One of my favorite one-I-made-earlier aphorisms is “Men are the sum of their parts; women are some of their parts.” But now I’m wondering if it’s a bit out of date. When I thought it up, women were the only ones who bothered with “tweakments” and cosmetic surgery and generally turning themselves into living dolls, hoping to hook what in the common parlance is known as “a live one.” But now, with transplants for receding hairlines and male film stars no longer looking like their passport photos, I don’t think this is true anymore.
Becoming a “lad” once meant swerving Sports Day, drinking beer and generally letting oneself go
Where there is still a gap in male and female attitudes to looks is in dieting. For both sexes, the rise of semaglutides has rendered the dreary business of calorie-counting somewhat superfluous, but for those who don’t want to take them on principle or are medically unsuited to them, the difference in attitudes towards starving oneself is striking, as a new study by Anglia Ruskin University, published in the journal PLOS One, sets out.
For girls, dieting was always a bonding mechanism, a secret society which meant you’d become a woman. And what a grim view of being a woman it was, depriving yourself in order to appeal to men – and not even straight men at that, who always leered at the thought of “something to get hold of,” but to gay male fashion designers, who you’d then have to pay for the pleasure of squeezing yourself into their ghastly creations.
For boys, the opposite was true. Becoming a “lad” meant swerving Sports Day, drinking beer and generally letting oneself go; you can see the difference in the way the sexes traditionally defined “Me-Time.” For females it was probably a “pampering” day, which meant even more slogging away and frittering your pay on being appealing to the opposite sex; for males it might well have comprised pizza, Peroni and pornography, with no thought of pleasing the ladies at all. The thought of my husband and his mates sitting around at Games Night swapping handy hints about intermittent fasting makes me howl with laughter.
However, one thing the survey did find that men could get on board with when it came to getting into shape was competitive challenges. We’ve all known those fellows whose idea of fun is entering the wildly popular event “Tough Mudder” (Freud would have a – muddy – field day), whose website tells us that they are “A community of normal individuals with an abnormal commitment to overcoming challenge.”
Another quote which is either a threat or a promise informs us that “they let urban professionals be savage again.” Though their website shows lots of smiley girls doing their best to recreate the famous The Slits album cover (minus the toplessness), I took this to be mere window-dressing and was astonished to discover that the breakdown of the sexes taking part is roughly half and half. Perhaps they’re often couples, to whom rolling around in all that mud acts as something of an aphrodisiac foreplay?
Or maybe it’s just an extreme twist on a rather touching point of the survey, which says men are happier to get fit if it’s through an activity they can share with their “partner.” (Unless you’re playing tennis with them or in a law practice with them, I hate that word.) One man said, “For me, it was having the support of my wife – without that, I wouldn’t have done it.” It does seem sweet at first, when the participants affirm that dietary changes were supervised by the women in their lives.
But I suspect that, given the passage of time, it might have a negative result on many relationships. We all know the danger of a man coming to see his wife as his mother, and the resulting resentment which may ensue, and it’s only one low-carb meal from a woman overseeing a man’s food input being seen as “caring” to dark mutterings to his mates down the pub about “Her Indoors” giving you merry hell if she smells pork scratchings on your breath.
NHS England statistics claim that while “only” 62 percent of females are overweight, a whopping 70 percent of males are, so it’s not like women being keener on weight-loss is logical. However, as quite a fan of men (despite the frequent scoldings of “Man-hater!” from some below-the-line bounders), I’m always on the lookout for something we can learn from them. In the arena of physical appearance, might we be more laissez-faire about being fair lassies?
It would be a real shame if all those nice fellows who are fans of the barmaid’s apron and the full English ended up like poor Clavicular, known to his mum as Braden Eric Peters, a 20-year-old “influencer” from New Jersey. “Clav” became famous in the “incelosphere” last year for getting up to the most unimaginably daft antics on TikTok – including using crystal meth as a diet aid – as well as claiming that as a teenager he sought to reshape his jawline by bashing himself in the face with a hammer; when his parents hid the hammer, he improvised with a sports trophy.
He has shown himself to be extremely judgmental of the looks of others, calling the beauteous Sydney Sweeney “malformed” and saying of “obese” J.D. Vance, “How are you fat and expected to lead a country?” Other remarks include claiming that Frenchwomen are less attractive than American women due to Europe’s gene pool being “devastated” by World War Two.
Maybe it’s best that men don’t start following women into dieting, considering the rabbit hole of vanity they might follow poor “Clav” down? I say that as someone who was once compared by a magazine to Jabba the Hutt, had a whale of a time on Mounjaro a few summers ago and am now so depleted by disability that community nurses call me “frail.” Most men I know would only harm their facial features accidentally, falling over drunk on their way back from the local hostelry. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I like them that way.
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