The photo op is an emblem of a discarded time. Taken in 1991, during the second annual Great American Workout, a fitness event hosted on the South Lawn of the White House, it shows President George H. W. Bush with a hundred-and-thirty-five-pound barbell hanging in his grasp. He is flanked by two bodybuilders, only one of whom, a man of lesser renown, assists the grimacing leader of the free world, who is looking ever the country-club veteran in a polo and a pastel windbreaker. The other bodybuilder, grinning and finger-gunning at the camera, is a man we know well, an Austrian indispensable to the American consciousness, referred to by mononym: Arnold.
It was an amusing pairing that not long before would have been considered truly odd. In 1976, when the Whitney Museum pedestalled Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “living work of art” during a one-night symposium, bodybuilding was still, as a reporter for Sports Illustrated noted, “a sport with a low repute in this country.” Ian Frazier, writing of that event in The New Yorker, recorded a Columbia University art professor’s disdain for “well-developed body builders” who evinced “some of the worst excesses” of a bygone era. But the eighties, embracing excess, loosened Americans’ suspicion of flagrant muscle: gyms and “Rocky” films multiplied alongside the national debt. Never as rich as its aesthetics intimate, the U.S. met the nineties financially—and, therefore, spiritually—depressed. “America felt itself to be losing out . . . losing its sense of itself,” John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his best-selling account of this overlooked flash point, a period that saw the budding friendship of a President and a bodybuilder who would become a governor. In the meantime, as if to stave off the national mood, untold bodies across the country strove and strained, breaking themselves down in the hope of forming something better, stronger.
Men sweating in the weight room, women glistening in the aerobics studio—was the gym ever as segregated as that ready image? Perhaps not, though members of the so-called fairer sex were hardly encouraged to remake themselves in Schwarzenegger’s silhouette. The documentary “Pumping Iron,” from 1977, introduced audiences to the niche mores of male bodybuilding. Less remembered is a 1985 sequel subtitled “The Women,” featuring, among others, an Australian powerlifter turned bodybuilder named Bev Francis, whose ungentle musculature—perceived as unfeminine—the judges of the filmed competition punish with an eighth-place finish. “I just want to say that women are women and men are men. There is a difference, and thank God for that difference,” a male judge says at one point, spouting the sort of unelaborated tautology that today torments sport and legislation alike.
This notion of “difference” arrived packaged from—what else?—mass culture. The summer after the second Great American Workout, Linda Hamilton cut a new figure in her reprise of Sarah Connor in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” transforming, as Entertainment Weekly put it, “her softly feminine physique . . . into a hardbody even a five-time Mr. Universe can admire.” That “hardbody,” the sinewy result of both free weights and heaps of cardio, was nevertheless on the muscular side of thin, which remained “in” throughout the nineties. Women, it was said, wanted not muscle but “tone,” which was thought to be achieved through “fat-melting” repetitions with rubber weights that didn’t exceed five to eight pounds or so, lest one grow “bulky.” This was standard ladies’-magazine fare in the two-thousands, when a body like Britney Spears’s could be accused of being too buff. (“I wish Britney wouldn’t go on exercise machines so often,” Hugh Grant said at the time. “It can give women big thighs.”) In the following decade, though, gym culture saw a change in the winds, as gals in the weight room looked up from their sets to find that they had female company.
The pitch that pushed women toward the iron was irresistible in its inversion of gendered wisdom: What if you could spend fewer hours in the gym, stop restricting what you eat, and untether fat loss from the number on the scale? Emerging internet forums such as Reddit’s r/fitness were replacing the vacant perfection of editorial spreads with crowdsourced examples and instruction. Regular Janes posted their amateurish snapshots, showcasing lean yet shapely physiques attained through weight training, minimal to no cardio, and a caloric intake generous enough to make Marie Claire vomit. The author Casey Johnston, a chronic dieter and reluctant long-distance runner, studied one such post with fascination. “She was a normal person, having a normal-person’s relationship with this activity that I’d previously understood to be reserved for macho gods and immortals, eating an amount of food that I’d previously understood to be reserved for people who had renounced the hotness battle I was locked in,” Johnston writes in her new book, “A Physical Education.” Nursing an injury to her Achilles tendon following the 2014 Brooklyn Half, she kept returning to the post and “hundreds” like it, enthralled. “As a journalist,” she writes, “I itched to know, always, if a story was too good to be true.” Her short answer—no—is suggested by the book’s subtitle, “How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.” Lifting “toppled everything I knew about my body,” Johnston reports, ushering a physiological, as well as psychological, transformation that reads as nothing short of a revelation.
