Kennedy, who is 69 years old, recently shared videos of himself lifting weights and doing press-ups shirtless. Alongside these, he pledged that should he become President, he will “restore America as the global example of health and well-being. Not through pills or syringes, but through character and self-discipline.”

The idea that physical and moral vigour go together is ancient. The first Olympic Games were held nearly three millennia ago, around 776BC, and many athletic-looking Greek statues survive to this day that vividly celebrate male physical beauty and strength as shorthand for good character.

This association persisted. In his 1855 poem “I Sing The Body Electric”, Walt Whitman celebrated human beauty as a fusion of character and embodiment, where flesh and gesture “are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul”. According to Whitman, the “well-made man” expresses his character in both body and movement — all of which offers a clue as to character.

But fusing beauty and value lands differently today. The modern progressive mainstream has set itself firmly against the idea that our bodies say anything moral. Kennedy’s videos prompted a flurry of accusations that in showing off his muscular torso, he’s mired in toxic masculinity, dog-whistling body fascism and eugenics, and implicitly promoting discrimination against disabled people. And – perhaps most damningly of all for someone who promotes natural health – that he’s faking it: of using unnatural means to pump his muscles when in reality he’s old and weak.

Kennedy has not responded to the rumours about steroid use. But the argument hits a live and divisive issue on the Right: biotech. A significant chunk of his support comes from a cluster of emerging popular movements whose common theme is resistance to “unnatural” biotech innovations. He was a prominent opponent of Covid vaccine mandates, one such innovation; other issues in the same cluster include medical gender transition, and artificial meat – all of which inspire strong opposition as unacceptable incursions of technology into our nature.

So we might ask: how can Kennedy advocate health and wellbeing via character and self-discipline, and show off his ripped physique to underline the point, if he attained that physique with the help of synthetic hormones? It’s a fair question. But the collective shrug from Kennedy supporters suggests that what was gleefully pointed out as an inconsistency — an advocate of “natural” health possibly using medical tech to attain that health — is not, in fact, seen as contradictory in the slightest.

We take the opposition between tech and nature for granted today — not least because we’ve spent two centuries using tech to escape the limits of nature, and told ourselves this was a story of moral progress. This forms the backdrop — among other things — to the women’s movement, a story that wouldn’t have been possible without a host of now near-invisible technologies that underwrite women’s relative autonomy.

Beyond this, it forms the backdrop to progressivism in general. It’s not just women who now seek to escape the idea that our bodies say something about us: it’s everyone. From the disability rights movement to “body positivity”, the driving idea is that any judgement or constraint imposed by our contingent physical form should be challenged. Perhaps the logical endpoint of this challenge has been gender medicine’s all-out resistance to embodied limits, a politics that’s centrally about “pills and syringes” as liberation.

This utopian drive to break the bounds of human nature, then, began in earnest with the industrial era. As the world modernised, technology and a Protestant work ethic were applied not just to escaping our limits, but also to resisting our waning strength as physical work became less important. With the freshly-minted Land of the Free roaring from agrarian colonial backwater into industrial superpower, new anxieties proliferated about health, vitality and masculinity. In response, a “muscular Christianity” emerged which framed manly fitness as an expression of religious devotion — and whose many legacies include the still wildly popular sport of American football.

But it wasn’t just the Christians. As industrialisation made life easier and people richer and freer, so this new wealth and leisure drove an explosion in social and cultural experimentation in how to live well. In this free-for-all, a dizzying array of health entrepreneurs flourished, offering “water cures”, physiology lectures, anti-masturbation campaigns, sanatoria, and diets and lifestyles of such experimental weirdness, they make our 21st-century keto diets, NoFap forums and jade yoni eggs look positively normie.

Even Walt Whitman contributed to this emerging culture. Just three years after “I Sing The Body Electric” was published, he wrote a 13-instalment guide to Manly Health and Training in a New York newspaper, under the pseudonym “Mose Velsor”. In it, he sets out the intimate link between physical fitness, moral virtue — and also personal efficacy and performance. Training doesn’t just deliver a “perfect physique” but also helps a man “exalt the intensity of his personal force” — a transformation that will, in turn, “attract to him attention, friendship and respect”.

