I accidentally found out one of my friends has a huge dick, and in a panic I blurted out “congratulations on the pipe, man.” What’s my next move after this
I know people are gonna get salty af about this but by God she’s RIGHT.
When Brad Pitt did Fight Club, he was cutting weight for every single scene to maintain his physique at 155. I’ve you’ve ever cut weight, you know how horrible that must have been. He did it because they needed a “look”.
Changing Tatum said his Magic Mike body doesn’t last for more than five days. He starved down and dehydrated his already fit physique for a “look”.
The male soldiers on Spartacus: Blood and Sand were eating pretty much chicken and veggies for every meal to maintain a “look”.
Why is this such a big deal? Because all these characters are considered physical goals for men. These are actual unobtainable physical standards for men. Male body image issues get swept under the rug so often that some people don’t even think they exist.
You want proof? Just check out that scene in Captain America: First Avenger where Cap just transformed into that beautiful beefcake of a man. Agent Carter’s actress just HAD to touch them muscles, it was completely unscripted.
Chris Evans had to wear shirts so small they physically hurt, and he dislocated a shoulder during the helicopter scene in Civil War. But who cares, girls got to wet their panties watching Captain America flex.
If we are talking about unrealistic physical standards of male fitness given to us by movies, I would like to mention Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman here.
Yeah, he is ripped, isn’t he?
Well, it is true, but to get that kind of definition, he went through 36 hour period of dehydration, which caused him to temporarily lose 10 pounds of “water weight”.
Thus during the fight scene he was filming, he was a hair breadth from blacking out whole time, just to look unrealistically muscular.
As he said during interview with Steven Colbert, “If You go three days without water, You will die. Then, when You are halfway there they shout ‘Roll it!”
It’s the same with professional bodybuilders who get into periods of extreme fasting and dehydration to lower their fat-to-muscle ratio to inhuman levels, all in hopes of making their muscle definition a bit better.
According to experts, healthy body fat percentage for a healthy male ranges from 8% to 20%, depending on height, lifestyle and numerous other variables.
Fitness model and professional bodybuilder Helmut Strebl also known as “World’s Most Shredded Man” as he supposedly managed to get his body fat percentage below 5%…
… But only when he partakes in competitions, since it is not humanly possible to live with such low fat percentage of one’s body for longer periods of time.
I mean, yeah, he keeps a draconian training regime, as well as a very strict diet even off-season, but looks much more human then…
There are documented cases of incredibly fit and muscular bodybuilders fainting on the stage in the middle of their flexing routines, as well as several who outright died, because of cardiac arrest caused by their blood becoming too thick, due to long dehydration…
And let’s not forget about Muscle Dysmorphia, colloquially known as “Megarexia” or “Bigarexia”.
Yeah, it’s a thing, but it’s barely talked about, since it’s apparently not manly to admit to having problems like that, which also creates problems with researching this particular disorder…
So… Thanks Hollywood?
I had no idea that most people who looked like this are dehydrated until I read posts like this.
dehydrated to the point theyre about a day away from actual organ failure
okay so chris hemsworth is a absolute god of a man, but hollywood says ‘thats not good enough’ and for the thor movie he has to spend several days having the juice squeezed from his body untill he looses about a gallon of whats supposed to be him so that he can do 2 days of shooting scenes without his shirt, after which he has to have recovery time before he is hospitalized because i am not joking about ‘one day away from organ failure’
thats the benchmark- look at chris hemsworth and process that he is told he isnt suitable for a shirtless scene without prepping for three days and nearly fainting
real feminism acknowledges the unhealthy standards that men are held to. radfems brush them off as non-existent
guys, feminism is for you, too. it’s for all of us.
Unrealistic body images helps no one and actively hurts men too!!
since the discussion of that they put henry cavill through for the witcher is floating around my blog, i want to add this too,.
one of the reasons producers get away with this in men and no one criticizes it is because we are fed the lie that this body type is 1) attainable and 2) healthy.
We know starving women down to skinniness is unhealthy, but you see an overmuscled man and you don’t immediately think dehydration.
i love this whole thread but uh
this IS feminism. being able to speak out about that? that’s the most feminist thing she could have done. don’t call it bullshit, because this is IMPORTANT. these men are being starved and dehydrated and basically just hurt over and over again so that people can drool over their muscles and no one (by which i mean the audience) realizes something is wrong. so don’t say that this isn’t feminism, because it is. it really, really is.
^^^
Remember when Zac Efron ate pasta in his Netflix show and cried afterwards?
Also that Natalie Dormer headline is 100% feminist thank you @crying-at-ikea for your service.
this comparison of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in X-men (2000) vs. what I think is Days of Future Past (2014) always make me so sad, he looked like an actual human, and strong, in the first movie and then they turned him into…that.
All of this is good, but the most important thing to note is that THIS PRESSURE ON MEN ISN’T FUELED BY WOMEN’S DESIRES OR WHAT WE FIND ATTRACTIVE.
These super-shredded body images aren’t based on what women like. They’re based on what MEN like. They’re male power fantasies, not female sex fantasies. So this is just another hellish tab in the browser window of the patriarchy.
And YET, it is still incredibly important that women and people who aren’t men speak up and say that they don’t want to see men put in such terribly unhealthy states for aesthetics, that they find men who aren’t about to be hospitalized for dehydration MUCH more attractive to look at than someone close to death for a “lewk” because a lot of people think it’s a thing women are into. It’s important to feminism that we acknowledge it, that we don’t brush it off, and that we make it clear that it’s NOT OKAY that men are forced to do this for roles, that it’s wildly unrealistic and incredibly unhealthy and that should never be something expected of anyone, ever, at any point. It is the patriarchy, but it isn’t just the job of the patriarchy to deal with.
The male gaze affects men, too. It’s just that women have more experience being able to identify it and to fight back against it. Men, in many cases, lack that sort of experience, and it’s hard to know what to do or to stand your ground if people won’t stand with you. So for me, as much as this is a product of the patriarchy and male power fantasies, when real people, men included, are getting hurt by those patriarchal fantasies, that’s where feminism needs to step in, needs to take a stand with them, and help give them the tools to critically understand what they’re experiencing and how to combat it.
It also means we need to stop this false dichotomy of slimness/body-builder muscle= healthy, and anyone who isn’t in that state isn’t healthy. That means promoting diverse body types, and being vocal about how much you like seeing diverse body types, even in superhero movies, even in action movies. Why isn’t Jack Black out here kicking ass and taking names? Why is Tyler Labine *NOT* starring in a million rom-coms? Greg Davies could be a sci-fi imperator and I would very much bend the knee.
The point is, that insane body-builder muscle mass has been normalized and then pushed past it’s limits, and then normalized at that level and pushed back again, and if we can do that with one look, we can do it with other, healthier, more diverse appearances.
