Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff

Author:Nancy Etcoff [Etcoff, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77911-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

No Pecs, No Sex

Written on a billboard advertising David Barton’s gym in New York, NO PECS, NO SEX could come straight out of studies of tail lengths and peacock plumes. Pectoral muscles are the human male’s antlers, their weapons of war. Men may no longer hunt or wage war through hurling weapons but a broad chest still echoes of survival skill. Men are fist fighters who flex muscles instead of baring canines. Today a man’s upper body strength is often used for a different form of hunting and gathering. Six million people read Muscle and Fitness magazine each month, where the typical cover shows a muscular male (often being gazed at by an admiring female) beside headlines such as “Getting Big.”

Studies that focus on weight suggest that heterosexual men are happy with their bodies, or at least less dissatisfied than women or gay men are. If they looked at shape, height, and muscularity, they would find a less happy group. Many men consider themselves underweight. But they don’t want to get fatter, they want to get more muscular. Men have less body fat than women (twenty-five to twenty-seven percent body fat is the average for women, versus fifteen percent for men) and have no interest in acquiring more. But they are eager to add muscle mass as early fitness advocate Charles Atlas knew when he promised to transform weaklings into “he-men.”

Generally, the most attractive male torso is thought to be V-shaped, tapering from wide shoulders to a narrower waist and hips. The most strongly disliked shape for men, according to both females and males, is the pear shape, with thin shoulders and widened middle and bottom. In one study Caucasian and Japanese male students all expressed desires to be larger everywhere except around their hips and waists.

Adult men have, on average, more muscle mass than women and the biggest difference in strength is concentrated in the arms, chest, and shoulders. The average woman can bench-press about a third of the weight that a man can, and her grip strength is about half that of a man’s (contrast this to leg strength, where the average woman’s strength is about three quarters that of the average man). The average male gym attendee’s first goal is to exaggerate that difference by developing his upper body—the pectoral muscles in the chest, the lats (latissimus dorsi muscles) in the back, and the biceps and triceps in the arms. Arnold Schwarzenegger was said to be able to balance a glass of water on his flexed pecs. When actor Tom Hanks asks his friend Rob Reiner what women are looking for these days, in the 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle, Reiner answers, “Pecs and a cute butt.”

In Elizabethan times men stuffed and padded their doublets to get that Calvin Klein ad look, much as Roman warriors wielded huge breastplates and as men today pad the shoulders of their jackets. When leg shape was visible in tights, before the advent of pants, men went about stuffing those too if their legs were thin.

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