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Between sets of pull-ups done in such a manner as to emphasise the hypertrophic (muscle-building) loaded stretch on the lats – the hang at the bottom of the movement – three profoundly jacked men discuss the meaning of life. They have talked about ‘game’ and other forms of sexual marketplace optimisation, they have talked microplastics in the testicles, their effects on male hormone production, whether microplastics in the testicles matter due to the soon-to-arrive revolution in genomics; but now they have reached the real meat of their discussion, the intelligence explosion of the universe, the arrival of the AI God that may or may not kill all humans.

The point, says the shortest man, who has a PhD in sport science, is that the robot god is inevitable. Whether it eliminates humanity is irrelevant because intelligence itself will survive, in a superior form. It will swell until it is coterminous with existence, a kind of Hegelian absolute spirit, the universe finally knowing itself. To die for that, to be annihilated, is beautiful (what a goddamn dream). The least jacked, most conventionally handsome man asks his companion if he believes that truth exists outside of human perception. I don’t have to believe it, the man with the PhD in sport science, Dr Mike Israetel (Dissertation: ‘The Interrelationships of Fitness Characteristics in Division 1 Athletes’) says, it’s been proven mathematically.

 

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Why would you watch this, even ironically? my girlfriend asked me, when she saw this conversation unfolding on my laptop screen, returning earlier than expected from dinner. She knew that I watched bodybuilding and other lifting (as in weights) related content, but knowing and seeing are two different things. Self-awareness, ironic distance, disappear up close. The same is true of actual lifting. You can try to deadlift your bodyweight ironically, but it doesn’t really work. You either lift it or you don’t.

The real answer to her question – that I think it’s culturally extremely significant – sounds a little silly. You wouldn’t use it to explain away watching porn. Though it would be facilely true. Sillier still, perhaps, is that I think it’s significant not only because it tells you the kinds of things certain men are thinking about their balls or how to approach women or AI, but because lifting influencers, not in what they say, but in the full dynamic tension between what they say, do, and weigh, tell us something about the relationship between beauty and truth. Whether or not truth exists mathematically outside human perception, it’s harder to say that beauty does. And when you try to turn the body into data, to upload it to be admired, that difference between truth and beauty becomes clear.

*

I’m going to assume you, as a normal person, know nothing about this kind of thing – though millions do, far more than ever used to be involved in the sport of bodybuilding before social media. So to start with, the world of online lifting is about two things. The first of these is about putting on muscle mass – getting swole, jacked, hench, dense, succulent, the vocabulary itself expands constantly – and the second is the usual influencer parasocial stuff, but weirder. Middle aged men make shirtless videos about shirtless teens. Shirtless teens make videos about each other. Jocks discuss endocrinology at the pitch of passion, also shirtless. Everyone stands tensed in downlighting. They argue about glute striations (when you can see the separate muscle fibers on the buttocks stretch apart); they argue about steroids; they argue about diet. Most of all they argue about the best way to put on mass.

Over the last couple of months, the biggest row has been about the kind of science-heavy approach promoted by people like Israetel. A group of true meatheads has claimed that all this research – the geeks who cite PubMed studies and say things like stimulus to fatigue-ratio – defeats the point of weight training, which isn’t a science, it’s a discipline. Just lift heavy shit. It works if it works.

That might sound in some way like a ‘two cultures’ debate for people who know what deltoids are, but really, these two different training philosophies aren’t so different. They’re more like people staring at a picture that might be a duck or a rabbit, both correctly pointing out the flaws in the other’s interpretations. Over the course of my own staring, I’ve come to think that at the heart of all so-called lifting philosophy, whether scientific or meat-headed, is the governing idea of our culture writ large: the removal of the subjective, of human error, from as much of life as possible – the desire, we might say, to mechanise. And yet, lifting, in its end goal, embodied in that very philosophical word, ‘aesthetics’, normally misunderstood as simply looking good, also makes the tensions in this idea visible.

Ask men why they lift weights and, nine times out of ten, they’ll say something like to get big, to get jacked, to look good. Women might be more likely to say to feel strong. But for men, less judged for vanity and frivolity, the motivation is often stated as baldly aesthetic. This was the case for me, certainly.

As with most things to do with men these days, the turn to the gym is often discussed in terms of social pathologies. A crisis in male body image, the male gaze finally turning itself onto men and tearing them apart, an eating disorder epidemic, a steroid epidemic, a yearning to be manly in an age of declining male usefulness (why does bodybuilding really take off parallel with American and then European deindustrialisation in the 1970s? Why is it only getting bigger now? Why especially in places that used to have heavy industries?).

