perspective, which can be just as damaging. Some believe that any body type is acceptable for men. To them, there is no sufficient reason for you to change and men should be comfortable in their own skin. This is all well and fine but it is subject to the same pitfalls the “everything or nothing” mentality entails. “Those body-types are unattainable,” or “no one needs to be that big,” are similar attacks made on the male form which also damage the mind, but for different reasons. Here, acceptance begotten from tolerance becomes idolized and anything short of it is considered unappealing. Instead of leading overly physique-based lifestyles, this perspective chooses no idealizations as the unquestionable standard.

So what sort of stance should men take about body image? No exact answer to this has been found yet, but we should know that it is most certainly somewhere in-between these two camps of thought. During my brief stint as a military fitness instructor I wavered between these two approaches, but quickly learned that neither side had a firm grasp on what it meant to be a man aesthetically or mentally. During my instruction I understood that everyone had different circumstances and therefore different lifestyles. BUT I also knew that we had the shared goal of being physically prepared for any mission. Put simply, if you could do push-ups, sit-ups, and run in a sustainable fashion, then that is all I could ask for. But if you wanted to do more and be more, then that was something I could not control. This mentality is exactly what contemporary social movements on male body image fail to grasp, despite preaching about it regularly. We have forgotten to disassociate a person’s character from their appearance.

We cannot assume that what media is portraying as ideal is what is right and just, and this applies to both thought processes. Neither the barrel-chested barbarian nor the dad-bodied philosopher communicates the reality of men, just what seems more marketable in the moment. Yet we continuously choose to accept it as hypothesis and subsequently choose to disprove it. The common modern man appears to define himself more on what he is not than what he is or wants to become. “I am not a musclebound simpleton,” or “I’ll never be some scrawny nerd,” are two sentiments that serve to distinguish individuals by disparaging others. And to prove that they are not (insert stereotypical imagery here), they further lean against the grain to prove their point.