Bodybuilding in fashion among young people
As you must have heard lately, bodybuilding is in vogue, especially among young people who have become their favorite sport 43% of fans between the ages of 16-25. Two years ago we were worried about the sedentary lifestyle of young people, today we wonder if they do too much sports, I really don’t understand the times we live in. But what does it matter, because my heart is only joy and happiness.
Stasa is a generation of athletes, and I am one of the women who love muscles. The more inflated, the happier I am, and not just for aesthetic reasons, I associate big muscles with great sexual ability and we agree that’s totally stupid because if there’s one useless thing a woman would come for, it’s muscles. But regardless, I’m completely conditioned to the idea that muscle makes a lover.
Historically, muscle has been progressively sexualized
England, 1743. Jack Broughton, the inventor of the rules of sports fighting, created the first boxing academy for rich young men. And among all these arguments there is also the idea that it will help them find a wife… And the fight that was reserved for soldiers becomes a spectacle that women watch, although it was not always allowed. Fast forward to the end of the 19th century where we see fitness culture which is followed by many magazines in which there is boxing, wrestling, bodybuilding. And all this promotes a new male ideal.
Anyway, up until the 50’s and 60’s, the obsession with muscle only grew for many reasons. People are already going to the beach, so we see bodies. Then there is the trauma of the world wars, which makes governments afraid that we lack strong men, especially at a time when office work is more and more widespread, so we sit more and more. And there is social Darwinism who was there and who weighs in the sex market the idea of a competition between men where only the strongest can triumph. All of this crystallizes around the idea that a man, a real man, must inflate himself like a balloon.
This big cliché that still fuels bodybuilding: female success…
And it’s super clear in bodybuilding magazines: a real man must have a body that men respect and women admire. And in order to clearly understand the message, we see men training under the gaze of women who go so far as to hold their biceps… These are the images we will find on the covers, in literature and of course through cinema, pop culture. And immediately we think of the peplum.
It’s the golden age of bodybuilder sex symbols that still exist today. We went from “Tarzan” to “Gladiator” to “X-Men”. And then, every time, the desirable hero is built like a Norman wardrobe. These are the images we’ve seen millions of times, which become automatic thoughts with a double message:
- First, muscles allow you to acquire women
- Deusio, the muscle helps protect women
More sexual narcissistic muscle?
Even today, we are a bit like that: when we lift weights, we also lift girls. So, of course, each generation reinvents the codes. But it seems to me that we are coming to a surge of muscle that is a little different, a little adapted to modern times. Today’s muscle is perhaps more narcissistic than sexual, more mixed than strictly masculine. Maybe it won’t be as sexualized for the new generations as it is for me, but personally I’m conditioned: when I see muscles, I see sex, and thanks to the boom in bodybuilding, I see sex everywhere.
