ScrawntoBrawn

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August 20, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 9; Page 1; Column 2; Style Desk

LENGTH: 1338 words

HEADLINE: VIEW;
Scrawn to Brawn: Men Get Muscles, Or Pray for Them

BYLINE: By GUY TREBAY

BODY:
IT started with Woodstock -- the video, not the event. Although old enough, barely, to have attended the original 1969 festival, I opted to skip the brown acid and spend that fateful weekend working my summer job. I've never regretted particularly that I wasn't on hand at the Yasgur farm for the grooviness, the mud and Jimi Hendrix's wah-wah pedal, although the rampant nudity sounded like fun. I had no idea how much fun until a friend invited me over recently to watch the documentary film on television.

Now, it's a cheap gimmick to quote Oscar Wilde when you've got hold of a tricky thesis, but you'll forgive me, I hope, for invoking him here. "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances," Wilde wrote in "The Picture of Dorian Gray." And watching "Woodstock," it was hard to keep from thinking that there was something important to be learned from the way people appeared 30 years back. I don't mean the crocheted ponchos and granny glasses. I mean anatomically.

People were much thinner then, especially guys. They had lean torsos and narrow shoulders and scrawny legs. A lot of them had stoner's swayback, but that's a separate issue. It occurred to me watching "Woodstock" that I'd happened on a piece of evidence documenting a powerful change in the social landscape. You have only to check out MTV's perennially rerun spring break special to see how radical the evolution in men's bodies has been.

The age cohort on spring break is the same as at Woodstock. Any similarity ends with that. Where the average 20-year-old man at Woodstock had a body that looked fine by most objective standards, that same man today would be judged a pathetic dweeb. The women, too, look different, of course, although not as markedly. Even braless hippie chicks knew pretty well what the culture expected of them.

But hold a picture of the Woodstock man alongside the MTV guy, and you'll be shocked by the difference. Where one has a perfectly agreeable pectoral arrangement, the other resembles a Playtex model. Where one has a flat stomach, the other possesses an abdominal six-pack with musculature that looks acid-etched.

Woodstock guys were all thin in the fashionably groovy scrawny/ sexy/semiwasted rock star mode, while the contemporary guy resembles a plastic action figure. His is the image of a recent New Yorker cartoon in which a woman replies to a hunk's barroom approach by saying, "Sure, we can have dinner," but only if his breasts sign a "noncompete clause."

"Can you imagine today's kids trying to fit into those Woodstock clothes?" asks Lou Schuler, fitness editor for Men's Health, a mass market monthly published by Rodale. Rodale, you may recall, is the Pennsylvania-based press founded on a roster of organic gardening journals. Now, with the phenomenally successful Men's Health and its new teenage spinoff, MH-18, it has become a publisher of what amounts to eugenics primers -- wish books whose surreally godlike cover models provide, as Mr. Schuler says, "the definitive cultural icon of masculinity."

That icon has a thin waist and wide shoulders. He has "muscles that you can see from 50 feet away," Mr. Schuler says. Never mind, he adds, that the actual models chosen for Men's Health covers are members not only of a self-selecting minority but of one that's "super genetically gifted." Few men are physically able to achieve a tiny waist, a washboard stomach and a massive torso, Mr. Schuler concedes, adding: "It's not necessarily an unreachable ideal. But it's an ideal."

The evolution of that ideal is the subject of "The Adonis Complex" (Free Press), a new book that tries to demonstrate how concerns about body image have come to dominate, and tyrannize, many American men.

"There's no question that there's a much greater emphasis on male body image than there was a generation ago," said Dr. Harrison G. Pope Jr., one of the book's three authors and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Back in the iconographically innocent era of Woodstock, Dr. Pope said, "men didn't go to the gym five days a week." They didn't employ personal trainers, measure themselves in terms of body fat percentage or spend $2 billion a year on commercial gym memberships, and $2 billion more on home exercise equipment.

They probably read Rolling Stone, too, not muscle magazines. But now even Wenner Media, Rolling Stone's parent company, has gotten into the fitness act, publishing its own regular exhortations, in Men's Journal, on how to achieve six-pack abdominals and a pert behind.

In 1996, "The Adonis Complex" reports, American men underwent 690,361 cosmetic surgical procedures, including 217,083 hair transplant operations and 54,106 liposuction procedures, not to mention surgery to augment their pectoral muscles, their buttocks, their calves and even their penises. A recent survey conducted by Dr. Charles Ysalis, a Pennsylvania State University researcher, also found that -- beyond the steroid abuses now considered commonplace among the adult male population -- 40 percent of American boys 12 and over report that they have experimented with, or plan to use, anabolic steroids to look better naked, as the gym ads say.

Many men, in other words, seem to be suffering a crisis of identity whose remedy is apparently to become cartoons. None of this would particularly shock women, who are accustomed to negotiating a reasonable self-image against body ideals that might include such implausible models as Barbie and Calista Flockhart.

"For men there's something new in all this," said Susan Bordo, a humanities professor at the University of Kentucky and the author of "The Male Body" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). On the one hand, Ms. Bordo said, men now "can experience the pleasure of self-display, a pleasure that women have always known, that experience of your body as the erotic center of the world."

But that pleasure is not without cost: many men are now developing women's maladies -- a cruel cultural trick if ever there was one. "There's a serious increase of eating disorders among men," Ms. Bordo said, "of steroid abuse, of exercise compulsion."

One result is the beefcake parade you'll see at all the local beaches these last weekends of summer. At Jones Beach recently, there were enough supermanly specimens to give Charles Atlas the willies. Similarly at Fire Island Pines, the beach resembled a "Gladiator" casting call. Even at Robert Moses State Park -- never much of a muscle beach -- there was so much hypertrophy on display that most guys with ordinary physiques took refuge behind their Igloo coolers.

When Jane Pratt, the editor of Jane, began planning the magazine's August beefcake issue, her intention was parodic. "The idea was to poke fun at Playboy," she said. "We made lists of questions like you'd find in the Playboy centerfold: 'What's your biggest turn-on?' Things like that."

The actors and models approached for the issue were let in on the conceit, and told they would be photographed nearly naked in come-hither poses. "Most of these guys are in good shape to begin with," Ms. Pratt said. "Our idea was to have fun with reverse sexism. But I ended up feeling so bad for these guys, for how distorted their body images were. We've featured women in bathing suits plenty of times, but we've never gotten so many calls from subjects begging us to airbrush their pictures."

Even models with buff bodies were paranoid about love handles. They wanted signed agreements that gave them the right to see how the other men looked.

"When Men's Health started doing covers that said, 'Get abs like this in 10 days!' " Ms. Pratt recalled, "it was a first in terms of putting pressures on men that women's magazines have always promoted. It's been at a ridiculous level for women for so long. I remember when it was just women who were obsessing over every square inch of their bodies. Now, men are going to that place where women always were. It's not that much fun here. I think we should all get out."

http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Photos: Before and after: Woodstock Man, inset, and the guy who could kick sand in his face today. (Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times; John Dominis/TimePix inset )(pg. 1); An ideal that some men actually achieve: six-pack abs on a magazine cover model and on Jones Beach. (Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times)(pg. 4)