SAM FUSSELL 579
That's the trick. The look is as carefully cultivated, as painstakingly
pared as a bonsai tree. And there's nothing natural about it.
While the swimmer and the bicyclist shave to cut down on drag,
on air or water resistance, the bodybuilder shaves to make sure his
body is seen without obstruction. His performance lies in being
looked at, ogled, appraised. For these modern-day coxcombs, using
the theatricality of the street as their backdrop, the stare is the
ultimate reward. It's a reversal of sex roles, with the builder taking a
traditionally female role: body as object. To be "buff" or "buffed"
means literally polished-not like people but furniture. Not for
nothing is the bodybuilder's tan-in-a-bottle known as "bronzer."
Every movement of the bodybuilder is self-conscious presentation
and display. Take the distinctive and dramatic walk of the bodybuilder, that weightlifter's waddle of muscles on parade. With the
elbows held wide from the body, thighs spread far apart, the walk is
as stylized, as preening, as a model's flounce down the runway.
Quintessentially urban, bodybuilding is inextricably intertwined
with homosexual camp. Susan Sontag remarks: "The whole point of
camp is to dethrone the serious."6 By making a labor of leisure, a
vocation of recreation, bodybuilders lampoon wage slaves and nineto-fivers. His is a perversion of puritanism, and utilitarianism. He
doesn't use his muscles to build bridges, but to raise eyebrows. They
are at once functionless, yet highly functional.
"Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality," says Sontag. Every bodybuilder's goal is to achieve "the Apollonian Ideal," in which he embodies perfect symmetry. This is accomplished by using pulleys and barbells to increase certain bodyparts
and decrease others until, at long last, the neck measures the same in
circumference as the arms and the calves, while the chest measures
twice one thigh.
"The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and
exaggeration." Those who actually work with their bodies don't look
remotely like bodybuilders, whether it be the village smithy or
farmers under their John Deere caps. In fact, the world's strongest
men (such as Russia's Vasili Alexeev) look like Jackie Gleason. But
through dumbbells and cable exercises that temporarily balloon the
muscle, and stringent dieting that shrinks the joints, the bodybuilder
banks on artifice to give him the appearance of spectacular muscularity. Camp is "The curved line, the extravagant gesture." It's the
revenge of the hip on the square or the straight. I mean this literally:
the curved contours of a bodybuilder's body, every muscle a ball, are
