I Am My Body
I am my body and my body is me. That may sound facile, but I have come to think it is also unusual. I did not arrive at it naturally. I arrived at it through thirty years of being in rooms with men who had not arrived there, or who were arriving slowly, or who were trying to.
What I noticed over those decades was that the most interesting division in the range of men who came to me was not between the attractive and the plain, the young and the old, the fit and the unfit. It was between the men who were inside their bodies and the men who were not.
I want to be precise about what I mean by outside the body, because it is easy to reach for psychological language that is more confident than the observation warrants. What I actually observed was something like this. A man would be on the table and I would be working on his back, and his back would be a very good back—healthy, strong, doing what a back should do—and I would be aware, in some quality of the man’s presence, that he was not in his back. He was somewhere else, monitoring the situation from a remove. He was aware of what his body looked like, or what he imagined it looked like, from outside. He was watching himself being present rather than being present.
This was sometimes expressed directly. Men said things like: “I know this isn’t much to look at”—meaning their body, meaning themselves, meaning the thing they had brought into the room that they were also somehow observing from the outside and judging while lying in it. I found this locution strange every time I encountered it, and I encountered it often. “This isn’t much to look at” presupposes a viewer, and the viewer is the man himself, operating from some external position, assessing the body as if it were a separate submission.
The proposition with which I began—I am my body and my body is me—is precisely what those men had not arrived at. They were separate from their bodies in a way that allowed the body to be commented on, assessed, found wanting or adequate or occasionally satisfactory, without that verdict touching whatever they took to be their central self. The body was something they inhabited as you might inhabit a rented flat—living in it, responsible for it, but fundamentally separate from it and aware that other people could have opinions about it that did not necessarily match your own. The assessment was always potentially external. The body was always on view.
What the culture around those men had been telling them, for decades before they arrived at my door, was that the body was in fact a separate thing—an object to be managed, improved, assessed against a standard, and either presented with confidence or apologised for. The confidence and the apology were both responses to the same proposition: that the body existed in relation to an audience, and that what the audience made of it was a significant fact.
I have read about the researchers who named the Adonis complex in 2000—Harrison Pope and his collaborators at Harvard and Brown, who tracked what they identified as a crisis in male body image that had been building since the 1980s. What they documented was the way images of the male body in advertising, in Playgirl centrefolds, in the action figures given to children, had shifted over the preceding decades toward a muscularity that no ordinary male body could sustain without pharmaceutical assistance. The G.I. Joe figure of the 1960s, scaled to human proportions, would have had a chest measurement around 44 inches. By the 1990s, the equivalent figure would have had a chest measurement around 55 inches. The ideal had been inflated beyond biology, and the men growing up against that standard were calibrating their bodies against something that was not a body.
What I notice about that research is that it described, in clinical and statistical terms, something I had been watching in the room for years. The man assessing his back from outside himself was operating against an image. The image was not of any actual man he had met. It was a composite of what he had been shown, accumulated over a lifetime, and the composite had certain properties—a muscularity, a definition, a symmetry—that the ordinary body simply could not produce without effort that most men did not have the time, the inclination, or the physiology to sustain. He was measuring himself against a standard that had been manufactured rather than observed, and he was losing, and the losing was producing the dissociation I was watching from across the room.
The word dysmorphia—the clinical term for the condition where a man who is large and muscular looks in the mirror and sees someone frail and inadequate—is useful as a label for the extreme end of this process, but I found the mild end more interesting because it was more common. The mild end did not present as a disorder. It presented as a slight and pervasive separation between the man and his body—the body as an object of evaluation rather than a subject of experience.
Men who were not particularly anxious, who were functional and adjusted and by any ordinary measure comfortable with themselves, often turned out, when you spent an hour with them, to be conducting a low-grade running commentary on their own physical fact. A murmur of assessment, not loud enough to cause distress, but constant enough to interfere with the simpler experience of being in the body rather than watching it.
Social media, I have been given to understand, has intensified this for a generation of men younger than the ones I worked with most. I did not work through the Instagram era in any significant way, and I am cautious about generalising from what I read about it. What I have read suggests that the mechanism is the same as what Pope and his colleagues were describing in 2000—the calibration of the self against an image that has been curated, filtered, and selected for specific properties—but that the exposure is now continuous rather than occasional, ambient rather than episodic. The magazine in the waiting room has become the device in the pocket, and the device delivers the comparison every time it is picked up. I find myself wondering what it is like to have grown up in that.
What I have observed, set beside this, was that exposure to a wider range of actual male bodies seemed to shift something. Not always, and not in a simple way that I would want to overstate. But several men who came to me over the years and who also spent time in naturist settings, or in the communal environments of certain gyms and clubs, described a change in their relationship to their own bodies that had to do specifically with having seen what male bodies actually were—the range and the ordinariness and the variety that no advertising image or pornographic video had ever shown them. They had recalibrated against something real rather than curated, and the recalibration had changed the commentary.
I noticed something similar, occasionally, within the work itself. Not because I provided a particular kind of affirmation—I was careful not to perform approval, which seemed to me both dishonest and beside the point—but because the hour of simply being in the body without it being assessed, without the usual commentary, sometimes produced a quality of presence in the man that was different from how he had arrived. The body had stopped being an object. It was, for an hour, just the body, doing what the body does. And then the man would put his clothes on and the external relationship would reassemble, and I would watch it happen, the slight stiffening, the reassumption of a stance, the return of the body to the condition of something being presented.
The male cosmetics industry has grown substantially in the past two decades. I have read about the expansion: the skincare ranges, the anti-ageing products, the cosmetics sold specifically to men under packaging designed to look industrial rather than decorative, as if the masculinity of the product needed to be established before the vanity could be permitted. The packaging is itself a symptom. The product is acceptable if it looks like a tool rather than a luxury—if it can be understood as maintenance of a project rather than attention to an aesthetic. The same man who would have found moisturiser embarrassing in 1990 applies serum in 2015, provided the product does not look like anything his female partner would recognise. The dissociation is present in the purchase: I am not doing this because I care about how I look; I am doing this because the modern man maintains his equipment.
But care about how they look is exactly what these men are doing. The packaging manages the embarrassment of that care rather than eliminating it. The care itself—the attention to the face and body as things that can be improved, that exist in relation to an image, that require maintenance—is exactly the same operation as the assessment I was watching from across the room.
I come back to where I began. I am my body and my body is me. The proposition is not that the body should be beyond assessment, or that how it looks is irrelevant, or that care for its appearance is somehow false. The body is real and it exists in the world and people see it. What I mean is something narrower: that the experience of the body as the self rather than the self’s accommodation is a different experience, and that it is, in my observation over thirty years, less common than it should be. The man who is entirely inside his body does not comment on it from outside. He does not assess it from outside. He is it, wholly, and it is him, and the fact of being seen does not split that unity into observer and observed.
I met men in that condition. Not many, and not consistently—even the most integrated man split the unity occasionally, when the pressure from outside was strong enough. But I met them, and what I noticed was that they were not particularly remarkable in any physical way. They were not the men with the bodies that advertising had selected. They were men who had, by some combination of circumstance and time and whatever particular experience had brought them to it, arrived at a relationship with their own physical existence in which the commentary had quietened.
The commentary quietening is not the same as the body changing. The body stays what it is. What changes is the distance.
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