Blog Post 2(Rough Draft Essay)

In today’s society we place an extraordinary amount of emphasis on appearance. What it means to have a healthy body both internally and externally. Or at least what appears to be a healthy body on the outside.  The dictionary definition of health is “the state of being free from illness or injury.” While there is some truth to this, we go further as a society in expanding this simple definition. A healthy body is able and active but most importantly it is natural and proportionate. One of the most important things for maintaining a healthy body is to eat well, drink lots of water, and avoid artificial things that may cause harm or push your body to the limit. Body building and Gender Ambiguity Transformation are two different types of excessive body types that challenge the notion of health in similar but distinct ways.

Body building challenges the universal notion of health because it falls into the extreme side of the spectrum of what the average body is. The body that a person gets from this is due to over training and taking in different medications to help speed their process for physical strength. The once cliché phrase that too much of anything is bad, applies very well to the habits of body builders because they do exactly “too much”. They strive to go beyond what the average body can do and although to some it is seen as “heroic” or “breaking free of society’s rules”, when it comes to the body, “too much” is not heroic, it is detrimental.

In Stuart Ewens “Hard Bodies”, he takes us a little deeper into the mentality of a body builder.  People who body build become a slave to their bodies. From the minute they wake up to the minute they go to sleep all the work that they do is dedicated to their body. What they choose to eat, where they choose to spend their time, what they choose to do or not to do, is all in relation to maintaining their specific body. Even slacking for a single day could ruin all of their months or years of hard work. In “Hard Bodies”, Ewen uses a 34 year old fictional character named Raymond H to reenact the life of a body builder. He narrates, “Surveying his work in the mirror, H—admires the job he has done on his broad, high pectorals, but is quick to note that his quadriceps “could use some work.” This ambivalence, this mix of emotions, pursues him each time he comes for a workout, and the times in between. He is never quite satisfied with the results.” Ewen is describing how as Raymond works out he is always checking to see the results and while he is pleased with it for a short amount of time, he is also quick to see his flaws. This is significant because it highlights the insecurities that arise with body building and how body builders work so hard attempting to reach an unattainable goal. It is never enough because you always have to gain more muscle, or become stronger, and that leads to a loss of judgment about the reality of your health. Ewen adds on, “An incorrectly struck pose reveals a over measure of loose skin, a sign of weakness in the shell.” He is highlighting the extent of the insecurity that comes with bodybuilding and how just the mere strike of an unpleasant pose could make them unsatisfied with their entire body and cause them to feel like they are not doing enough.

So when a body builder is doing everything “right” and they are still not satisfied with the limitations of the human body what is their last option? Steroid use. Steroids are simply chemical substances that include different hormones and vitamins that can be injected into the body in order to give us a boost in different things such as stamina and strength. Many body builders tend to resort to this as sometimes their last or even first option because it allows you to do things with your body that you never imagined you could do. So why not use steroids if it can make us superhuman? With the use of steroids body builders can lift things ten times heavier without a single drop of sweat, and they have ten times the duration that they once had which could help them achieve their unfeasible goal much faster. In Adrians’ interview with a female bodybuilder, Roxanne Edwards he asks her about her use of steroids and she responded saying, “So you’re not going to be stronger because you use a steroid. You were already strong before you started.  A steroid just allows you to do it for a longer time so you’re able to create more muscle. Now in terms of myself, yeah I have, and the ones that I’ve used were to make me harder on stage. Twice as hard!” Roxanne is completely right. Obviously taking steroids does not mean that the person never had any strength of their own to begin with. And it is great that it makes you feel undefeatable by granting you this new strength and stamina.  However, the issue is that steroids are not natural, although it is far more complicated than this. Many body builders even without the use of steroids choose to neglect the fact that their bodies have limits. So with the use of steroids it only helps to exacerbate their dangerous mentality by blurring the line between what is possible and impossible for the human body. What they once knew was impossible has now become possible, even painless, so they begin to start taking more and more steroids. While living in this fantasy world they fail to acknowledge the reality of the stress that their bodies are undergoing due to this artificial substance that is making them believe their bodies can handle it when in fact, it cannot. When there is no end goal or limit to your body, and you work it beyond what nature allows, that is not healthy. The body building mentality is limitless but the human body is not, and that is where the clash between health and bodybuilding lies.