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This mania for self-improvement tracked the wider transition in American culture, from largely agrarian to increasingly wealthy, entrepreneurial and technologically advanced. To succeed in this new era, the ambitious man had to grind. In other words, the fitness culture that emerged with modernity serves as a mirror of the machine age that spawned it: a “body electric” for the age of electrification, in which our physical forms become sites of industry-like labour and competition.

Today, we live in a biotech age, in which our flesh appears less in Whitmanesque terms — as union of body and soul — than as organs for donation; DNA for re-writing; a uterus for rent. We are raw material for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With this new turn has come another round of dematerialisation. Work is not just de-sexed, but virtualised. Life is sedentary. Happiness, risk-free sex, even weight management or the appearance of the opposite sex can be obtained in a pill or syringe. There’s no pressing reason to attain any level of physical fitness, except personal desire. And on top of these disintegrating forces, the dominant culture has also set itself (at least overtly) to the dissolution of physiological norms.

And just as industrial technologies spawned egalitarian challenges to our limits, and also new cults of the body beautiful, so today’s biotech age of hormone-enhanced affirmation and “inclusive” body culture has also given rise to a countervailing one, of aggressive physical beauty. One influential aspect of this backlash is a Right-wing subculture of bodybuilding, whose proponents oppose the progressive war on human nature along every possible axis. In general, adherents embrace effortful self-improvement, vitality and individual excellence, while dismissing “body positivity” and egalitarianism of every kind. Centrally, the RWBBs embrace the link expressed so controversially by Kennedy between physical health and moral worth — especially what health implies about individual effort and discipline.

Perhaps the most influential figure in this movement is the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Bronze Age Mindset decries egalitarianism as the attempt to abolish excellence and natural hierarchy in favour of meaningless “buglife”. His social media account abounds with “Handsome Thursday” images of honed male physiques, presented as aesthetic resistance to such levelling-down.

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Unlike the 19th-century “muscular Christians”, this 21st-century fitness subculture draws inspiration more from the Hellenistic ancients, especially their sculptures of athletes. This affinity is so closely held that when a historian recently suggested ancient Greek soldiers would have been lean and tough, rather than “ripped”, he was deluged with furious anons, who accused him of self-interestedly attempting to legitimise “dad bods” and emasculation, and undermine men’s aspiration to physical beauty and strength, and — implicitly — to the superior character such beauty and strength have classically been viewed as reflecting.

But when such aspirations are located — as in the contested Greek soldiers — somewhere in the distant past, before the world modernised, what hope does anyone have of holding on to it? Critics sometimes accuse the RWBBs of clinging to a type of masculinity that has simply been rendered obsolete by changing social conditions. And maybe there’s something to that idea. Even “I Sing The Body Electric” expresses a palpable sense of loss at disappearing physical cultures: Whitman eulogises an agrarian grandfather hunting, boating and fishing with his many sons and grandsons. Hale and tan, loved by all, overwhelmingly magnetic, he’s a compelling figure – and was written in an era when that version of America was already disappearing.

Today, much as in the 19th century, we’re embroiled both in a tech-enabled war on human nature and a defence of that nature that is also tech-enabled — not least in how extremely online it is. But one upshot of this entanglement is that it might not, after all, be such a gotcha for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be using testosterone replacement therapy to pursue the body beautiful.

Right-wing body-builders and their fellow travellers may decry the use of synthetic hormones for anti-normative ends, such as “transgender” medical interventions for children. But there’s far more ambivalence where it comes to using biotech to enhance human beauty and performance. For example, there’s no clear consensus in this community on whether using anabolic steroids is OK. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if even those who criticise the use of tech to wage war on our nature might be less troubled about using tech to give nature a helping hand. After all, there’s no going back even to the 19th century, let alone the world of the hale, tanned farmers Whitman eulogises – or indeed of Greek hoplites. And, in theory at least, technology and desire can be turned to ends other than flattening every physical difference between individuals.

So perhaps this is the best we can hope for: diverting our “pills and syringes” from waging war on our nature, toward wielding them in support of human health and beauty. It’s a risky path, with many pitfalls. But with no obvious route back to a supposedly “natural” state, it may be that the only way out is through.

