Gym Theory: Jock Oppression

Nerds v. Jocks (reprised), toxic masculinity, normie nostalgia

How the jocks became nerds

When I first watched the Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, I thought that Paul Mescal was a bad choice to play Connell, the male lead. Though Connell, an English major and aspiring novelist, plays football in high school, Mescal looks too hunky for the part. Almost a beefcake. In one scene in the adaptation, Mescal’s Connell talks to a friend from his working-class hometown and remarks that his classmates at the elite Trinity College are very different from him. By way of explanation, he says that he wears trainers and track pants and they wear loafers and chinos. But it’s deeply unclear whether he’s voicing a class critique or the alienation he feels as a hulking athletic bro among skinny, effete intellectuals.

Let’s have a good time and say it’s jock oppression.

If the nineties and aughts were a battle between nerds and jocks, then the nerds won in an unabashed triumph. It was an end-of-history moment. The rise of the knowledge economy and the popularization of “personal technology” meant that everyone had to be, at least to a degree, a nerd. The internet further disintegrated the boundary between jock and nerd. I remember in high school, c.a. 2010, being deeply, deeply closeted about the fact that I had watched Death Note, because anime was social suicide. Not too long ago, I was at the barber shop and this jacked, thirty-something guy walked in and pulled out his phone covered in stickers of his waifu. On /fit/, some people recommend “being autistic” as an entry-level approach to the gym: devouring wide fields of knowledge, fastidiously tracking one’s data, and trying to optimize lifts and macros as much as possible. Muscleheads explaining their steroid stacks can recite the stages of the Krebs cycle. Bro science has been replaced by Actual Science.

These people are nerds—all of them. But like with Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis, the triumph of the nerd was perhaps not as complete as we might initially have believed. Eating meat-only diets, “slonking” raw eggs, abstaining from seed oils—jockish anti-intellectualism is making a comeback. It fits within a mounting distrust of the liberal professional-managerial “expert” class. There’s a growing interest in PRIMAL and FUNCTIONAL exercises, e.g., crawling on all fours on uneven terrain. “You were made to worship the sun,” former grad student Bronze Age Pervert writes. Sunlight is the arch-nemesis of the nerd, and you can break free from the nerd’s world.

NerdWorld.EXE

Guess it was inevitable I’d have to include this image at some point…

How it goes: The modern world, controlled by nerds of various stripes, wants to keep you weak, addicted, and fat. Experts say that masculinity is toxic, porn is fine, and obesity is healthy and beautiful. The facts don’t add up. Or perhaps they do, but not in your favor. Corporations, governments, and institutions either will force you to buy in or will crush you. Or jab you. As soon as you wake up from the Matrix, it’s you against the world. But through diet and exercise, you can reclaim your autonomy from this state of slow death. You don’t have to consume the chemicals in processed foods. You can develop the willpower to resist easy consumption. You can build a psychological defense against their lies and propaganda. 

The “nerds” are trying to oppress you. You don’t have to let them win again.

Jocks during COVID

It’s hard to overstate what COVID, both the gym closures and the vaccines, did to the jock mind. To be fair, when I can’t go to the gym for a couple weeks, I also go insane, but generally I don’t write screeds about how the increasing price of protein powder is a conspiracy to make everyone weak and compliant. (I said generally, not never.) In retrospect, I think COVID was #GamerGate for gym bros. The threat to their perceived group identity formalized, at least among themselves, an almost ethnic self-understanding: We are a group of people who deliberately stand apart from the dominant culture and who suffer because of it due to our unique way of life and our distinct bodies. We don’t ask for mainstream acceptance—only to be allowed to live according to our values. Vaccine refusal served almost the same function as circumcision in Jewish communities: manufacturing a group identity while also endowing a sort of religious purity to members’ bodies.

I think that’s the best way to understand the popular anti-vaxx sentiment among gym bros. After all, the “it’s a rushed, experimental drug” or “I want to keep my body natural” arguments couldn’t have found a more ironic mouthpiece than a community of people who will happily take under-researched and unregulated supplements from shady manufacturers because someone on 4chan told them that they will increase their T-levels. (Apparently the probiotics BAP recommends gave his followers mouth ulcers.) Refusing the vaccine was an act of personal and group autonomy, reinforced throughout a media environment of podcasts, Substacks, and Twitter accounts.

Of course, not all jocks refused the vaccine, and not all who refused the vaccine were jocks. But this specific subset seemed to understand the lesson from years of identity politics: there is great power in claiming a victimized minority status. Their willingness to challenge the mainstream, the Matrix, the NPCs, etc., defines their strength.

And so the war between nerds and jocks carried on.

Nietzsche for dummies

In that sense, the old trope that jocks are dumb was transmuted from stigma to virtue. It meant refusing the “knowledge” of so-called experts. It meant ignoring institutions that falsely claim to steward “truth” but only care about optics and ideology. It meant not buying into “narratives” in the mainstream news. To be dumb in an economy of false knowledge is to be smarter than most. In a kingdom of sheep, the half-brained man is a genius. It’s no coincidence that the midwitsphere loves both weightlifting and intellectual “heterodoxy.” It’s also no coincidence that this transvaluation of values is happening at the same time that boys’ performance in educational institutions continues to drop (and universities, instead of reaching out, are building luxury gyms). Better to create a new system of values that affirms that you are, in fact, very smart, original, and free-thinking. Slonk those eggs. Eat only meat—raw. Rebel against liberal safetyism by getting salmonella.

