Sales is an inevitable part of life, but what grinds my gears is marketing that preys on insecurities and lazy stereotypes to get men to pay up. If someone has a financial incentive to make you conform to their standards of behaviour, then it’s very unlikely they have your best interests at heart.
This is especially true when these tactics involve trying to dictate how an entire group of people should behave. These tactics are on display in fitness clothing brands, nutrition products, membership adverts, and social media. In most of these cases someone stands to profit from pushing lazy archetypes upon you to make you want to be more like their brand.
In my opinion, there is far more awareness and discussion around how this sort of pressure is directed at women. It’s time for men to catch up.
Knowing some of the archetypes that men are cast as – and how ridiculous they are – will hopefully reduce the pressure you feel to train, spend, and behave a certain way just because you’ve been told that’s what it means to be a man.
The Warrior
There are many truly demanding roles in life – jobs that require exceptional people to take on physical and emotional trauma and risk permanent injury or death.
I’m talking about military personnel, firefighters, medical staff, law enforcement, and so on. Roles that require courage and grace under pressure, regardless of how you feel about the institutions behind them.
And yet, you won’t have to look far to see people making comparisons between the recreational pursuit of fitness and the warrior lifestyle. I can’t help but cringe when rocking up to the gym or sports practice is described as going to war or going into battle. Your air-conditioned gym is not a battlefield. You can’t listen to your Spotify playlist in a warzone. Facing death is not the same as maxing out your deadlift.
Perhaps I see more of this due to my history with martial arts, but it’s pretty pervasive. Whether it’s t-shirt quotes about “the warrior in the garden” or products named after grenades and axes, the point is: it’s a fantasy.
The Beast
We’ve all heard of #beastmode, and lately, I’ve been hearing other similar terms like “demon mode,” or “train insane”. These phrases all convey the idea that training is about unleashing some wild, unstable part of yourself that lies dormant until it’s time to train.
This concept is ridiculous. There is nothing inside you that is not human. You are responsible for your actions and decisions – and that includes training like an idiot.
This idea is also potentially harmful. To walk around all day, smothering your emotions and frustrations until you can get to the gym, is deeply unhealthy. What happens to the “beast” when you can’t get to the gym (for example, during a pandemic)? What happens when you get injured?
Training can be an outlet for stress, and a great way of making yourself feel good. However, you shouldn’t be pinning all of your hopes for a cathartic experience on your ability to get to a squat rack.
The Entrepreneur
A lot of the arguments that rich people make about wealth have filtered into the way we talk about fitness.
The popular argument goes that if someone is rich, its because they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. There was no luck involved, no inheritance given. Anyone who tried and failed to accumulate wealth were either lazy, or lacking some magical X-factor.
In fitness, this logic implies that a particular physique or performance level is proof positive of superior work ethic or fitness knowledge. Genetic potential, free time, disposable income – these things are meaningless to the person who simply wanted it more. We all have the same 24 hours, after all.
But in reality, all those factors (and more) will absolutely influence your chances of achieving your gym goals – just as being born into a family of millionaires will improve your chances of being wealthy.
As I’ve written before, the fact that the entrepreneur’s claims are bullshit does not mean you should give up hope of ever getting the results you want, but context is important in any “success” story. Anyone who pretends otherwise is probably trying to con you into blindly following their method.
Summary
There’s a chicken and egg situation present: are brands telling people what behaviours they should identify with? Or are they capitalising on a culture that already existed? Just as with the chicken and the egg, the origin hardly matters – what matters is how we respond to these pressures.
It may seem harmless, but these marketing tactics amp up the toxic aspects of masculinity and narrow the range of acceptable behaviours that men can display, whilst manipulating you to spend your money on the brand in question. Not only this, but these tactics can encourage you to adopt a less effective, even dangerous, training mentality. For example, if every workout was literally like a war, an injury would be inevitable.
We can’t have deeper conversations about masculinity and mental health whilst continuing to aspire to these absurd caricatures. Yes, training can be hard. Yes, you can be competitive. But working out does not make you a warrior, a beast, or a psycho. Your body, performance and wellbeing will only ever truly matter to those people who care about and respect you, and that has much more to do with your behaviour outside the gym than in it.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to be notified of more great content, you should sign up to our newsletter.