Ambiguity gender transformation is another form of excessive body type that challenges the notion of health. In fact, this body defies the very idea of health in every single way. In the case of Heather Cassils, she is a female attempting to achieve a body that cannot clearly be categorized as either male or female. She did this for approximately six months and it was her effort to undergo a gender transformation without the actual surgery. In the essay Traditional Sculpture, she describes her experience by saying, “This project was all about consumption: my grocery bill sky rocketed to $1,000 a month, my hormones fluctuated with the androgen I had taken into my body, and my cells tried to figure out if I was male or female. Let alone the cost of maintaining this body, injury was imminent, and though I managed to stop before it got too bad, it was just a matter of time before I was limping around with buckled knees like all the other bodybuilders.” In order for her to do this she placed her body under an immeasurable amount of stress with all the pills she was taking to defy her natural state as well as the amount of food she forced into herself to maintain this developing body. This body challenges the notion of health even more than the average body building one because her goal was not just to work out and maintain muscle, it was to become the extreme stereotype of a whole other gender.  During this time period Cassils was hardly active due to the stress on her body from the excessive medications and painful routines day in and day out. She complains, “I was so tired all the time from all the heavy lifting. My joints ached constantly, and my muscles became so tight that my girlfriend had to take my t-shirt off at night because I was no longer flexible enough to do so myself.” Although this is self explanatory, I must add that despite how muscular, or powerful, all of the drugs made her in terms of lifting weights, if she could not even remove her own shirt due to being sore and in pain, how does that in any way reflect health? Like I mentioned, to be healthy, is to be able to move around, and be energetic and able bodied.  This goal of gender ambiguity has placed Cassils in the complete opposite direction of unhealthy.  Surprisingly, despite this all, Cassills still, saw it as a form of achievement. When describing her day to day interactions and ridicule that she faced she explains her feelings by stating, “this anger was one of the true indicators of success for me. I had achieved a confusing body that ruptured expectation.” This demonstrates that Cassils main goal was not even health itself, rather it was the reactions of the people who would watch her as they awed in confusion over her physical appearance. As much as this lifestyle has affected her personally in terms of her health, it has also had public repercussions. She mentions several times in the article how in her day to day interaction, she has people trying to either fight her or test her strength by arm wrestling and other silly things in that nature.  It almost seems as if this was more of a ‘joke’, or slap in the face towards society and all of us on the outside world who feel the need to box people into specific bubbles. One could argue that what motivated Cassils was defying society’s norm of what a male or female body is. To a certain extent, unlike body building Cassils has reached her goal- gender ambiguity.  Cassils expresses this time of her life in the article saying, “It was also empowering. At the peak days of my transformation, I could perform a 650-pound leg press, and I could bench press 165 pounds. I got respect from the serious meatheads in the gym, and I was able to split the seams of my shirts (Incredible-Hulk-style). In total I gained 23 pounds of muscle.” So clearly based on this we can see that she was able to do some incredible things and enjoyed the superhuman power that the steroids and workouts gave her. Nevertheless, as I mentioned in the case with Roxanne Edwards, despite a person gaining a new founded strength and power it does not change the fact that the way that they went about to get that was an unnatural and “unhealthy way”.  

I could not emphasize the significance in acknowledging the difference between regular work outs and excessive body abuse. What Cassils has done to her body for the mere satisfaction of defying social norms is internal and external bodily harm.  She is not healthy due to the mere fact that her body is being overly worked and she has too many artificial substances in her body. Six months later Cassils concluded her ‘project’, and she describes the several after affects of this unhealthy experiment. “I stopped this project on July 27. On this day I stopped the creatine and the steroids. I stopped force-feeding myself, and I took two weeks off the weights. Within 14 days I had shed eight pounds of muscle. My skin grew thick as the testosterone withdrew from my system. My moods swung.” Her statement alone stresses how detrimental this physical gender transformation was. The very fact that within just two weeks of living a normal life, Cassils experienced all of these negative effects, proves not only the severity of the damage that this was doing to her body, but also that this gender ambiguity goal does not align with the notion of health.  

In conclusion, what it means to be healthy is to also be content and feel good about yourself. What body builders or female body builders in this case do not have is satisfaction. Working out for them can never be enough, they have to get bigger and it is like they are chasing a goal that they know can never be reached. Body building can honestly be perceived as abuse. The amount of food consumption, steroid usage, and weightlifting, is not one that a human body is should take. Both woman are trying to do the “impossible” and yes to a certain extent they are achieving the impossible, however is the impossible healthy? Both these woman have entered a lifestyle where they are now slaves to their body. They cannot do anything else, or rest, or have fun because if they do not keep working for their body they will loose it. The very thing that they place so much emphasis on and the very place where their happiness lies will be gone.  So in actuality, are these lifestyles for themselves or for the outside world? Are they doing this not to be healthy, but to send a greater message? It is almost as if they are living less for themselves and more for others. That in itself is very interesting because woman like Roxanne want to look good for society so that people can compliment her, but at the same time she is not following the social norms of what actually defines a person as healthy or “good looking.” They are the ones who defy society’s norms and create their own separate lifestyle while we either choose to admire or reject what they do. As a result of the fact that they do not follow social norms they’re lives are filled with unique obstacles.  They have to deal with constant judgment and stares from the outside world for not “fitting in”. Whether they are going to the grocery store or doing laundry, people will always stare because they are perceived to be “strange”. But most importantly the biggest repercussions on people such as Roxanne and Cassils are that they have to deal with the constant judgment from themselves. They place an extraordinary amount of emphasis on their physical appearance and it almost seems like they mainly live for the reactions of others. It brings into question whether or not people have these excessive body types because they genuinely want it, or whether they do it for reactions. Regardless, the human body has its limits and we as humans are meant to abide by the laws and rules of our body for the sake of our health. When you go beyond that, you endanger yourself in great ways. So as much as people are free to live their lives they way they want to, both the body building and gender ambiguity lifestyle challenges the notion of health because it is in fact damaging to ones well being.