The Straight White Man dilemma

But obviously, this subset is merely a subset. I don’t think that jocks are, on the whole, dumb. A lot of big guys at the gym were nerds in school who didn’t play a single sport, so operating within the terms of the jock/nerd binary seems silly. As I said before, the most jacked guy at the gym is probably doing it all for his waifu.

Let’s go back to the Normal People example. Though literary and introverted, Connell is a straight white man, and his hulking, masculine body emphasizes this fact in the worst way. For Connell in his college classes, “jock oppression” is not a globalist conspiracy to eliminate strong men but rather an indirect way of talking about the inability or refusal of some straight white men to adapt to the cultural norms of elite liberal identity politics. The mainstreaming of social justice frameworks in the 2010s placed straight white men within a global and transhistorical narrative of oppression and destruction. The counterargument—we’re not talking about individuals; we’re talking about a system—didn’t alleviate the general suspicion that individual straight white men were now vulnerable to.

Indeed, an interesting shift took place as the decade progressed. The feminist concern for patriarchy morphed into a concern for toxic masculinity, reassigning a systemic problem to the individual. In response, some men tried to thread the needle by saying, yes, we are Straight White Men, BUT we are not stereotypically masculine. Zoomer male fashion aesthetics capture the compromise at a glance: pieces that remind girls of their grandfathers, soft textures to both their clothes and hair, loose fits that deemphasize the musculature of the body, painted nails and jewelry. Not to mention developing the personality and behaviors of a golden retriever—a dog that, though large and great at basketball, is fluffy, harmless, and kinda stupid. Having a certain amount of muscle tone remained important, despite it all—nobody likes a soyboy. But jock masculinity was no longer felt to be socially permissible.

In a telling essay from the time, “The Life of a Jacked Guy in 2019,” Oliver Bateman navigates the cultural baggage of having and pursuing an aggressively muscular male physique in the wake of the #MeToo movement, when men’s desire for strength was easy to equate with their license to abuse. Bateman admits to the problems of hypermasculinity in the lifting community. His counterpoint is to highlight the growing influence of women, gay male, and trans lifters in the competition space, offering new and better definitions of strength and masculinity for all 🥰. That, in the final analysis, Bateman’s argument ends in little more than a milquetoast liberal bromide shows the real paucity of left-wing answers to this dilemma beyond the male-but-not-masculine compromise.

The non-ideological lifter

The compromise wasn’t going to hold for a number of reasons. For one, liberals had to walk back their “all straight white men are literally evil” line to rally behind Joe Biden. Another is that, rightly or wrongly, more people now believe that politics as a force for actual change is over. They would rather seek out spaces and experiences that are free from overwrought political meaning and feel personally enriching. That’s the vibe of Emma Glenn Baker’s interview with Jordan Castro on lifting. (Incidentally, I listened to it while I was meal-prepping chicken and rice of all things.) The thrust of their conversation is that lifting shifts your point of view from received ideological narratives to your immediate and embodied reality. On the level of individual worldview, it corrects the ideological excesses of 2016–21 without becoming a tool for an ideological project itself.

That last bit is important, because it reframes jock oppression as the burden of ideology heaped onto the non-ideological. You can’t simply be going to the gym because it makes your body feel good or builds your confidence, but because a fascist worked out that day and you have to train to beat them. Or because you are the fascist and you need to be able to harass a Starbucks employee for being fat. It’s an exhausting, even delusional, way to live, and pollutes one of the few remaining “third places” left in ordinary life with suspicion.

In large part, I agree with this analysis. My general post–culture war stance is that “not being insane about something” is usually an option and you should take it as often as possible.

But cards on the table, I think that among such people (and I’d include myself), this desire to become “normie” is, ironically, less a devolution to a kind of pre-internet, pre-politics, pre-narrative default setting than an aspirational drive born out of nostalgia. On an old episode of Nymphet Alumni, a host suggested that the rise of astrology among young women is a product of the increasing rates of college attendance. Astrology offers a sort of freedom from the academic ways of thinking that everyone is inculcated into and has reflected back to them in Netflix shows, Guardian pieces, and Twitter takes. There’s a freedom to forswearing these epistemologies and being frivolous in one’s thought. Similarly, the jock is the male normie par excellence. As a figure, he offers a kind of freedom from political ideology, abstraction, and neurosis grounded in the reality of the body and the steel of his equipment. His anti-intellectualism is part of his appeal. He is neither woke nor anti-woke, but oblivious to it all—which is incredibly attractive to the post-woke. The jock models a sort of Nietzschean normiehood.

For those who are skeptical of the identities they have created for themselves through politics, the jock offers a fantasy of being normal again. Call them conservative or neoliberal or w/e, but the simple values of lifting—discipline, responsibility, and self-improvement—feel like a non-ideological bedrock after years of living out virtual arguments, intellectual narratives, and utopian projects. If you can’t effect change anyway, you at least shouldn’t worry about it and try to feel good. Be hot, be free.

Actual jock oppression

(@sashafurman)

Full disclosure

I’ve been vaxxed against COVID like five times lmaoo. Sorry you’re not serious about the grind, bro. Some of us aren’t missing out on two weeks of training to lounge in bed. Guess we’re just made different. 🤷🏼‍♂️