The Times last week reported that steroid use in the UK has increased tenfold over the past decade, while recent studies have shown that 2% of Canadians, and between three and four million Americans, have used steroids in their lifetimes — with roughly a quarter of those users reporting “psychological dependence” on the otherwise-non addictive drugs.

I have been on the periphery of the strength and fitness culture for my entire adult life, and steroids have always been part of the athletic game: if you want to win, not just at bodybuilding and powerlifting but at any sport, you take performance-enhancing drugs. Initially, I had primarily positive views about the drugs: steroids, I thought, were merely a means to an end, a way of getting stronger and increasing functional capacity, something reams of academic and anecdotal research have confirmed they do. However, I gradually learned that the individuals using them in this way are few and far between.

That small pool of people largely consists of pro athletes, driven by financial incentives or competitive instincts to pursue every conceivable advantage. But recreational users have always outnumbered professional users, whose livelihoods depend on athletic performance. And that gap has only widened as these drugs have become available everywhere from internet forums to legally operating testosterone clinics. Their pull is irresistible: a relative of mine who never played sports or even took to the bodybuilding stage was arrested for felony possession of steroids in 2014. 

These recreational users are trying to win a different kind of game. When I started investigating steroids, an increasing number of users were following in the footsteps of Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, a Russian-born Australian who built a following on YouTube at the end of the Noughties. One of the first notable influencers to emerge on the now ubiquitous site, Zyzz preached a gospel of “aesthetics”, relying on steroids consumed in conjunction with exercise to develop a physique similar enough to his idol Frank Zane’s that it would win him the undying admiration of his followers.

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The key difference, of course, was that Frank Zane — whom I interviewed a year ago — was a professional athlete, training his body to win bodybuilding pageants, and Zyzz was merely someone who wanted to look the part. Zane detested selfies and self-recorded footage, believing it to be deceptive and no substitute for up-close, objective inspection of another person’s body; Zyzz relied on these methods to project a particular self-image. Taking steroids arguably made him weaker and sicker, not stronger. Zyzz died after a cardiac arrest aged 22, the victim of a congenital heart defect and cardiomegaly — an enlarged heart — worsened by the drug use that, like many fitness influencers including the recently disgraced Brian “Liver King” Johnson, he had spent the majority of his career denying he used. (Zyzz’s deception was exposed a month before his fatal heart attack, when his brother Said was arrested for possession of anabolic steroids.)

Zyzz’s early death should have made him a cautionary tale. Instead, he became a “muscle martyr” beloved by other fitness posters. People like my felonious relative saw him and wanted to be him, while emerging social media platforms provided convenient playgrounds for their carefully-curated exercises in brand-building narcissism. I’ve now interviewed hundreds of users, and the reasons for their use all arise out of some sense of absence, some internal emptiness. A gay user whose steroid-abetted transformation I profiled explained to me that he wanted to transition from being a chubby, schlubby teen to a “hyper-masculine” man. Others said they added mass in the hope of “becoming someone”; all that hypertrophied flesh would obscure an essential lack of self. Several steroid users who were attending bodybuilding pageants merely as spectators told me how eager they were to be mistaken for competitors, that passing for one would constitute the highlight of their year. 

“The first casualty of steroid use is the truth,” the fitness journalist and bodybuilding competition coach Anthony Roberts has told me repeatedly. Even if steroids are obtained with a perfectly valid prescription, there is still a cultural taboo that prevents most users from admitting to using them. As Roberts tells it, lying is the oldest and most effective performance enhancer of all: lying about what you take, how much you take, what else you take — because steroid use, for many, is but a small part of a drug-filled lifestyle. Certain fitness influencers, in addition to denying or at least staying silent about steroid use, have gone even further, inflating their on-screen workouts with the use of fake weight plates and exaggerated claims about their performance.

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Meanwhile, they are risking their health. Heavy steroid users are already uniquely susceptible to cardiovascular problems — and so many influencers are using steroids in excess of what a physician would prescribe for therapeutic use. Those with pre-existing heart problems, like Zyzz, are uniquely vulnerable, particularly in recent times. During the pandemic, each widely-publicised bodybuilder death was met with waves of accusation: at first, it was the evil virus that did them in, then it was the “clot shot”. Never mind that most of these so-called “recreational users” are teetering on death’s doorstep at all times, aware that even a common cold could stop their engorged hearts.

