The Barbell as a Tool of Gender Affirmation
On the male struggle for gender affirmation and the role of the hallowed barbell
On a typically warm and humid night in Lahore, a 13 year old boy wearing loose trousers and an undershirt goes on to the balcony to interact with an object that would lever him into manhood. It probably weighs 10 kilograms, though he soothes his burgeoning ego with the thought that it weighed the standard 20. He pushes the bar above his head several times, then he lies on the bench and pushes it perpendicular to his chest, followed by curling it towards his chest while standing up. With each repetition of the movement, he imagines himself imparting a catalytic force that is pseudo-spontaneously chiseling the contours of his arms, shoulders, and chest into the taut, vascular shapes of the idols of manhood he sees on television.
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At the end of this round of exercise he is neither fatigued nor suffering any pain, and that is contrary to his expectations. He knows pain and suffering are the essential wages of the craved transformation. So he proceeds to perform unstructured movements with the object, treating it like a heavy staff and performing whatever creative movements he can imagine. Still no pain but he feels he has done enough, he is bored, so he goes back into the living room, half-convinced of his success.
“Don’t train with weights at your age!” warned his father, “You won’t grow as tall as you can if you exercise with heavy weights before you’ve fully grown”. This was a dilemma for the boy. He wanted to be a real man, tall and strong. He never imagined that these desires could be in conflict.
Among his peers he was the slow, hunkering one. His physical size was always remarked on by parents and elders. His precocious growth was a refuge for his fragile self-esteem. He decided to “prioritise” his height, dissuaded by the anxiety instilled in him about losing a marker of prestige he had for one he could not be certain of gaining. Yet this compromise ensured he would never feel like a complete male.
Whenever he saw his body in the mirror he was seized by frustration at his unruly form, that was taking a shape unlike the one he craved. Hairs growing on his chest, a sign of precocious puberty (and masculinity in his culture), plump abdomen, chubby arms, legs that jiggled when shaken. A strange amalgam of features he did not see in his peers, in turn leading to his treatment as a strange mutant. Plagued by taunts in the playground, unable to run fast enough to compete with the smaller, nimbler children, he understood that he could only achieve dignity among his peers if he was seen as physically strong. Where he could not have love and admiration, the stiff armour of sinew and muscle may facilitate fear and respect.
The barbell has facilitated my physical transformation from that tender age to the present. It is a simple object. A stainless steel cylindrical rod with a coarse pattern (called knurling) to allow gripping, two sleeves attached on each end resting on ball bearings, collared to allow fastening weighted plates in place. The physical simplicity elides a rich metaphysical life.
For men, it is a principle tool of the craft of manhood. Like an anvil and hammer to a blacksmith, the barbell allows men to forge a new body. One that in which they can feel safe from the demonic fears of emasculation. This is perhaps crass to say. How can I assign this exclusive relationship between an inanimate object and manhood? What about everyone else that exercises with weights? Fair objections.
Until recently, I never recognised that a cis-gendered man also craves gender affirmation. That when we see ourselves in the mirror, we see not one but two reflections. There is the physical reflection, product of light striking and reflecting off a mirror, received by our eyes, and finally interpreted by our brain. And then there is the reflection we want to see, the desired signal which would lead to an interpretation that aligns with the physical form we want to occupy, and that form is usually perceived as that of an idealized man. The form which the thirteen year-old boy is futilely willing into existence when he pushes, pulls, and curls the barbell.
The simplicity and versatility of the tool gives it a special quality and makes it so entwined with masculinity. Women, transgender individuals, they merely adopt the barbell, men are moulded by it. It is often the first recourse for a desperate male that has discovered the creeping chasm of optic dissonance. Whatever success or failure is achieved then has a decisive impact on the subsequent course of action. He might choose to take steroids. He might pay for a personal trainer. He might develop an eating disorder, compulsively preparing and eating meal portions with calibrated quantities of macronutrients — a voluntarily imposed peacetime rationing.
Recomposing the fat and musculature of our body is the most readily available front of attack against the undesired reflection. Acne, hair loss, pockets of fat, undesired facial features, and of course the most incurable malady of them all: the perception of having an unimpressively small penis. Those require more drastic measures, the means for which we usually lack. The barbell thus does a lot of heavy (metaphysical) lifting.
Some men even develop personal relationships with particular barbells, a very strange imprinting to an onlooker but with many parallels. If you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, you would be familiar with the personal bonds soldiers are encouraged to develop with their rifles. Seen in that context, the barbell is a very benign object to develop an infatuation with. There are times in the gym where I would unload a bar with my training weights because I saw another, better bar become available and replace the one I was using. On other occasions, a fellow lifter would cast doubt on the weight of a given bar, claiming it to be lighter than the standard 20 kilos. It is only slightly hyperbolic to say I feel betrayed in those moments and vow to never use that bar again. I think I would be more understanding of infidelity with a partner than a bar with the taint of being lighter than assumed. And though this sounds ridiculous to most people, I feel fairly confident plenty of my GymBros have had similar feelings without consciously realising it.
The serious attitude to such trivial problems should indicate how seriously men take the fortification of their masculinity. We all live one emasculating incident away from losing our imaginary man cards. The tainted barbell casts an aspersion on all our previous exertions with it and the pride we felt afterwards. Where we celebrated a successful set, we become ashamed of exaggerating our accomplishment. Even if the exaggeration was a minuscule 2.5 kilos. After all, a suit of armour is only as strong as its weakest point.
