Muscles
I've just finished watching a doco on body building and what they called "muscle worship."
They featured an Australian bloke living in California who started on his quest to become hugely muscular after seeing muscle bound men at the beach with women, a female body builder who does private sessions in hotel rooms that involve arm wrestling, posing, lifting, and carrying, and a female body building competition.
A clip can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OWqz5FMEY0
Now to declare an interest, I spent more time at the gym than most of my friends. I started four years ago when I moved to Australia and have stacked on nearly 10kg. Part of it was to train myself up for rugby, part of it became a growing interest in pushing myself and feeling a physical strain, and part of it was me being happy with how it made me look. I'm willing to admit that there was some vanity involved in this. Some women I have known have said they like muscles. (One said she liked knowing I could break her in half. I don't think that's literally true, but sometimes an accentuated difference between men's and women's bodies is a sexy thing.)
That said, these people seemed to me to have gone WAY off the deep end.
First of all, there is the question of appearance. Contestants tanned so heavily that their race was difficult to determine and their skin looked like leather, and being sprayed with aerosol cooking oil gave the competition a distressingly surreal atmosphere. I can accept that a small subset of people find this over the top muscularity attractive, but I am certainly not one of them. Some enthusiasts suggested that the mainstream media conditions people to think these muscular women are unattractive, but I didn't need to be conditioned to think that way. I understand that people make fetishes from a variety of unusual things. Hell they even mentioned in reference to a private session with a female body builder that some men like being physically dominated by a strong woman, and showed the filming of a video featuring a moderately muscular woman strangling, stabbing, and crushing men (not for real mind you.) I've got nothing against powerful women. I'm not going to throw stones at muscle fetish on a moral level, but when I realised that if many of the women in the competition weren't wearing bikinis I wouldn't have known that they were in fact women, and when some of them had stubble and voices deeper than mine, the aesthetics is TOTALLY lost on me.
Which leads to another more important point. While the subjects protested that it was, I have a hard time calling what I saw "natural." People throughout the doco were filling their bodies with all manner of drugs and supplements in pursuit of the perfect body. From time to time I will take creatine before a workout to help me push my workout a bit more, but I always go off it for a while so my body doesn't come to depend on artificial supplements of it. These people, however, were building so much muscle that their bones and tendons and bodies as a whole couldn't handle it. In many ways, they looked, and according to an ex-marine drill sergeant who had trained as a boxer and maintained himself as a "performance athlete", they were unhealthy. People who spent so much of their time an energy pursuing their image of perfect body had a poor diet and often died young.
Moreover, the boxing drill sergeant siad they weren't even that strong. They had superficial strength, but their bodies were meant to look a certain way rather than to do certain things. Good for posing doesn't mean good for performance.
It took me a while to be convinced to take even creatine. I wanted something effective, simple, and above all, safe. I've heard guys at the gym taling about the myriad of supplements they take. I never asked them how taking hugely inflated amounts of protein would actually help, and I never pointed out to them that when you are doing something several times a day, it is becoming dangerously close to becoming your religion. I don't do this because I didn't want to be one of those gym guys.
But all the same I'm going to keep going to the gym. If nothing else, I'm told muscle is good as a target for flogging!