To celebrate the start of another NFL season, news broke on Sunday that Tom Brady, the man-hunk quarterback for the New England Patriots, used to have love handles. Some guy that owns a pizza place in some random Palookaville that Brady once danced through on his way to Olympus has been quoted as saying that the college-age Brady used to eat ham and cheese grinders with a fatty side of onion rings. To back the claim, a shirtless photo has surfaced of Brady from his rookie weigh-in with the slender but doughy physique of a cubicle surfer.

I imagine seeing stories like this satisfies some need for prurient gloating inside our collective cultural psyche. The man who has been leveraged as an ascendant molding of raw male ambrosia used to be that regular guy in old gym shorts nursing some cheesy fries at the end of your dorm hallway. The key to Tom Brady the sex symbol is his body; the key to Tom Brady the regular guy is the layer of fat gently covering over his physiology with the faintest hint of sloth and youthful gluttony.

That schism is disturbing to me. The sex god Tom Brady, with his hulking triceps, hairy chest, and chiseled jaw might as well be an animatronic sex doll. That's not a slur on the human being the doll was based on; I have no idea who he is (though he has at least partially consented to this presentation of himself as a glossy object of desire, based exclusively on physiology). Attractive people are nice to look at and all, but there's something pathetic about the creation of some superhuman version of a person just to stoke the interest of the Sex & The City culturatti who need a new pet name for their vibrators. (There is a male analog to that pith, but I'll leave it to you to customize your own pithy snipes)

I realize protesting about the image of Tom Brady is sort of absurd because this kind of dehumanization through sexual iconography has been the yoke born by women in the public spotlight for years, decades, centuries, millennia, and beyond. There's nothing particularly tragic about Tom Brady's ascension to swank material. But it did remind me of feet.

I hate feet in general. I can't think of anyone I know off-hand that I would say has nice feet. I have one lovely friend who has an unfortunately permanent toenail fungus and she takes great pleasure in torturing me with her feet. That's as concise a way as I have to characterize my aversion to feet: they're the part on a person's body where things inevitably fall apart and begin to decay. So it's surprised me over the last few months to notice just how much I miss my ex-girlfriend's feet. She didn't have particularly nice feet, but I sometimes find myself staring off into odd corners remembering the knobby pink bunions on her third toes. I miss them.

It's not the body that matters. It's what the body says about the person, how it comes to be an effigy to the spirit inside after you've come to know someone. In the glut of celebrity media that has come to embody our aesthetics and consumerism, we've somehow lost track of the fact that there are actually people inside of those blank celebrity automatons moving across the pages of People magazine. We punish celebrities for breaking from their idealized image. But the image is always the least interesting part of anything; a person, a place, or a moment in time. So take the time, for a moment, to enjoy the gap between rookie-Tom and the man who's become Giselle Bundchen's real life vibrator. Alas, Tom, I hardly know you, and I hardly even care.

 

[Source – Boston.com] 

Previous Posts:

Date Night: The Wine Bar as the End of Civilization 

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Celebrity Confession: In Which Kevin Spacey Bangs Ass

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle