The other day I watched a “documentary” called “The Adonis Factor” on the Logo TV channel. Like all of the programming on Logo, this documentary was shallow, short, and generally uninformative.
BUT
I was glad to at least feel slightly less alone than normal.
The program takes place mostly in “gay mecca” cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Atlanta, and New York. I’m from a suburb of a small city in Connecticut and have never lived in any of the mentioned cities (though I have been to all of them at one time or another). One thing I should note off the bat is that many of the pressures, which were discussed by the people in the film were those, which I’d experienced through the media but never first hand. Perhaps this is an advantage of living in a smaller city.
The most interesting premise of the documentary is that men are, by nature quite competitive. And in this way, our bodies are just one more way of competing. The ideal is smooth, tan, and muscular. So men compete to have the best in all those categories. Indeed, in these large cities the men described as being the most in-line with this image ensure that their group of friends consist solely of other similar looking men.
And this is something I haven’t really experienced. Where I live there are plenty of out homosexual men. But I don’t sense this extreme segmentation. Perhaps I’m wrong.
As main stream normative values gain more power among homososexual men I hope this situation improves. As men become judged for NOT being in monogamous long-term-relationships with kids, property, and shared finances the focus on bodies will lessen.
At least that is my hope.
One thing I’d like to add is that another reason gay men are obsessed with becoming muscular is because we are perceived as being sissies and wimps. We want to appear strong. So that’s what we do. The appeal of this is quite strong for me. I am naturally thin and I’m average in height. Further, I’m just not a kid who can survive a fist fight. I’m a huge nerd. And so I wish that I could be tougher.
Anyway, I have nothing much more to add but it was nice to at least sit for an hour and know that I’m not alone in my unhappiness about my physical appearance.
