“Confidence on the basis of body image relates to intimacy in a very special way. If we are ever rejected, we want the confidence to say, “They are wrong for rejecting me.” We search for self-confidence so that we can temper our experience of rejection.”

“If I could look like that guy who played Thor, I would be happy.”

It’s a common belief among men of our age. Put more honestly, “If I can’t appear confident, sexy, intimidating, competent, and super-human, I’m worthless.”

We compare ourselves to others in the gym. We come away from movies wanting to exercise for eight hours. We would rather jump in front of a truck than take our shirts off at the pool. We feel pathetic and small. We look at ourselves in almost every mirror we pass. When alone, we flex — not because we like what we see, but because we don’t. We have spent hundreds of dollars on pre-workout, weight loss, and weight gain supplements. We research the best way to bulk, shred, diet, and binge.

Maybe this doesn’t resonate with you. But if it does, you are not alone. We have been fed a lie. I know this lifestyle. It’s a locomotive — and too powerful to be stopped by a single blog. I hope to shed some light on what we’re actually trying to achieve with each rep, each yard, each stabbing “You’re pathetic” we put ourselves through.

Aspects of Male Body Hatred

Health is not the issue here. There is a huge gap between being healthy and meeting our culture’s ideal of “hot.” And in that space lies any and every resource for a man to hate his body.

A man who hates his body is really searching for love — a fundamentally relational search for intimacy with self in the form of confidence, intimacy with the opposite sex in being sexy, intimacy with the same sex in intimidation or acceptance, intimacy with authority in competency, and ultimately intimacy with God, in appearing worthy. The lie is that performance offers intimacy at all — it is, in fact, its foil. Yet this is the path we choose.

A man’s hatred of his body takes place in terms of five relationships because he is searching for intimacy in each of these relationships.

1. To our selves, we want to be confident.

We want to love ourselves — to look in the mirror and think, “I look amazing.” We look — “I’m fat there, small there, weird there” — and emotionally destroy ourselves. We want confidence. Confidence on the basis of body image relates to intimacy in a very special way. If we are ever rejected, we want the confidence to say, “They are wrong for rejecting me.” We search for self-confidence so that we can temper our experience of rejection if and when it happens. This drive for self-love is driven by self-hate. It is a dialectic of inordinate self-praise at our own progress, and then emotional self-mutilation for our failures. In self-love, we are able to dismiss rejection as misinformed. In self-hate, we are able to preempt rejection with introspection. And we hope to find intimacy at the end — at the six pack.

2. To the opposite sex, we want to be sexy.

We want women to love us. We want to walk by women, and have them think, “He’s so hot.” We want women to lust after us. We hear women, even Christian women, talk about wanting to marry Channing Tatum or Zac Efron. Whether it’s accurate or not, we buy that even Christian women want a man to have a certain kind of musculature —– not “muscly” or “big,” but cut — with lots of angles on every part of the body. We want to be able to seduce, to be “swoonworthy,” to embody the full form that media sells as “sexy.” It’s an obsessive and driving ideal. So I go out for a run. I get home, and run again. What sort of performance earns the adjective sexy? “Certainly another run. Another set. Am I sexy yet?” We don’t speak it — Christians don’t even talk about it — but it drives us.

3. To our peers, we want to be intimidating.

We are primally competitive. We want to be the biggest, the most intimidating compared with other men. It can be reduced to “sizing up” another guy, but can have results as broad as “I’m amazing” and “I’m worthless.” We want to know that I could steal this guy’s woman, beat him up, and I want him to know that too. And if I feel like another guy could do that to me, I go to the gym. I purge. I go online. I buy a supplement. And, for many of us, we would simply settle for being accepted as one of the group.

4. To our fathers, we want to be competent.

A dad’s disapproving glance is a surefire way to help a man hate his body. When I was 13, my father, in commanding wisdom, patted his traps and said, “Girls like this muscle to be big.” End of story. For the next ten years: supersets of shrugs twice a week at the end of my workouts. We look to older men and feel the need to measure up — to compensate in body what we know we lack in spirit and mind. We want to know, “I can replace you on this earth when you go. I can take the mantle. I’m strong, like you. Please tell me I’m strong, like you?”

5. To God, we want to be superhuman.

Every male portrayal of God or the godly in art history is jacked. The statue of David. The creation of Adam. Even Jesus has a six pack. A six pack. Vascular. A youthful head of hair. We think, “David must have written Psalm 102 about P90X, because this guy is shredded.” What place does 18% or 25% body fat play in God’s story? And what about the scrawny, the skeletal, the scraggy? Neither quite fit in God’s grand history — at least how art portrays it. And so men are given the aesthetic message from both Christian history and cultural rhetoric: “The secret password to our love is to be godlike in your body.” So, of course, we spend fortunes and hours and energies we don’t really have to attain an image we can’t really attain to earn love that isn’t really love. It’s a cycle of death (Proverbs 16:25–26).

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