In a new book, the author Casey Johnston argues that pumping iron helped her “escape diet culture.” But a preoccupation with strength can take many forms.
Excerpt – “Ask a man why he lifts, and that man will lie to your face,” he [Lifter, classical music critic and author of “Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle” Michael Andor Brodeur] 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:
“The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in a gym, is the pump. . . . Your muscles get a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode any minute. . . . It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, you know? As having sex with a woman and coming. . . . So can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am getting the feeling of coming in a gym, I’m getting the feeling of coming at home, I’m getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up, when I pose in front of five thousand people, I get the same feeling, so I am coming day and night. I mean, it’s terrific, right?”
The image, barely figurative, is presumptuously, intrusively masculine, as though the body, flushed from lifting, is itself becoming a phallus, “fully engorged and engaged in the performance of masculinity,” as Brodeur explains. And yet something else resides here—orgasm not as a terminus, as a climactic ending, but as a boundless state, coming in pulses, waves. The pleasure-pain of the pump does not discriminate; it is capable of filling up and domming whoever wants it enough. [..]
My skepticism, I should say, stems from affinity. [Chronic dieter, reluctant long-distance runner and author of “A Physical Education” Casey] Johnston and I share a similar trajectory toward powerlifting; my own “strength journey” preceded hers by only a few years. I have watched with amusement, and some concern, as idioms from the world of meatheads—“macros” and “push day,” “meal prepping” and “overnight oats”—have become de rigueur among members of a wider public. Those meatheads led me to a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound squat (and a hundred-and-fifty-five-pound bench, and a three-hundred-and-fifty-five-pound dead lift) and, for a while, into that mythical body known as the best shape of my life—not that I appreciated it then. What I am saying is that I, too, have been to the mountaintop, only to catch a glimpse of the next peak somewhere above cloud cover. But such is the presentism of the discipline. There is no finish line; progress is fleeting and motional. I still lift, I still strive, and I still worry over what the contents of my plate have in store for my reflection, a fixation that I can blame on the culture, but which I must nonetheless experience in the first person. That is my own testimony. You can look around and see the progress we thought was permanent warping all around us, in diet culture and beyond. Somewhere on Instagram, a beautiful woman squats with a heavy barbell on her back in a muscle-rippling display, leaving behind the caption: “Working hard for those summer pics.”
Full article, LM Jackson, The New Yorker, 2025.5.10