Certainly, social pathologies are part of the story. There’s also something going on with gender and race and right-wing politics. Crank US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posts videos of herself doing Crossfit-style kipping pull-ups (imagine a child gearing up to jump off monkey bars). Ultra militant UK kulturkampf crank Douglas Murray has put on a couple of inches on his arms. On the even harder right, you can find men calling themselves things like Bronze Age Pervert, the Raw Egg Nationalist, the Palaeolithic Pederast, all advocating getting jacked, and a range of hysterical food purity taboos, as a way to fight back against our modern, feminised, cosmopolitan and ugly society. This is from Bronze Age Pervert’s Nietzsche-with-online-brain-rot book Bronze Age Mindset:

Any man who improves his body through sun and steel will drift away from the modern left, a program of decrepitude and resentful monstrosity…

Sun and steel is a reference to Yukio Mishima, the Japanese fascist writer whose essay on bodybuilding is still the best of its kind. He died by seppuku after failing to incite a military coup against Japan’s new liberal- democratic constitution.

But such people are only part of the story. Tech billionaires do Brazilian Jujitsu. Jeff Bezos looks like he’s discovered a large external supply of testosterone. Fitness culture, and the desires it represents – at base, for beauty – cross lines of politics, race, sexuality and gender, and distort them. Ultimately, I think, in this moment, the body doesn’t matter. It’s just another thing to upload onto the cloud. Or rather, it matters because it’s the ultimate thing to upload. The realest thing.

Among online fitness freaks, the worst insult to your physique takes the form of a question, a sort of ironic meme, do you even lift? It’s become an adjective, abbreviated. I don’t wanna be DYEL, bro. Within that closed circle of lifting to look like you lift is an attempt to find beauty in data, in objectivity, in hard numbers, weight – in the stripping away of the subjective, which wants to be a new aesthetic, a new knowledge of the beautiful, adapted to an information age.

Where once works of art embodied, say, Christian ideals, the bodies of men who lift weights symbolise a kind of stripping back of themselves. While obviously, people who lift do this to be desirable, the desire is conceived of objectively. As in scientific observation, the ideal is objectivity, not do you find me pretty, but am I proportioned correctly? But when this beauty becomes actual data, and goes online, a bunch of non-quantifiable stuff comes along for the ride.

*

A man in his early twenties, big enough that he’s presumably on suicidally high doses of anabolic steroids, drives his car across anonymous American night. His name is Sam Sulek. He studies engineering and has a microphone attached to the baseball cap on his head. He talks to you, the viewer, as he drives.

His voice is firm, fraternal. He talks about the importance of just showing up. The importance of feeling the connection to your body. The beauty of the pump. At the gym he throws weight around, smiles and grunts, until he’s ready to take off his shirt and grin at the presence of the pump, showing so much wholesome youth in his smile that his freakish physique disappears for a second, and then returns, uncanny – man and boy bound together like a glitching statue of Laocoon. His arm veins are hurdling serpentine coils and he is immensely likeable.

The pump, by the way, is when blood flows into the muscles and makes them look bigger. Any writing about bodybuilding has to explain this to you, a normal person, and make reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger, lying about how it is like ‘coming’ in the classic documentary Pumping Iron, which first introduced bodybuilding to the non-lifting world. But Sam Sulek channels another Germanic philosopher. His description of the pump (your future soft state i.e. how you will one day look, bigger, even without the benefit of the pump) sounds more like the promise of happiness, Nietzsche’s definition of beauty in On the Genealogy of Morality. Beauty, for Nietzsche, is a kind of story you tell about yourself; ascetic philosophers, for example, want the conditions in which they are free to most be themselves, and call this detachment beauty itself. Beauty simply is another name for desire.

In Sam’s case, and in the case of his millions of viewers, the promise of happiness is the promise of swelling further. On one of his most popular TikToks, he swells further still, beyond the flesh. This has got to be a shared experience: do you guys imagine yourselves in a workout edit while you’re working out? he asks. And he is right. Millions share this experience, and experience the lure of something like this promise. What we want is to become the future, to become data made beautiful once again, to become media.

*

The first legend of the internet era of bodybuilding was an Australian man called Zyzz. He posted videos of himself walking around, raving, working out, always shirtless, and generally ‘looking aesthetic’ as he put it, asking people if they were ‘miring. He had the classic narrow waist and wide shoulders that those who know call a V-Taper. He had feathered hair. He had popping abs. He died in 2011, aged 22.

But his image lives on. He became a meme. A heroic sacrifice. Like James Dean or Kurt Cobain, but less complicatedly, more immediately aesthetic, at one with his art. His body was so obviously a good body that even though it killed him, it will live forever, elegised in video tributes on YouTube.