Bodybuilding prodigy Dallas McCarver, for example, died in 2017 with organs so enlarged that they strained credulity, and a recorded testosterone level of 55,000 nanograms per deciliter (the normal range for a male falls between 300 and 1,000 ng/dl, and the highest recorded testosterone level captured in a failed Olympic drug test was 20,000 ng/dl). So, as they near peak muscularity, and fame, these bodybuilders are also nearing the end of their lives. Their spectacular bodies serve as both temple and tomb. 

Hours of conversations with men like these have led me to believe that their behaviour is, in part, a response to the socioeconomic situation in which we find ourselves. Since the early Eighties, in the West, deindustrialisation has proceeded apace and the world of finance has become dominant. To people coming of age, it might appear as if nothing is made anymore but money. Farmers and manual labourers, such as the steamfitter captured in Lewis Hine’s famous 1921 photograph, sometimes exhibit a high degree of muscular development related to their jobs. By contrast, middle-class workers, performing increasingly less strenuous work for more than a century, have to actively cultivate muscular physiques to project power for which there might be little purpose — beyond showing that they aren’t subject to the degenerating tendencies of their age. In the absence of any tangible construction projects, the only thing that you can gain approval for building is your body — a body that is both an “aesthetic” calling card and a prison for your enlarging viscera and solipsistic thoughts.

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In more recent years, there has been much commentary on declining male testosterone levels. Blame is assigned to everything from poisoned food to sedentary lifestyles. Some pundits, such as manosphere influencer Mike Cernovich, have urged men to set aside $80-100 a month for testosterone replacement therapy. Whereas Cernovich’s cohorts would most probably deride the prescription of SSRIs for depression, or oestrogen for transgender-identifying individuals, they accept a pharmaceutical solution for the crisis of masculinity. At least testosterone administered in a clinic is accompanied by regular blood tests that can detect cholesterol issues and other problems before they become dangerous. But it is still another of modernity’s many panaceas: here is a weekly or biweekly needle to the thigh or buttocks that will make you feel and perhaps even look like someone you are not, but feel entitled to be — or at least appear to be, on social media.

The overdiagnosis of SSRIs, the superfluity of steroids, and the legions of men killing themselves to look strong are tragedies. They are disordered responses to a kind of existential emptiness, a world in which our identities are all we have left to display and sell. And we know, deep down in our hearts, that such a meretricious product is worth nothing at all. 

Mishima examined strength and weakness in some of the greatest works of 20th-century literature. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), for instance, tells the story of a pathetic, dissolute son of a consumptive Buddhist priest, growing up amid the wartime wreckage of mid-century Japan. The protagonist, Mizoguchi, experiences various indignities while descending into mental illness, culminating with a suicide attempt he ultimately abandons, choosing life instead.

Mizoguchi is based on Mishima’s study of a real-life Buddhist acolyte, Hayashi Yōken, who burnt down the titular pavilion. Albert Borowitz described the arson in his 2005 book, Terrorism for Self-Glorification, emphasising that Japanese authorities attempted to conceal Yōken’s name, for fear of him achieving national celebrity. This anti-hero’s weakness — and resulting madness — arises within the context of a society perceived as both impotent and decadent; striking parallels exist between him and today’s hapless, bullied mass shooters, such as Elliot Rodger and, more recently, Anderson Lee Aldrich.

But Mishima is most often invoked by online admirers in 2022 not for his literary greatness or political insight, but his personal aesthetic. He was, for want of a better word, ripped — lean and well-defined from the practice of weight training, karate and kendo, which he undertook because he wished to experience “the essence of action and power”. The Mishima of the Western cultural imagination, then, is similar to the Oscar Wilde who allegedly told André Gide in Algiers that he put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his works.

