Do gymcels exhibit another form of orthorexia?
If you’re online at all, by this point you’ve probably heard of “incels” and the infamous “red pill community”, many of the members of which fall under the umbrella of the online “manosphere”.
“Incel” is a portmanteau for ‘involuntarily celibate’, a term used to describe a person (usually male-identifying) who views their own lack of sexual activity as a source of resentment for those (usually women) who are having sex with other people, or in any case, not having sex with them. A reference to the 90s blockbuster film The Matrix - ironically created by two trans women - this state of realised resentment is what constitutes the “red pill” existence, one in which supposedly, men remain in a “reality” in which “women run the world without taking responsibility for it”.
By contrast, the “blue pill” represents a world in which women’s greater oppression and absence of equal opportunities comparatively with men is acknowledged. This is what the incel community would call The Matrix, and what people like me would call “true lived experience backed up by stats and epistemological experience.”
By and large, the “manosphere” - an online world of resources which promote misogyny and anti-feminist discourse under the guise of homo-social bonding, is predominantly made up of people characterisable as “incels”.
For women in particular who find themselves on the receiving end of this sexism and women-oriented hate, this particular subgroup of (mostly) men can feel terrifying. Feminist writer Laura Bates spent two years infiltrating the manosphere to understand the ideology of its participants. During this time, she faced questions like “Should rape be legalised, or would that take all the fun out of it?” and “Would it be better to take away women’s status as human beings altogether, or to designate them the official “property” of their father or husband?”
Of course, the manosphere has a different explanation for women’s fear. According to the r/PurplePillDebate Reddit thread, “women hate the manosphere because [it] teaches men to protect themselves from women, which makes it harder for women to exploit us.” Not, that is, because of the death and rape threats it perpetuates.*
*As a side note, Rollo Tomassi, who goes under the name The Rational Male online, explains that the Purple Pill is a euphemism for people who have become Red Pill aware but have decided to temper these “uncomfortable truths” with their Blue Pill optimism.
Nor, according to this Reddit user, would women’s fear of mobilising misogynists result from the statistics around the disproportionate exploitation of women, including that we make up more than 70% of MSHT (Modern Slavery/Human Trafficking) victims. Or from the estimate that 58% of all women murdered in 2017 were killed by an intimate partner or family member. Naturally, that would be ridiculous; we are, after all, the ones who have been so successful in our repeated exploitation of men.
For many incels then, the goal is to seek revenge on women who they believe are torturing them through rejection. Although not regarded at the time as an act of terrorism - as misogyny is yet to be classified by law as a “hate crime” - we’ve seen this revenge enacted through women-centric killing sprees.
Perhaps most notable is that which took place in Santa Barbara in 2014, when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen after writing a manifesto claiming he was jealous of “Chads” (conventionally attractive, sexually active men) and resentful of “Staceys” (conventionally attractive, sexually active women). That same year in the UK a teenager stabbed three women in three weeks as “an act of revenge because of the life they gave me”.
However, though at this point you’d be forgiven for despairing aloud “ALL MEN”, that’s not to say that there aren’t certain nuances to insidious incels (or manospherical misogyny?) As well as your “pick-up artists” - many of whom will give women a generous 7 hours to get comfortable before attempting to manipulate them into sleeping with them, you also have *drumroll please*: the “Gymcel”.
This is another portmanteau - although admittedly not a very clever one - to describe (mostly) men who obsessively go to the gym and work on their bodies. For some, this is seen as a way to escape the incel characterisation, the idea being that the more muscle they have, the more attractive they’ll be to women and therefore, more likely to get laid.
While for others, expending their energy at the gym is seen as an alternative to sexual activity. By “lifting” they can work through their own rage and self-hatred. This subgroup is often classed as “MGTOW” (“men going their own way”), as those who have decided to reject women all together to deal with their own self-perceived feelings of sexual rejection.
Whether they gym in order to gain female attention, or as a result of the absence of women in their lives, “Gymcels” are also often the most susceptible in the incel community to what’s become known as “bio-hacking” or “looks-maxing”.
For years, gym-goers and athletes have played around with steroids or other performance enhancers. Certainly, The Global Performance Enhancing Drugs industry is already valued at around USD 0.40 billion. What’s more, of those abusing steroids, research suggests that despite the growing rates of use amongst young women, men still account for the majority of users.
However, like the global pick-up industry, which is already valued at USD 100 million, Gymcels’ susceptibility to performance enhancers to improve their chances with women is also being capitalised on. This is what’s become known as “bio-hacking” or “looks-maxing”, a way to supposedly scientifically and technologically alter your body to get the maximum results out of your fitness and nutrition.
The severity of these alterations range from ways to build more muscle or improve their posture or hairline, to hormone substitutions and surgical procedures. In an episode of their podcast “Rehash”, Hannah and Maia discuss a “looksmaxing” forum in which a man claimed to be “injecting 50 milligrams of IGF-1 directly into his penis 3 days a week, as well as a topical DHT applied daily”, combined with “500 milligrams of testosterone injected per week”.
Aside from the fact that administering such invasive and drastic chemical changes into your own body without the correct medical experience is extremely dangerous, feminist academic Neil Shyminsky also points out that “biohacking” is just an incredibly effective rebranding of feminised wellness culture. Neil points out that this masculinised language has transformed a power-nap into “bio-hacking your sleep cycle”, slimfast into “soylent”, and a diet into an “eating plan”.
<https://youtube.com/shorts/d_gNYF763KU?si=_ssailgj_jCxJ2Cw>
However, as well as being a marketing scheme which preys on men’s insecurities around their own desirability in order to exploit them for their money, could this unhealthy obsession with the gym - often embodied by “Gymcels” - also be seen as a form of “orthorexia”?
Orthorexia is a type of eating disorder that revolves largely around an obsession with eating only healthy food. Although it shares similar restrictive eating patterns and, like anorexia, is more common in women than men, sufferers of orthorexia tend to focus more on high-quality, “healthy” food groups, and often avoid those considered “unhealthy” or “calorific”.
On one hand, Feminist scholar Eve Kofosky Sedgewick has suggested that many men might build muscle as a way to promote homosocial bonding. This in turn allows them to maintain and protect their networks of power as ways of sustaining patriarchal privilege.
However, for men who already feel disempowered by women, in this case, “Gymcels”, it's perhaps understandable that they might hyper-focus on the gym as a place in which they can work on themselves and their bodies, in order to control how they’re being perceived.
This reliance on a (Gym) community, in which men feel strong and valued in a world in which they feel rejected by women, creates the perfect conditions for men to be exploited - often by other men - through expensive “looks-maxing” training programs or “biohacking” eating plans. What’s more, it carries certain similarities to the manosphere as a whole which, above all, offers men a place in which they can feel validated and like they belong.
So great is this longing for belonging - not just amongst men, but amongst all of us as innately social beings, that it becomes understandable that men might, consciously or subconsciously, develop an unhealthy obsession with their diet and the gym if they believe this is what will help them feel less alone. As we’ve seen by the man willing to inject himself in his own penis, through the patriarchal implementation of certain metrics of their desirability to women as a measure of their masculinity and virility, men are even willing to undergo serious risks as an alternative.
The answer then, as always, is education. Proper education around nutrition and exercise, but first and foremost, as Greg Matos has suggested, around socialisation. The only way to deconstruct a manosphere of angry incels - which has arisen coincidentally at the same time as the male-dominated loneliness epidemic - is to teach men how to prioritise and value friendships and quality time above the quality of their abs or the quantity of women that they’ve had sex with.
Comments
Post a Comment