Bro, the thing about raising teenage boys is how fast your food disappears.
Anyway, homosocial activities for males that aren't actively destructive seem very good to have right now. But I don't even lift.
I agree with 2. I also think the undercurrent of "You are expected to grow and change and reflect and improve" is a mostly good part of gym culture. And "you don't know everything - learn to take advice from a coach or expert" is a mostly good principle as well.
Though the devil is always in the details.
I have a former student with whom I'm close, who is currently serving in Afghanistan and fully embodies this form of masculinity. I sent him a link to the essay because I am really curious to hear what he thinks of it!
Jocko Wilink preaches a fairly unforgiving message of no-excuses personal discipline above all, which is potentially toxic if the individual preachee absorbs the message as an ideal but can't live up to it (ending in shame/self-destructive attempts to live up to an ideal) or (worse) can live up to it but uses it as a reason to judge/dismiss others who can't. Boot-strappism is easily toxic, even if personal ownership of effort tied to results is generally positive. (I came to read/listen to Wilink via Tim Ferris--who pairs a less rigid but still "success" -driven philosophy with a "one weird trick"/life hack shtick. Useful in small doses (I really like the Stronglift 5x5 weight-lifting program I found through Ferris, and other resources he points can be quite good or can be 21st century snake oil), but not someone to trust unreservedly.
I like gym rat culture on a gym-by-gym basis--some are definitely better than others. The best I've found was a mostly-free-weights-but-with-crossfitesque-accesories gym in the heart of one of the poorer areas of Minneapolis. It had a good proportion of serious male powerlifters--I watched a dude do multiple sets of partial range of motion squats at over 900 lbs.--paired with serious exercisers of both sexes and community members of all ages/incomes/backgrounds. Friendly, polite, zero harassment of women, and an assumption that everyone was there to work at their own level in a positive, generally encouraging, but reserved way. I liked it a lot but moved too far away for it to be practical as my regular gym. All of the gyms I consider in-range of my current home are of the giant mega chain variety (excepting the Y, which is the affluent nonprofit version of the same).
Gyms are so static, though, and getting better at lifting weights is just not very functional, unless your job is moving furniture or something. Just wish these guys would move around more, and measure that instead.
Understand that the army focusses on being able to pull yourself over obstacles, etc. which justifies pull ups and the like. Again, not widely applicable.
Are you lifting heavy objects or are the heavy objects lifting you?
Gyms are so static, though
Lifting a gym would be really hard.
8: I found getting better at lifting weights was very functional for goals like having my back feel less creaky and looking okay, and lifting heavy-ish stuff does also come up occasionally. I'm not sure that there's a different kind of exercise that would be much more functional for my lifestyle.
I mean, probably some kind of obstacle course-based boot camp would make me more capable of feats of strength and skill or something than I am, but I run into the need to move a heavy box more often than I need to scale a cliff.
Right, but NYC-based elitists are different.
Cindy Crawfords 1992 workout video is the most 90's thing ever, it's like watching an issue of brill's content ads with a nice soundtrack. some weight suggestions included.
weights now are going for like $2/lb insane. I am doing rowing lifts with a bucket of water, thinking about whether mounting a pulley on my probably frail trellis makes sense, would need a good handle anyway. It's irrational, I should just spend the money to be the best I can be, who can put a price on that.
14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLabGjTlSeo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE_CM3tvkys
Once everybody gets the vaccine, used weights are going to be super cheap.
Lifting is cool and I agree that most gymgoers are friendly and helpful but I actually think discourse has maybe overcorrected on this... I've seen a decent amount of ogling/leering and mansplaining as well as just guys being dicks to other guys about resting too long between sets when benches or squat racks are hotly contested.
My pandemic exercise goal for the fall has been to decrease my mile time to X:00. My unscientific strategy for doing this has been to just wake up every day and run 1 mile as fast as I can. Seems to be working pretty well so far.
Every time I turn around, someone translates Beowulf.
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
The Texas state legislature can eat a bag of Spear-Danes.
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
I've spent decades as a gym rat (reached the 200lb club the same week I finished my thesis, and mentioned it in my bio -- that sort of gym rat), and while sure, I guess in theory I can buy into this idea of gym culture as self-improvement and self-actualization, in real life I think it doesn't work that way. And I wonder what women think of all this, of what their equivalents are. I have this vague suspicion that it's close to what eating disorders are like. I'm not saying that working out is bad: just that using it as a metaphor for real life is ..... idiotic.
And again: I started lifting age 21, and have done it (with cycling and last 10yr, swimming) as my primary forms of exercise.
I topped out at about 195, I think because work and age interfered with my beer and wings habit.
Salaries, ACT/SAT scores, max bench. GO.
reached the 200lb club the same week I finished my thesis, and mentioned it in my bio -- that sort of gym rat
Chet is McLovin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nEQtj_iC7k
Wow, the kid from Superbad got old real fast.
Hypothesis: gym culture is to physical work as gun culture is to hunting. Working out is fine and good and certainly a better use of time than what was known, and forbidden, in my childhood home as "playing shoot people," but maybe we don't really need to have performative substitutes for traditionally masculine tasks?
The prohibition of deer hunting in almost all of the city parks in Pittsburgh is an attack on traditional masculinity.
Just bows with arrows. Shotguns are too heavy.
If you want to be real he-men about it, how about a knives and spears season? Could be an valuable urban wildlife management tool!
Persistence hunting. I've suggested it before.
In the Berkeley hills, you are allowed to shoot animals on your property that are eating your fruit (possibly any of your garden, can't remember, but IIRC animals eating your edible crops are ... fair game).
More of my professors were armed than I realized. And these were only the ones that admitted it!
Also, while you may be thinking of the common small suburban pests, I had a five-point buck as a pace animal more than once, and mountain lions come into town occasionally (the police shoot them).
Eastern deer are smaller generally, even in the woods.
I tried to shoo that buck off someone's rosebush once and it didn't shy away from me.
There was a doe bedded right outside my window. It was very hard to chase her away, but I did it by brandishing hedge clippers. There was blood when she rose, probably from a dog.
Deer know exactly when hunting season starts. One day before hunting season, happily eating the rose bush and not eager to move. Opening day, hiding in the brush from dawn to dusk.
Limited by geography. Check your local listings. Void where prohibited. Don't eat the yellow snow.
If a deer stands it's ground when you run upt to it, emit a surprised but forceful bark. Works every time for my dog, so far.
How do we know a deer runs from the same noise as your dog?