It was a life that ended with a picture-perfect tableau: a ritual suicide, alongside a 24-year-old male follower, in the office of a commandment of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, where he had attempted to initiate some sort of national — or at least nationalist — renewal by means of a carefully stage-managed coup. Latter-day dissident intellectuals such as Bronze Age Pervert, writing in Bronze Age Mindset, understand Mishima’s appeal: “A beautiful death in youth is a great thing, to leave behind a beautiful body, and the best study of this pursuit you find in the novels of Mishima, a real connoisseur.”

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Mishima’s perfect body was based on both a Western sculptural ideal, rooted in Greco-Roman ideals of beauty, and “silence”: the pull of a “wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty”. Language, the stuff of social media posts, hot takes, and the political opportunists running our country, seems to exist to conceal and deceive; Mishima sought the “pure sense of strength” — some ideal that would tether him, body and soul, to “ultimate reality”.

He dreamed big, then. But materially, Mishima was limited. This much is obvious from the 1960 film Afraid to Die, in which he played the starring role as a gangster. He makes a display of leather-clad toughness, chest puffed out as far as his well-defined but concave pectorals can go. But it is almost a camp toughness, a little boy strutting and fretting along the stage in tough-man drag. Mishima, all of 5’4” on tiptoes, is no swaggering Marlon Brando or Burt Lancaster. From the perspective of a functional strength athlete, it is bizarre that he commands so much attention. And yet there he is, even if he is in “hyper-masculinity drag”, admired by all manners of weightlifting intellectuals and dispossessed dissidents.

It is this quality of Mishima that reveals something unexpected about the muscle boys of 2022. His modelling — artistic, sensitive, and even quite beautiful when working with photographers like Eikoh Hosoe — conveys in most cases not pure strength but a body that has “transitioned” to be more masculine. It is an end result that is at least stronger — if not as strong as it appears — frozen in time by the camera. The images for which Mishima sat, like the ritual death for which he spent years preparing, is somehow more important to his contemporary acolytes than the day-in, day-out life he actually led — which is exactly how Mishima would have wanted it.

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If this sounds bizarre, consider a quotation from the Washington Post’s recent series on the dangers of excessive steroid and diuretic use in bodybuilders. Mike Israetel, a 38-year-old bodybuilder who holds a PhD in sports science, described why he has used steroids for the past decade: “I’m almost to that size…[where] these are pictures that I’ll have forever, that I can look back on and say: ‘Wow, I really did the thing. I really looked the part, like the part that I was truly capable of looking.’” In other words, Israetel has built his body expressly for the pictures, so he can see himself looking the way he wished to be.

This was the same desire that provoked Samuel Fussell, a slender, dissipated academic, to take up the “steel” in the late Eighties. In his memoir Muscle, he describes how he pursued the creation of a new body, abetted by steroids, to serve as a hyper-masculine self that he portrayed to the world. Behind it, he could hide whatever remained of his real self. “Everything I’d done for the last four years had been an effort to keep the world at bay, to find a place in which I wouldn’t have to react or think or feel,” Fussell wrote of his transformation. His body grew far larger than Mishima’s or even Mike Israetel’s. But, he wrote, “as big as I’d gotten and impressive and imposing as I looked ‘standing relaxed,’ I felt that if you could somehow find a chink in my armour… you’d find nothing within that vast white empty space but a tiny soul about the size of an acorn.”

In my many years of interviewing bodybuilders, I’ve seen this philosophy crop up a lot. When I spoke to the long-time pro Bob Paris, who during the Eighties and early Nineties married considerable mass with Frank Zane-calibre aesthetics, he told me that putting on a “gorilla suit” — the title of his memoir — provided, among other things, some cover for the homosexuality he wouldn’t disclose to the world until the early Nineties. “I hated myself”, he wrote in his memoir. “My limbs were all in the wrong places, my teeth were weird, the hair on my head from outer space, the hair sprouting on my chest embarrassing. And I was a fag.” Or, as he summarised it to me: “What’s the old saying? ‘Show me a bodybuilder and I’ll show you a guy with dad issues.’”

