The Body As Project
The phrase “the body is a project” appeared in my room, in various forms, more frequently in the later years of my massage practice than in the earlier ones.
Men said it, or said versions of it, usually with a quality of slightly rueful self-awareness—aware that they were using a framework that had been handed to them, aware that the framework had a certain absurdity to it, but not quite able to locate themselves outside it.
The body as something requiring continuous work to maintain its value. The body as something that could be improved, optimised, invested in. The body as a form of capital whose returns were expressed in the currency of social outcomes—better health, better confidence, better sex, better professional presence, better life.
I notice that this language did not come from nowhere. It arrived in those men with the same specificity that the Augustinian inheritance arrived in earlier generations—not as a conscious belief but as an ambient assumption that shaped the way they thought about what their body was and what they owed it. The difference was the source. The Augustinian inheritance came from theology. The project framework came from the market.
What researchers call the political economy of signs is an idea, drawn from academic work on the fitness industry as a product of neoliberal ideology. That the body in the contemporary market occupies three positions simultaneously: it is a production site, where the physique is manufactured through labour; a consumption object, where it is displayed and assessed in social interactions; and a capital investment, where the quality of the body determines the returns available in the social and economic world.
These three positions are not separate. They operate together, reinforcing the proposition that the body requires management as you would manage any other form of capital—with inputs, maintenance, ongoing investment, and attention to returns.
What I find in that framework, is a recognition of something I watched operating in men for three decades, now described with the vocabulary of political economy rather than with the vocabulary of religion or law. The management of the male body—the requirement that it be governed, disciplined, presented in a form that meets the relevant standard—has simply migrated from the theological framework to the commercial one. What changed was the institution doing the managing. What did not change was the requirement that the body submit to management, and the consequence—shame, anxiety, insufficiency—of failing to meet the standard the management was working toward.
The supplement industry is one of the more remarkable commercial phenomena of the past two decades. Male sexual-wellness supplements alone are projected to grow from a market of five billion dollars to over nine billion within a decade. The fitness supplement market across Asia, Latin America, and Africa is growing at rates that suggest the anxiety being sold is genuinely global and genuinely available for monetisation regardless of local context. China and India together represent the largest shares of global fitness and supplement sales. South African gym memberships have doubled since the early 2000s.
I want to be careful about what these numbers tell me, because numbers tell you what happened without telling you why, and the why is usually more various than any single explanation can contain. What I can say is that the scale suggests something real is being responded to. A real anxiety, a real desire for transformation, a real experience of the body as insufficient in relation to whatever standard the person is measuring against—and that the market has become very effective at identifying and servicing this anxiety at scale.
What I find most interesting about this is the argument that the fitness industry simultaneously generates the insecurities it claims to address and sells the remedies for those insecurities. The supplement that promises improved sexual performance is marketed alongside content that has already communicated to the consumer that his current sexual performance is insufficient. The gym membership that promises confidence is available precisely because the advertising has already created the sense of inadequacy that confidence is the answer to. The same economic system that funds anti-anxiety supplements is producing the conditions that generate the anxiety those supplements are sold to address.
This is not a discovery. It is the structure of a mature consumer market operating in a domain where the product is not the supplement but the relationship to the body that makes the supplement seem necessary. What the market has found, in the male body, is a domain that had already been prepared—by the traditions I have been tracing through these essays, the theological inheritance, the regulatory history, the narrowing visual vocabulary—and that could be entered through the existing anxiety without generating it from scratch.
The men who came to me in the later years of my practice, carrying the project framework, were not stupid or naive. They knew, at some level, that the proposition was circular: you invest in the body, you produce a better body, the better body produces better outcomes, the better outcomes require the body to remain at the level of investment that produced them, so the investment must continue. They could see the circularity. What they could not easily do was step outside it, because stepping outside it would require a different account of what the body was for, and the different account was not on offer from the same institutions that had produced the project framework.
What I was offering in the room, without intending it as a counter-argument to the market, was something that the market’s framework excluded almost entirely: the body not as a project but as a fact. Not as something being produced or optimised or invested in but as something that was already there, already capable of producing experience, already in possession of the capacity to receive sensation and generate pleasure that had nothing to do with how much it had been worked on. The calves of a man who did not go to the gym had nerve endings. The shoulders of a man who did not take protein powder responded to pressure. The body as given, rather than the body as made, was capable of experience that the project framework was systematically directing attention away from in its emphasis on the body as something requiring improvement before it was adequate.
I want to be precise about something here. I am not arguing that physical fitness is without value, or that the gym is a purely exploitative institution, or that the men who lifted weights and tracked their macros were doing something wrong. Several of those men had found in the gym a community that mattered to them, a practice that structured their time, a form of physical capability that gave them genuine pleasure and confidence. That was real and I do not want to dismiss it. The same institution that exploits anxiety can also provide genuine benefit, and the men who found the benefit were not being deceived about it.
What I am describing is something narrower: the specific way the market framework positions the body as perpetually insufficient, as always requiring the next investment, as never quite arrived at the destination the previous investment promised. That positioning is structural—it is not the accidental byproduct of an industry primarily oriented toward other goals, it is the core mechanism by which the market sustains itself. A customer who has arrived at a body that fully satisfies them is a customer who stops buying. The market requires the dissatisfaction to continue. And so the standard is calibrated to move just ahead of what any particular investment can achieve.
The class dimension of this, which the brief’s data make visible, is one I noticed in the room without having the framework to articulate it clearly at the time. The fitness culture I observed was predominantly a middle-class phenomenon—men who had the time and the disposable income to pursue the body as a project were men who had both of those things. The working-class men who came to me tended to have bodies shaped by physical labour rather than deliberate cultivation, and their relationship to those bodies was often different: more functional, less aestheticised, less caught up in the comparison with an ideal that required specific inputs to approach. Their bodies had been doing things. The bodies of the men deeply embedded in the fitness culture were being made to look like bodies that did things, which is a different relationship to the same external appearance.
The supplement markets expanding in Brazil and India and South Africa are, as far as I can read the available evidence, predominantly urban middle-class phenomena in those countries as well. The anxiety being sold requires a specific kind of consumer: someone with enough disposable income to be a consumer, enough exposure to the visual economy to have absorbed the inadequacy the market is offering to address, and enough of the neoliberal framework’s assumptions to accept that the body is a legitimate site of capital investment with measurable returns. That consumer exists in São Paulo and Mumbai and Johannesburg as well as in Sydney and London and Los Angeles, and the market has found them.
What the market cannot find, by its own logic, is the body that has already arrived. The body that is simply there, receiving the present moment, not being worked on and not being assessed, not producing the physique and not consuming itself as a social object and not investing in its own future returns. That body is outside the market’s framework entirely. It is not a product, not a consumer, not a production site. It is just a body.
The room I worked in for thirty years was, I notice now, outside the market’s framework in exactly this way. Not because I was making a political point about it. Because the work did not require the body to be a project. It required the body to be present.
Some men found that distinction surprising. Some of them had been so long inside the project framework that the absence of it felt, briefly, like something was missing. What was missing was the assessment.
And when the assessment was absent, and the body was simply there, and the work proceeded without the body being required to produce or consume or invest—some of those men found something that the project framework had been directing their attention away from. Not improvement. Just what was already there.
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