To be ‘miring is to be looking with a kind of involuntary desire. In a way that’s what bodybuilding aesthetics is all about. Attempting to provoke desire at a level that is not interpersonal, but impersonal, like gravity. Even if you wanted to, you can’t deny the width of someone’s back. But a fact doesn’t really need the recognition of others. It shouldn’t care about your feelings. Meanwhile, bodybuilding is all about other people. That’s why it’s ideal for social media, where the body itself disappears into data about others’ reactions to it. We lift so that others will recognise what we want to be true about ourselves. Muscles are a fact, but we want them to close the gap between that fact and the judgement another person has to make about it. What is compelling about it is the bodybuilder’s contagious desire to close that gap. You can never be big enough.

This unfulfillment is something that literary fans of bodybuilding tend to miss. They largely treat bodybuilding as the opposite of the cursed life of the mind, of writing, where you always say more or less than you mean. Mishima puts it well in Sun and Steel, bodybuilding is a path out of the flabbiness, the elasticity, of words. What I was seeking, in short, was a language of the body. Kathy Acker’s essay on bodybuilding, ‘The Language of the Body’, picks up the phrase and turns it into a kind of sublime encounter with all the reality that resists Western male phallogocentric ratiocination (Under the sign of Descartes. This sign is also the sign of patriarchy.)

The language game named the language of the body is not arbitrary. When a bodybuilder is counting, he or she is counting his or her own breath.

The alt-lit novelist Jordan Castro recently published an essay in which he argued (though not in a feminist way) much the same thing. And in his novel, The Novelist: A Novel, he inserts a novel by a character with his name, which is about lifting, and which embodies existential seriousness against the online idiocy that the novel’s protagonist is trapped in.

But lifting is not the opposite of being online. When you embrace the lifting mindset, you do not deal with the body as reality but as the sign or token of reality; it’s where you go to look for it, not where you actually find it. Whatever you’re counting, weight, reps, grams of protein, milligrams of steroids, the numbers aren’t inside the body. Instead, they are numbers for numbers’ sake. What it teaches you is a stance towards your own body that is impersonal – where it is neither your, nor some other individual’s feelings about your body that matter – but the numbers themselves; this is also the logic of platforms, of big data. Of objectivity itself.

I remember talking to a friend, who found that pictures of his hard-won six-pack significantly increased his Tinder response rate. Many readers might not find such flaunting a turn on. I have friends, male, female, and otherwise, who say the opposite, but, speaking in the aggregate, the numbers don’t lie. The weirdly unquantifable dynamics of attraction in

fact scale into patterns. Do you want to be attractive to one particular person, or the most people you can be? Various platforms believe the data they have on you means they know you better than you know yourself; to think this is true in the realm of aesthetics, we have to believe that beauty is in the eye of a kind of impersonal beholder. But that beholder can have no desire and can’t find anything beautiful.

The Iron never lies to you. The punk singer Henry Rollins, immensely jacked, wrote:

The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends come and go but two hundred pounds is two hundred pounds.

You can’t actually be friends with the iron. But what’s interesting about online bodybuilding culture is that for it to work it has to keep humanising the iron. Influencers rise based on some combination of their physique and their personhood. Sam Sulek is not the biggest man, and certainly not the prettiest, but he is big on social media because he is both big and likeable, in a way that cannot be quantified. Even his inhuman dedication to lifting serves not so much to make himself more desirable as to remind viewers of the force of desire itself, the strength of what cannot be broken down into numbers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger once offered a reading of his practice as art, in line with the mathematical ideals of Greek sculpture, all about ratios and proportions:

what you do is you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay on each side. And, you know, maybe he does it an easier way. We go through a harder way.

Lifting promises to build a self that can become beautiful the hard way, that can embody objectivity. But in attempting to do this, it’s ended up in profoundly weird places. Not sculpture but drama. Conflicts with fate. To be your own sculptor is to try and fail to close the gap between yourself and your desire. Just as with sonnets, which try to make untranslatably personal feelings legible through rigid conventions, it’s ultimately the failure of the conventions that becomes bodybuilding’s true subject.

Lifting culture, with its insane endocrinally enhanced teens and grizzled meaty beasts, all pursuing an art that desperately wants not to be an art, is both the dumbest embodiment of our wider culture of objectivity and a mute protest against it. It’s simple enough that we see the strain, just as we see muscle striations on a body that’s lean enough. It’s also the closest a lot of men come to questions of beauty, both artistic and natural. It’s where they find the promise of happiness. But a promise is a gap. A gap between body and idea. Whatever escapes through that gap is beautiful.
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Hugh Foley’s poetry and criticism have appeared in Poetry Review, The White Review, Poetry London, PN Review and The Rialto, among other places. He is the author of an academic work on American poetry (Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire) and several study guides for children. He writes a Substack newsletter, Useless Concentration.