Mishima, Israetel, Fussell, and Paris all wished to be seen, and see themselves, in a certain way. But the latter two renounced this pursuit in their memoirs. Both continued to train for health and general fitness, but they have lost their will to discipline their bodies in pursuit not of functional strength but some sort of particular image. As Fussell put it when he walked away from bodybuilding: “My lifting was life-denying rather than life-affirming… I was a lonely and solitary sceptic in this realm of smiling and pumped Pollyannas.” Paris was more emphatic: “At the end of my bodybuilding rainbow, instead of a pot of gold, there was a complication; beyond that, frustration.”

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These patterns of thought have appeared in many of the other interviews I’ve done, too. When I spoke to a 20-something gay software engineer named Zander, who was using heroic doses of steroids to become the “muscle bear” of his dreams, he put the matter succinctly, drawing on the language of gender identitarians: “I sometimes see the use of steroids by men as like, being assigned male at birth, but identifying as even more male than your natural physiology would allow.”

He then put the question to me directly: “In a world in which we were truly free to express our gender identity, would you be able to get prescribed supraphysiological doses of testosterone to fix the persistent feeling that you were not manly enough?” 

Zander, like Mishima and Fussell, grew up weak and badly out of shape; his “transition”, which mirrors the one described by Mishima in his essay Sun and Steel, albeit with steroidal intervention, was an identity overhaul for him. It was, moreover, not something I understood, despite my years of lifting: I was a big kid, with a big father who had been a big-time athlete, and bigness and its attendant qualities, such as strength, was something I took as a given, until beginning to write about it decades later. I never had the experience, as California mass shooter Elliot Rodger wrote in his 2014 manifesto, of losing a trivial martial arts contest to a boy “who was so much physically stronger than me” that even “the deep anger inside me” couldn’t close the gap. It was, in other words, utterly alien to my own experience of masculinity, which I rarely considered; it was what it was, for good or ill.

Zander’s earnest discussion of this process, less artistic by far than Mishima’s analysis but equally heartfelt, calls to mind psychologist J. Michael Bailey’s treatment of “autogynephilic transsexuals” in his 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: “Autogynephilic transsexuals might declare attraction to men or women, to both, or to neither, but their primary attraction is to the women that they would become.” Could Zander and Mishima and all the others so obsessed with his idea of presenting the image of masculinity, indeed of hyper-masculinity, be “auto-androphiles” of some sort: individuals primarily attracted to the men they would become? 

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After 20 years of work in the strength and fitness world, I believe there is an important parallel to be drawn here. One often (but not always) finds that individuals making this sort of transition to hyper-masculinity are bitterly opposed to those going in the opposite direction — viciously critical of transgender females, in other words. Yet in their attraction to the men they want to become, there is a great deal of similarity: both are in love with the “hyper” aspect of their own mirror (or selfie)-reflected performances, whether it be hyper-masculinity or hyper-femininity.

Bodybuilders, from the anonymous model for the Farnese Hercules in the early third century AD, to ever-accelerating, the strongman Eugen Sandow in the early 20th century, have always shown off the fruits of their labour. But the technology of 2022 lets us go far beyond that, to admittedly unhealthy extremes. The narcissism of the present age is evident in an obsession with not just images but total control of the image. (Of course Mishima has become an icon: he stage-managed his own death.) Now cameras, filters and even AI art can take us even further; we are awash in self-love, on as many screens as possible.

Of course, wanting to be stronger is a reasonable goal: as strength coach Mark Rippetoe told me when I spoke to him, strength is preferable to weakness, even if “six-pack abdominals” matter little with regard to functional capacity. But when it crosses the line into disordered gender performance, it loses any such claim to utility. Even the old guard of ostensibly aesthetics-oriented bodybuilders recognise this. When I interviewed Frank Zane, perhaps the most aesthetically-minded bodybuilder of all time, he told me he had little use for selfies or heavily edited photography because they prevented the objective feedback that a picture simulating real-life conditions could provide. A man’s body, he told me, is a well-oiled machine — not a fantastically distorted ideal that one presents as standing in for something greater, but a functional construct that had to be seen up close and assessed in real life.

That level of what-you-see-is-what-you-get objective reality, not Mishima’s “ultimate reality” or the “hyper-masculinity” of the auto-androphile, served for Zane as the natural limit on aesthetic flights of fancy. It is a boundary, I think, that young men looking to build strong, healthy bodies would be well served to keep in mind.

***

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