I write muscle growth fiction, where I sexually admire muscular, handsome men with perfect bodies. Being a female writer sexually objectifying men the way men usually do so for women (I thoroughly enjoy the reversal and the power, by the way), I find myself asking a disturbing question: am I contributing to unrealistic standards and bad body image among men?
Well, let me explain one thing: as a former functional anorexic, I don’t believe bad body image comes from the media the way a lot of other people claim. It doesn’t come from outside, but from an internal chemistry, a combination of self-hatred and perfectionism, a desire to have control over your life. Obsessive perfectionism and self-loathing go hand-in-hand. Every single anorexic I ever knew had a 4.0 GPA.
Problems with body image don’t come from the media or from magazines. In my case, it’s about my relationship with my Mother. I grew up very chubby, and I was constantly belittled by my Mother for that reason (among others), a woman who had real problems expressing love or approval. I was made to feel worthless, and that nothing I did was good enough. Also, I was judged a “gifted” student by testing, so essentially I could never, ever come home with a “B.” According to Mom, B’s were for average, little people…which I was not.
In other words, I was trapped in a situation where being valued highly led to belittling my own achievements and good qualities.
It goes without saying how all this is connected to body image. No matter how good your thighs are, they’re not good enough. You internalize feelings of not being “good enough.” Your stomach is always, always chubby no matter how much you do, no matter how much any reasonable person thinks it looks fine. And your self-esteem is so fragile: anytime somebody said my butt looked chubby, I didn’t eat anything for three days.
So, it comes as no surprise I was a functional anorexic all through high school. To this day, I still take most of what I get in a restaurant home, and I never order desserts. Even lattes make me feel bloated.
How does all of this relate to muscle growth fiction?
Well, I’ve noticed in a lot of these stories there’s an excess, a feeling that you’re never “big enough.” Even in muscle growth art, I’ve learned to always stop reading a muscle growth comic two or three panels before the end, because that’s when they’re the brawniest and sexiest. Yet inevitably, the growth comic continues to a point that even someone with a tooth for beefcake - to say nothing of a normal person! - would consider to be grotesque or excessive. And believe me, it takes a LOT for me to say that, too, because I like men BIG!
When I write stories and post them on sites exclusively related to MG, the response I often get is “whoa, make him bigger!” To which I say, “Look, I made him 6’8” and 350 pounds. THERE IS NO “BIGGER.”
That's where my concern about adding to bad body image comes into play. Have I created a sense that "big" isn't "big enough?"
Immobilization is something I especially find disturbing. I probably sound hypocritical criticizing any fetish, because of how sexually dysfunctional and omnivorous I am. As George Burns once said, there are two things you can never argue with: what people find funny and what people find sexy. My purpose isn’t to point and say “ewww!” but rather, to call into question a few assumptions these fetishes work under.
At first, I thought immobilization was a turn-on closely related to being handcuffed, where the pleasure fantasy comes from a loss of control. If that were true, there’d be a lot more scenes in immobilization stories like from cheesy romance novels, where the hunky Pirate King captures a beautiful girl and says something like, “Ha ha, you’re my prisoner to have my way with…!” Instead, there’s a feeling of pushing the body beyond any reasonable dimension, where it’s no longer usable.
This relates to a website I’ve visited, called epiclust.com. For those not in the know, epiclust is a big penis story site. EpicLust has the distinction of being the first place I posted that wasn’t under a man’s pen name, incidentally. At first I thought epiclust was a website related to my fetish: muscle growth, only with a lot more of an emphasis on stories with male/female content. Actually, it’s more on big dicks.
I know what you’re thinking: “heh, sounds like your kinda place, Cristina.”
It’s true: I’m a size queen. I love well-endowed, ox-huge virile men. I don’t want to disappoint any of my fans that imagine me as some super-voracious cock-crazed queen, but really…if I was to make a list of the most important things in a man, a big dick wouldn’t even make the top ten. Wouldn’t even make the top
fifteen. It’s nice to have, but it’s way, way behind other and far sexier characteristics.
Which is why I find epiclust bizarre. The sort of penises they fantasize about having are too large to possibly have sex with any normal earthling woman, and in fact many protagonists of the stories there are frustrated for this VERY reason. In other words, the stories aren’t about sex as such, or even fantasies about being more sexually competent.
Penis size, to men, represents masculinity and value as a man. That’s why they call it a “manhood.” That’s what leads me to believe the writers on epiclust have serious issues on a par with anorexia or bigorexia: feelings of worthlessness or anxiety about being a man.
Everything about epiclust indicates a readership that is so sex-starved that the act of sex itself becomes mythologized, almost unreal. It doesn’t matter if a dick is four feet long and thus, less likely to be pleasure-giving and more like a brutal killing weapon Vikings fight with. There’s an emphasis also on elements of sex that anyone that actually HAS sex is downright terrified of: pregnancy, for instance. Like the Bigorexia of musclegrowth sites, their fixations are pushed into transparently psychological dimensions related to self-loathing.
I will admit, there’s something kind of sexy about incest, a common epiclust theme. That’s not how it comes off on epiclust, though: it comes off as an anxiety about women. Women related to men are “safe” and nonthreatening.
Finally, I have to say a few words about the Furry phenomenon.
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Psychologically, furries are an interesting and fascinating case, and if I decide to get my Master’s in Psych after I finish my MLS, I think I’d study them more in depth.
Here’s the behaviorism/Pavlovian explanation for how fetishes form. Let’s say you’re sexually aroused by something, for instance, a hot guy holding something incidental to the arousal, like (for the sake of the example) a rubber duckie. Later on, when you remember the arousal you received from the image, there’s an association made between getting turned on, and the incidental feature of the image (in this case, the rubber duckie). Enough of this happens, you might get a fetish for guys holding rubber duckies.
My mentor in the psychology department as an undergrad had actually studied and written on the furry phenomenon, and would have written a book on the subject if she hadn’t put it on hold due to cancer. Essentially, she studied furries, and found that it was different from other sexual fetishes, and didn’t form the usual way.
She found several interesting commonalities among male furries. Essentially, all of them had a similar profile: they usually had an absent father figure, suffered from social awkwardness caused by anxiety. “Furry” is less a fetish, more a “safety room” created to ease anxiety. That’s why furries comically overreact to any criticism: it’s an invasion, an intrusion into their “safety area.”
Men who are chubby chasers or who like female bodybuilders sometimes overreact this way. Their overreaction takes the form of dislike for society’s “standards of beauty.” It’s ESPN’s fault for not showing the Ms. Olympia, because of the unrealistic standards of beauty in our culture! Absolutely there’s some truth to the idea our media standards are airbrushed to an insane degree, but still…we have to be honest here. Female bodybuilders are weird looking (not a bad thing, I’d love to be one and freak people out), and reactions of disgust or bizarre fascination are to be expected, and are not offensive. Anyone who likes female bodybuilders and fat women are weird (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Please stop being sanctimonious, stop saying “everybody else” has the problem, and please have a sense of humor and laugh off any criticism.
