* I recall [Tom] Wolfe saying once that either in college or grad school, he roomed with one or two pre-med guys and they always had Gray’s Anatomy lying around. He said that he basically memorized the major muscle groups then and never forgot any of it. So that when he started to notice that weight lifting was getting popular in the ’80s, he could name every muscle.
My recollection of the The Right Stuff is that there is no discussion of weightlifting per se. But there is a divide among the astronauts between the old school pilots, who believed that exercise was for pussies, and the more clean living ones like Glenn who took it very seriously. NASA had physical standards for all of them but they were not enforced on the likes of Shepard, who found the whole idea an affront to his manhood. Glenn and Carpenter took the exercise standards very seriously. Most of the rets did not, with Shepard being the most hostile and really resenting what he saw as Glenn’s insistence on making the rest look bad.
I think the first time that Wolfe starts to write about muscles overtly (at least that I can recall) is in Bonfire, where it’s a recurrent them. Larry Kramer lifts and has weights in his little UWS apartment. His office mates make fun of him for feeling his muscles all the time. Then there is Rev. Bacon’s man Buck, who is jacked, but in both the prologue and the last chapter gets clocked by someone much smaller (it’s actually Sherman at the end). The last chapter is of course called “Into the Solar Plexus.” Then also there’s the scene when Sherman first goes to jail and he notices how built everyone else is in the holding cell.
From that point on muscles play a role in all of Wolfe’s books.
* I’m surprised you didn’t mention Andrew Sullivan’s steroid use and warmongering. It’s possible that Sullivan’s retirement from public life may be related to going off of testosterone.
They let you exercise harder than you could without them, but they don’t relieve the pain of lifting improbable weights.
Steroids seem to suppress or help you ignore pain. I have a nagging injury that has been painful for years. During a short course of TRT the pain disappeared, then came back when I went off. Other users and abusers report the same.
Steroids are a peculiar drug from a moral point of view because while goofs like Canseco sometimes used them, they functioned best for outstanding examples of the Protestant work ethic such as Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds.
That’s modern life in a nutshell. Mortgages, credit, sex, smoking, unhealthy foods etc. can be used carefully by certain people, but not others.
* Some observations about conservative vs liberal drugs:
-The effects of most drugs are socially constructed. For example many of the personality shifts associated with alcohol (higher sociability, higher aggression, lower inhibitions), manifest when experiment subjects think they’re drinking alcohol but aren’t. And vice versa, they fail to appear when experimental subjects are intoxicated but unaware. The effects and dispositions of drugs changes with cultural attitudes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/04mind.html?_r=0
-That being said, psychedelic use does seem to impart semi-permanent personality changes. A single experience with psilocybin increases subjects’ “openness to experience” factor score in the HEXACO personality model for a year or longer. Openness is highly correlated to socially liberal attitudes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience#Drug_use
-Related to steroids, a research study confirmed that upper body strength is positively correlated with self-interested political views. Strong men prefer less economic redistribution if rich and more if poor. Weak men tend to vote for what they think is best for society rather than just themselves. This result’s been replicated across a several different countries and cultures.
http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/2013Petersen_PsychologicalScience.pdf
-Physically stronger men (and physically attractive women) are more prone to anger and tend to prefer the use of force to resolve conflicts. This applies both interpersonally as well as internationally. Strong men heavily favor the use of military intervention.
* “It’s possible that the ascension of transgenderism to the cause célèbre of the 2010s…may be in part an aftereffect of the abuse of artificial hormones over recent decades… Perhaps some of them used chemical assistance to be more masculine when they were young, and are now experiencing a kind of hormonal blowback?“
I’ll second this with anecdotal evidence: my uncle’s former co-worker was a fanatical body-builder and juice-head. After years of constantly packing on more and more muscle, he finally declared himself a “woman” and started going around in a wig and dress. He looked about as feminine as a tutu-clad Dwayne Johnson. If the steroid use didn’t cause the transgenderism directly, then they were at least both a reflection of some weird underlying body dysmorphia.
I’m waiting for an irreverent comedy writer on a a high-profile film or TV project to take advantage of the inherent humor of ultra-masculine men declaring themselves “women” and demanding all the rights and privileges reserved for the fairer sex. Just throw Patrick Warburton or Terry Crews in a wig and pumps, then have him scream at people indignantly, and the jokes practically write themselves.
* By the way, if you do a Google search for fagification, Google asks if you mean gayification instead.
I mean what I type and I type what I mean.
