What Men Look Like
I have a collection of images that runs to several million, assembled over decades, from the earliest paintings and sculptures through the birth of photography to the present. This is not a boast.
It is simply what accumulates when you spend thirty years paying attention to how the male body has been depicted, and it means I have something that most commentators on the subject do not have: longitudinal evidence. I can look at what an artist chose to depict in 1750, what a photographer chose in 1935, what a producer chose in 1995, and what an algorithm recommends in 2024, and I can notice what has changed and what has not.
What I notice, looking across that span, is a narrowing. The range of male bodies that appeared in paintings, drawings, photographs and films across the earlier parts of the record was genuinely various. Old bodies, thin bodies, bodies with the kind of muscle that comes from physical work rather than deliberate cultivation, bodies with what I can only describe as their own specific gravity—the weight and arrangement of a particular man living a particular life in a particular time. The variation was not celebrated as variation. It was simply present, because the artists and photographers and filmmakers of those periods were depicting men who existed rather than men who had been assembled toward a specification.
What the contemporary end of the collection shows is different. The range has contracted. Not disappeared—variation still exists in the record if you know where to look for it. But the centre of gravity has shifted toward a particular configuration: the enlarged chest, the defined abdomen, the specific symmetry of a body that has been worked on systematically toward an aesthetic rather than a functional end. I find the modern preference for what I can only call breast-sized chests genuinely puzzling as an aesthetic, and slightly dispiriting as an observation about what the visual culture has decided to present as the male body. It is a narrow decision. And it has been made recently enough that the earlier parts of my collection show clearly that it was not always made.
Whether the narrowing happened because of production economics, because of social media aesthetics, because of algorithmic recommendation systems that feed popularity back into themselves, or because of some other mechanism is a question I cannot answer with confidence. What I can say, as observation rather than argument, is that the narrowing happened, and that its effects are visible in the men I worked with across those same decades.
The effect I noticed most clearly was not that men wanted to look like the images—many of them did, and that is its own observation, which I have written about elsewhere. What I noticed was something more subtle: that men had begun to lose a sense of what ordinary bodies were. The ordinary body had not disappeared from the world. It was as present as it had always been. But it had gradually disappeared from view—from the images that surrounded men as they formed their understanding of what a male body was. And when the ordinary body is not in the images, the ordinary body starts to look like a falling-short rather than simply what a body is.
This is the distinction I find most useful: between variation and deviation. Variation is what you have when the visual record contains enough bodies that any individual body can find itself represented somewhere in the range. Deviation is what you have when the visual record has contracted to a narrow set, so that any body outside that set appears to be a departure from a norm rather than simply one of the many forms a body takes. The images did not change bodies. They changed what bodies looked like relative to an implied standard.
My working life gave me a different dataset. Not selected bodies. Not bodies assembled toward a specification. Just bodies, in the full statistical reality of what men actually are: old and young, muscular and slight, scarred and smooth, athletic and sedentary, confident and self-conscious, ordinary in the overwhelming majority of cases in which I encountered them. After thirty years of this, variation stopped being variation. It simply became what men look like. The body with the surgical scar was not a body with a deviation. It was a body. The body with the weight of middle age settling into it in specific ways was not a body that had failed some standard. It was a body. The body that had been shaped by physical work, by illness, by decades of specific postures and habits, was expressing its own history. That was all.
I notice, writing this, that I am making an observation rather than an argument. I am not saying ordinary bodies are better than exceptional ones, or that the images should show a different range, or that anything requires changing. I am saying that the narrowing is a fact visible in my archive, and that one of its consequences—visible in my working life—is that men lost access to a realistic sense of what men looked like. The problem is not that exceptionally muscular men exist. They have always existed. The problem is when a narrow subset comes to stand in for the whole category, so that the category itself is misrepresented.
But I want to complicate the picture of beauty a little, because the image discussion is only part of what I observed, and perhaps not the most interesting part.
I have met men who were, by any standard that could be applied to such things, beautiful. Objectively, measurably, the kind of beautiful that made other men in the room aware of them when they arrived. And some of those men were deeply unpleasant—not in dramatic ways, but in the specific way of a person who has placed his value entirely in his appearance and expects the world to arrange itself accordingly. A man who knows he is beautiful and relies on that knowledge as his primary tool for navigating the world may never have needed to develop the other tools to the same extent. The beauty has done enough, for long enough, that the other capacities have not been pressed into service. What you get, spending time with such a man, is a photograph rather than a person—an image rather than an expression of whatever is beneath the image.
This is not a universal observation. I have also met beautiful men who were entirely uninterested in their own beauty, or simply unaware of it, in the way that some people are unaware of characteristics they have carried so long they have forgotten to notice them. Those men were something else entirely—the beauty present but irrelevant to what was interesting about them, an incidental feature rather than a central fact. I found those men more interesting to spend time with, and I notice that observation says as much about what I was looking for as about what they were offering.
I have also met men who were, by any conventional standard, ugly—the word is coarse but let me use it because the softened alternatives distort the observation—and who were among the most attractive presences I have encountered. The attraction had nothing to do with the arrangement of their features or the configuration of their bodies. It had to do with what I can only call their quality of attention: the way they were present in a room, the way they listened, the way they seemed to find what was in front of them genuinely interesting. A man like that takes up his body in a specific way that the beautiful man who relies on his beauty does not. The ugly man with a lovely character inhabits himself from the inside. The beautiful man who knows he is beautiful is often living on the outside, occupying the image of himself rather than the self the image is standing in for.
What I find interesting about this distinction—and what I cannot quite reduce to a formula—is that it seems independent of the actual body. The man who is inside his body, attending to what is in front of him rather than monitoring how he is being perceived, was present in every range of body type I encountered. He was the thin man and the heavy man and the athletic man and the man whose body had been significantly altered by the years or by illness. The inside-ness was not a function of what the body looked like. It was a function of the man’s relationship to the body he had, which is a different thing.
The social standard for beauty and the personal preference that operates beneath it are, I have observed, genuinely different things, and the contemporary visual culture seems to me to be in the process of trying to eliminate the latter in favour of the former. If the images show only a narrow range of bodies, and if those images are the primary visual environment in which men form their understanding of what is desirable, then personal preference gets crowded out by the social standard. The man who would have found his particular preference perfectly ordinary fifty years ago—because the images of fifty years ago were various enough to contain it—now finds his preference at odds with the dominant visual vocabulary. The visual vocabulary has contracted and his preference has not changed but the relationship between them has.
The ordinary body disappearing from view is, in my collection, a recent development. The medieval illuminations have ordinary bodies. The seventeenth-century paintings have ordinary bodies. The early photographs have ordinary bodies. The mid-century magazines have ordinary bodies, heavier or thinner than the current norm but various, unmanaged, present in their particularity. The narrowing happens—as far as I can date it from looking at the archive—somewhere in the last thirty to forty years, accelerating dramatically in the last decade or so.
I do not know what caused it. I notice it happened. And I notice that the men who came to me, particularly toward the end of the three decades, arrived with a more contracted sense of what a body was than the men who arrived at the beginning. Not less at ease, necessarily—ease varies across the whole range, for reasons I have described in earlier essays. But with a smaller visual vocabulary for what was acceptable, what was normal, what was simply what a body was.
Once you have seen enough actual men, as I have, you stop seeing variation. You simply see what men look like. The man on the table was a man, with the body he had, which was the body he was.
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