I went out with someone over the weekend. While we were walking towards a bar for drinks she grabbed my arm and asked me to flex. I held my arm out for her and she squeezed the modest swells underneath my sweater. "Is that it?" she asked. A submerged part of my ego winced. It's hard to imagine a romantic scenario in which hearing those words can count as a good thing.
"Yeah," I told her. "That's it." It's true. I don't have big muscles. I've always been lanky, and that's especially true now. I felt inadequate for a split second, like I was failing to live up to an unspoken expectation that I have strapping muscles and chest hair. Men aren't supposed to be bony and pale, we're supposed to be fleshy monuments of stability, comfort, and permanence. Macho.
After I got over the initial surprise of having my physique called out, I found that I enjoyed the candor of being able to say whatever I wanted in return. Going on a date can become so weighted down with manners, wanting to behave your best to make sure the other person likes you. Even when I know I'm not interested in the other person I still feel the tug of propriety. I don't want to be blunt or hurt someone's feelings. So I fake it, to make things nice.
But we all have interior monologues running all the time. Hearing my date blurt a part of hers out loud for a second turned out to be a happy ice breaker. There's nothing to apologize for about my body, thought I'm certain that there are plenty of people in the world who wouldn't be attracted by it. I wasn't expecting my date to be one of those people, especially considering this was our second time out.
I like my body. Whatever I do in this world begins and ends with it. It contains the root of everything I'll ever be. It doesn't resemble a lot of the male iconography in the media. It doesn't look like a movie star or an athlete. There might have been an analog in a sit-com, a bit player who wandered into "Friends" who briefly stole the limelight with a spindly assembly of knees and shoulder blades.
I stare at my body in the mirror almost every day, sometimes several times. It always surprises me. It looks so different throughout the days and weeks, sometimes gaunt and sucked in, other times soft and swollen. Some days it's pale and splotchy, other days it's relaxed and flushed with color. Social conventions encourage us to feel shame, but of all the experiences I have when I look on my body alone, embarrassment is entirely absent.
It's the introduction of someone else's gaze that inspires those feelings. There's an impulse to commodify yourself, to want to feel desirable; to feel the dislocated pleasure of becoming an object in someone else's eyes. That desire can become quantified, reduced into a hazy distillation of self-worth. It's a way of putting the burden down for a few moments, to let the weight of your own body be buoyed up by the admiring look of someone down below.
My date asked me to flex while she was squeezing my bicep. She wanted to see if there wasn't some hidden muscle waiting to magically inflate itself on command. I told her no.
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