Cosmetic surgery then becomes something more complicated than mere vanity. The exasperated exclamations of “I don’t know why anyone would go through that procedure” finally has an answer. Vanity is the veneer painted over the muted cries for gender affirmation. It is an ill-fated attempt at rebirth under conditions where we can exert fractionally more agency than when we left the womb. And when individuals undergo such, at times drastic, voluntary cosmetic procedures they are finally able to give expression to that muted cry. Where the wealthy can afford crafting their bespoke skin, the loyal barbell is an honest companion that lets us compensate for our shortcomings in exchange for sweat and pain. It won’t reverse male pattern baldness, it won’t craft a square jaw, and it definitely will not grow your penis, but it will give you bigger muscles and a sense of accomplishment.
When you tell a woman that you can bench press a 100 kilos, her most likely response is: “Is that a lot?”. You thought being a strong man would get girls to become magnetically attracted to you. Instead, the girls in the gym ignore you, the men take a brief pause from ogling women when you set yourself up to lift 100 kilos for training sets. They look at you approvingly when you proceed with your set. One. Two. Three. Four. Five repetitions. Clean, smooth, controlled. You get back up with a restrained smile of satisfaction. You became momentarily the reflection they wish to emulate. For a few moments, you are The Man. And that feeling of being The Man is gender affirming crack cocaine.
It was a long journey that you began from the other side of that division. You became more focused and regimented in your efforts. You learned to perfect your technique; the way you gripped the bar, the distance between your wrists from the centre, the position of your head in relation to the bar, the type of bar you use (yes they are different), the way you breathe between repetitions, etcetera etcetera. Though there are other exercises and other instruments, you know that the ultimate spectacle is only achieved through the barbell. When the bar is positioned on your shoulders as you squat. Or the way it rests on your clavicle as you press it above your shoulders. Or the way you position your feet and grip before a deadlift. The barbell bears the heaviest weight in the most unambiguously comparable manner that allows onlookers to judge your position within the masculine hierarchy.
Dumbbells are usually lighter, the exercises that you can do with them less standardized as measures of strength, cable machines do not carry the same qualities of spectacle. I suspect they may also be tainted with femininity — men tend to dominate the barbell racks in a gym, women often get turfed out to cable machines where they can recede away from the gaze. The barbell rack is thus the stage of masculine performance. To the extent that when women perform barbell exercises with respectable loads, they are inducted into the masculine domain of respect. They briefly transcend their gender as they perform physical acts that warrant male respect.
A strong woman, as perceived in the gym, then becomes an object of sexual desire; her physical features — normally used to judge conventional attractiveness —becoming accentuated by association with her prowess. Indirectly, this affect is evidence of homoerotic attraction towards yourself as you press that 100 kilo weight above your chest. It turns out you were almost correct in your assumptions: your sexual attractiveness does indeed increase with your strength.
I was in the gym on a hot June day in London, sweating profusely, wearing a sleeveless charcoal grey polyester gym shirt. My hairy shoulders were fully exposed, making me feel self-conscious. I always felt exposed in that top. I was missing a woman I had just had a week long tryst with. The most exciting week of my life so far. She was missing me. A wistful lust lingered in our minds.
We were texting. Each response from her brightening my mood, bestowing an irrepressible smile on my face. She asks me what I am doing and I tell her. She wants to see me lift out of curiosity. I politely ask a stranger to film me on my phone, and send her a clip of me bench pressing 105 kilos. It was a nice milestone after an hiatus. Coupled with the afterglow of a romantic episode in the aftermath of my first relationship ending, the gender affirming crack cocaine in my bloodstream was stupefying.
She reacts with an unexpected enthusiasm to the video. She is impressed and expresses desire for me. My monkey brain cannot cope with this hitherto unknown level of validation. An uncharacteristic period of silence follows, but we resume communicating. I suggest prolonging our tryst in London over one last weekend together before she leaves the country, presumably forever. She demurs.
Later that week she has a sudden change of heart and agrees to visit. We plan trains and accommodation. Brimming with excitement, I meet her at Kings Cross station that weekend. Our AirBnB cancels on us last minute so we rush to find something on the day in a Starbucks. We find something cheap and simple but cosy enough. We arrive sticky with sweat, into the modern equivalent of a cheap motel; living out some scene from some mid-brow novel. I look into her hypnotic, azure gaze and am overcome with burgeoning lust.
Talking in bed afterwards, once the deliriousness cast by desire had worn off, I asked her about the conversation that sparked her visit. Almost by accident, she tells me why she went quiet at one point the previous week. She was fanning the fur. Seeing me perform had provoked her desire and at least partially influenced her sudden decision to visit me one last time. Writing about it now, I realise it was not the performance that was hot per se, it just looked hot being done by me. Nevertheless, it as a long-awaited validation for my efforts to consolidate my self-image as real man.
That afternoon was one of the few times in my life that I could claim to have been freed from the optic dissonance that had plagued me for years. My self-image began to improve steadily after that episode. My masculinity was affirmed by her admission of unadulterated desire for the body she saw. A body that I had never fully wanted, wanted irrepressibly by one I wanted.
The hairyness, the fat around my abdomen, the colour of my skin, and a dozen other vulnerabilities. All of it together was, as if by magic, made eminently desirable. The journey of self-affirmation was thus realised for the first time when the image I had sought to carve of myself, with my loyal companion the barbell, was reconciled with the image I saw in the mirror. But I could have spent my entire life reinforcing my sense of masculinity, reshaping my body and lifting heavier and heavier weights, without ever being freed the way I was on that Saturday afternoon. It was the gaze of another, and their own vulnerable candour, that was the final, essential fragment which completed my masculine armour.