Lifters and writers share an obsession with form, a concept that grows ever more complicated the longer one sits with it. In “Keywords,” a 1976 compendium of cultural terminology, the literary critic Raymond Williams defines form as both “a visible or outward shape” and “an essential shaping principle,” a convergence of the superficial and the spiritual: form is what’s externally apparent, but it’s also something deeper or, at least, constitutive. When we discuss the form of a novel—or “novel form,” in critical jargon—we’re expressing not only how it seems but certain ideas about what a novel is (or isn’t). The same goes for the body. Lifters strive for “good form,” though what qualifies as such reveals much about what they value. The vanity often attributed to bodybuilders has everything to do with their concern for their outward shape; they’re seen less as athletes than as models, which is to say, as women. Johnston writes of becoming fixated, as the culture compels us to be, on her appearance at the expense of her well-being. But, as she began lifting for strength, her concern with form took on a principled dimension, focussed on bodily integrity. Good form was redefined away from external results—i.e., a hot bod—and toward wellness. As Michael Andor Brodeur, a lifter and classical-music critic, puts it, in his delightfully personal cultural history, “Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle,” out in paperback this month, “Without good form, you invariably obliterate yourself,” an adage that reads as both blunt—in a “check yourself before you wreck yourself” sense—and philosophical. Brodeur describes one’s lifting form as an “essential element, a guiding principle, the physical equivalent of a spiritual tenet.”
This theory of form contains a paradox in practice. Good form in the gym still requires external validation—you can’t actually check yourself, lest you tweak a vertebra in the attempt. (As Johnston writes, “It’s impossible to have good form and watch the mirrors at the same time.”) Practiced lifters have proprioception, a “cultivated rapport between one’s mind and one’s musculature,” Brodeur writes, which is uncultivated in newbies. Bad form, in which “bad” connotes “likely to injure,” flourishes in the gym. With exercise, as with anything else, it is entirely possible to feel right while doing something harmful—or, as Johnston found, “feel wasn’t enough.” She returned to the internet, which, since the development of the camera phone, had become littered with “form checks,” workout snippets uploaded by gym-goers wondering if their bench presses had too much elbow flare, or if they’d achieved “depth” on their squats. The practice makes amateur filmmakers out of lifters and critics out of viewers. (“You’re not always quite hitting depth,” Johnston was told after posting her own.) Form checks share a visual language with other recorded feats of strength in the gym, uploaded to social media for the same reason as anything else on the internet: for awe and attaboys—or attagirls. In their pursuit of something weightier than aesthetics, gym-going women didn’t seem to care what anyone thought, or so Johnston believed; they were “unconventional-looking,” that is, “muscular but not body-building-stage lean, fit but not Pilates-willowy.” Johnston “inhaled these videos through the YouTube window,” she writes, unaware that this might suggest a lingering fixation on the enticements of visual form.
In “Swole,” Brodeur doesn’t deny that his eye remains on appearances. He wants to be “big,” which he presents as no less thorny than the feminine obligation to be small. “Ask a man why he lifts, and that man will lie to your face,” he writes. “He will assert and insist that his ‘training’ is purely in service of health, fitness, strength, endurance, stamina, and whatever other buzzwords he can throw in to throw you off the trail.” It is somewhat déclassé to admit to exercising for the primary purpose of looks, at least in some circles. There is something regressive, even nationalist, about entertaining the notion of aesthetic perfection, let alone striving after it. Lifting, in particular, remains associated with a conservative strain of masculinity; the headline of a recent Times profile about the progressive YouTuber Hasan Piker, who speaks fluent gym bro, describes him as having a “MAGA body.” The Austrian immigrant who showed the U.S. what perfect pecs look like, and then what an action star looks like, threw his charisma in league with the G.O.P., after all. But nothing the Governator said has endured like his ode to lifting, to the hot rush of blood felt in a muscle after umpteen repetitions, which, in “Pumping Iron,” he famously likens to an obliteration of another sort:
