There was something titillatingly horrible about a gigantic woman for Fifties audiences. If King Kong had tapped into America’s racial angst, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was about fear of the uncontrollable woman. The film came out at the high-water mark of the American nuclear family, but the gender settlement was more fragile than it appeared. The same women being urged to smilingly embrace the apron had, not very long ago, been encouraged to pull on overalls in support of the WW2 effort.

Not all of them were happy about the return to domesticity: in 1963, Betty Friedan would formalise this simmering discontent in The Feminine Mystique. Before that, though, Nancy Archer was the problem that had no name personified at superhuman scale. For men, she was a warning about what could happen if you let the women run out of control; for women, she was a threat. “Once a normally voluptuous woman”, says the trailer, Nancy grows “incredibly huge with incredible desires for love and vengeance”. Get too needy, take up too much space, and you too could become “the most grotesque monstrosity of all”.

Size is a feminine phobia: in the kitchen cupboard of my family home, there was a jumble sale copy of a diet book that promised to “trim away unwanted inches” if you followed its directions. On the back pages, there was a helpful set of tables to record your measurements — so, in theory, you could track your glorious shrinking. A previous owner had filled out the first column, and every time I looked at it, I imagined the lonely self-reproach of this unknown woman and her tape measure, taking the circumference of each thigh, knowing that whatever the number, it would be too big.

But the other side of that phobia is a fantasy where impossible stature translates into impossible power. The fact of women’s size relative to men is what makes us vulnerable: what would it mean to be so huge you were untouchable? Which is the question brilliantly asked by the film Love Lies Bleeding, directed by Rose Glass. Set in the world of Eighties bodybuilding, it’s about an intense, obsessive relationship between two women: Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, and Katy O’Brian as body builder Jackie who blows in from out of town.

Jackie’s size and strength makes her seem freakish to other people. One of Lou’s sometime-lovers refers derisively to Jackie as “that big girl”. But big is what Lou likes about Jackie, and she introduces her to steroids to help her get even bigger. The doping turns Jackie into “the most grotesque monstrosity of all”. Ripped and ’roided, she is capable of murdering a man with her bare hands. The film drops us inside of her burgeoning drug-induced psychosis, first subtly, by showing her muscles popping and rippling superhumanly; then more fantastically, till the film ends in an all-out homage to Nancy Archer.

But Attack of the 50 Foot Woman had to end with Nancy put in her place: avenged on her cheating husband, yes, but also dead herself. Love Lies Bleeding lets its women have their gargantuan proportions and their revenge on scummy men, without needing to punish them for it. In Glass’s movie, there’s still something deliciously freakish about women who choose size over slightness, but the audience is no longer expected to root for their destruction. In the two generations since the Fifties, “female desire” has ceased to be seen in strictly pathological terms.

It’s not the first time the 50 Foot Woman has been rewritten as a heroine — PJ Harvey’s song “50ft Queenie” is written from the perspective of the giant woman, and has her glorying in her own size. “Come on and measure me,” she commands, and the figures go up through the verses. Here, bigger is better. In 1993, the same year that song came out, the experimental novelist Kathy Acker published an essay called “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body” about her own real-life efforts at hypertrophy.

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Acker was a bodybuilder, and had been for about 10 years when she wrote “Against Language”, making her part of the same cohort as Jackie and Lou. Acker describes the discipline like this:

“Muscles will grow only if they are, not exercised or moved, but actually broken down. The general law behind bodybuilding is that muscle, if broken down in a controlled fashion and then provided with the proper growth factors such as nutrients and rest, will grow back larger than before. In order to break down specific areas of muscles, whatever areas one wants to enlarge, it is necessary to work these areas in isolation up to failure.”

This is painful, purposeful work in pursuit of the exact thing the diet book told me to strive against: size. The strict body builder does not live a freer life than the fanatical reducer. As Love Lies Bleeding shows in its relentless montages of egg white omelettes being assembled, achieving a competition-standard physique demands the strictest physical discipline. But the bodybuilder — the big girl — represents a different kind of ideal, one that rejects the ostentatious display of waifish fragility as a status symbol.

It took me decades to go from a fascinated interest in the process Acker writes about, to participating in it myself. Entering the weights room meant breaking two of the taboos that lay heaviest on me: firstly, it meant crossing the invisible gender line around the squat racks and moving into traditionally masculine territory; secondly, it meant overcoming a deep horror of getting big. All my interest in exercise up to that point had been motivated by a desire to shrink myself by torching calories — the voice of the diet book absorbed into my own internal monologue. When I finally came to weights, it was only because I needed to remedy my injuries from running, and I had to reassure myself that female genetics meant I was very unlikely to get big before I felt OK about learning to handle a barbell.

But having overcome that fear, today I find that I am very interested indeed in getting big. It pleases me to see my muscles grow, and to know that this is a consequence of work I’ve done. I’ve got a friend who thinks of bodybuilding as the epitome of individualistic self-improvement, and maybe he’s got a point, but I think of my own strength work differently.  My body, which I experienced as a disappointment for most of my adult life, turns out to be a perfectly adapted organism when I use it this way.

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And I’m no longer an outlier as a woman in the weights section. The shift in beauty standards, from size zero to Kardashian curves, pushed many women towards bodybuilding as a way of developing the figure they want: if you want a bigger bum, the only way to achieve that without surgery is to build your glutes. A few years ago, I interviewed the author of that diet book (she was lovely, so I feel bad naming her as one of the origins of my neuroses), and asked her about the rise of the butt. She looked simply perplexed by it. She understood that this was what women now wanted, but for someone raised in — and indelibly associated with — the cult of small, it was hard to comprehend.

Still, things have not changed so much. The standards may have shifted, but they have not been destroyed. Bodybuilding for women no longer has the countercultural significance it had for Acker. She saw it as an escape from language into pre-verbal physicality; look around the gym, and you’ll see most exercisers (including me) are skimming Instagram between sets. The big girl is still trapped inside beauty culture, however much she tries to flex her way out of it; still thinking about what her body signifies.

Efforts to theorise the meanings of women’s bodies can be irksome, and the implications of changing trends often contradictory. In her book All the Rage, Virginia Nicholson points out that, while the demise of the rigid corset maps neatly onto the establishment of political freedoms for women, the loose-fitting, limb-baring styles of the Twenties may well have felt more exposing than emancipatory for women. Rising hemlines and less restrictive foundation garments put the body itself on display and under scrutiny, and drove the preference for lean, lithe figures that dominated the 20th century. Gamine silhouettes were associated with freedom, but squint a little and they could look like backlash.

The same goes for the embrace of big. It’s a personal relief to be free of the anxiety to stay tiny, but the pressure to be the correct shape can just mean swapping one set of fixations for another. The fantasy of freedom through strength is, for women, never going to be wholly realised: a strong woman is still weaker than an average man. In the fiction of Love Lies Bleeding, it’s plausible that Jackie can demolish abusive men with her bare fists because we’ve been tipped off that this is part-fantasy. And anyway, without the fantastical element, the revenge she takes would simply be swapping one kind of tyranny for another.

If the pleasure of Love Lies Bleeding is in its hypertrophied excess, for me the pleasure of getting big is in something closer to Acker’s description of the bodybuilding process: the intimacy it creates with failure. To grow strong is to be continually confronted with the fact of your own weakness. Which is as good a metaphor as any for political work women have done to get from the Fifties that made a monster of Nancy Archer, to the present day where supersized Lou and Jackie can be creatures of wonder and desire.

In The Seven Ages of Man: How to Live a Meaningful Life, James Innes-Smith writes that “Today, masculinity itself has come under attack, relentlessly maligned in the media”. The book glances wistfully back to an era of sturdy men and sturdier moral certainties, a time when gender roles were more clearly defined.

The 20th century was characterised by a surfeit of meaning. Everyone from Bolsheviks to National Socialists to Cold War liberals had a clear and discernible idea of what a good and fruitful life entailed. All were willing to spill blood (usually other people’s) to bring that vision to life. Yet barely three decades after the official termination of the conflict between East and West, we are awash with angsty books admonishing us (and by us I mean men) to “quell our deeper yearnings”, as Innes-Smith puts it. Bursting from every self-help bookshelf one now finds the gruff, rugged-bearded traditionalist rallying men to eschew materialism and seek out what Innes-Smith calls “deeper truths”.

The book guides us didactically through what he describes as the “seven ages” of man. These are childhood, adolescence, relationships and parenthood, work and providing, middle age, old age, death and legacy. The taut compartmentalisation of life is a giveaway in terms of the author’s broader moral outlook: a man’s life should be defined by “fundamental truths”. The author believes his interpretation of the good life — marriage, discipline, deferred gratification, strict child rearing, age-appropriate dress codes — is a universal one, which when you think about it is quite a large claim for a journalist to make.

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This is unusual for a British author too, for it tends to be American readers who seek out guidance in everyday matters (the self-improvement industry in the US was worth $10 billion in 2016). But Innes-Smith forges ahead in the guise of the sagacious older male, proffering advice on every topic under the sun. Deep fulfilment in his moral universe is derived from putting oneself at the service of others. And getting married. The author is extremely keen on men getting hitched; younger readers are encouraged to settle down as soon as possible (he even marshals the claim, which worked to frighten me at least, that middle age begins at 35!).

Like other moralists Innes-Smith is keen to let you know that “recreational copulation soon loses its appeal”. This recalls something once said about Malcolm Muggeridge: that he was against everything he had grown tired of doing himself. Innes-Smith similarly counsels young men to abstain from sex for 12 months during the quest for a spouse and in the process to avoid the “pouting sirens” who are “fighting for your attention on every street corner”.

We’ve heard some of this sort of thing before. It is 30 years since Robert Bly published Iron John, an earnest Jungian treatise encouraging men to go off into the woods with other men and get in touch with their wild nature. Bly interpreted the allegorical fairytale of Iron John as a call for men to locate within themselves the “deep male” — and with it to reassert patriarchal authority. “Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community,” wrote Bly. Women’s role was to submit to this “energy”, with their reward coming later on in the bedroom.

Yet the earnestness of Bly’s endeavour set it up for mockery. Martin Amis (who might have been writing about Jordan Peterson) remarked on Bly’s “impregnable humourlessness”. His fellow poet Charles Upton described Iron John as “utterly devoid of irony”. Ploughing through Innes-Smith’s short book (it is just 198 pages long) I too found it hard not to snigger as earnest prescriptions on erectile disfunction, strict portion control, and how to wear flat-fronted trousers rolled off the authorial pen.

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But he’s right that men are in a pickle. The #MeToo movement, the decline of marriage and traditional forms of masculine work, as well as “gender fluidity” — all have discombobulated the contemporary male. In one ear we hear feminist complaints about gender pay gaps, toxic masculinity and the predatory sexuality of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. In the other, we pick up grumbles from female contemporaries about the lack of “real men” amid the conformity and sterility of the commute and the office nine to five.

Male discomfiture is increasingly audible today on YouTube, where Bly’s ideological descendants mix Spartan asceticism with entrepreneurial uplift. It is traditionalism with a softer edge, in which self-development, stoicism, pseudo-scientific “life hacks”, and tips for developing rippling musculature sit alongside a new-age willingness to talk about feelings and vulnerability.

Deeper down this rabbit hole are the “neo-patriarchs” of the manosphere. These self-proclaimed alpha males rage against society’s feminisation of “soys” and “betas”. Covid-19 denial is rampant in the manosphere, where face masks are viewed as synonymous with emasculation and enfeeblement. Academics who recently surveyed nearly 2,500 American adults found that many men considered them “shameful, not cool and a sign of weakness”. This attitude — part insecurity, part bombast — goes to the very top. When the Trump White House announced in October that the President had “defeated” Covid-19, it was difficult not to read into it the corollary — that those succumbing to the virus were somehow being cast as weak and inferior.

Innes-Smith’s book also offers a more benign set of prescriptions for masculinity in the 21st century, though he does enjoy summoning the odd penis-shrivelling vision of a world in which men are “pacified, submissive and emasculated”. Most of the book is given over to encouraging readers to improve themselves through rigorous exercise and the imbibing of higher knowledge derived from authors such as Dostoevsky. Though readers are sternly warned to avoid popular culture where “pornography and funny animal videos” are corrupting young minds and where “triviality is the order of the day” (presumably those “pouting sirens” again).

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The author is right to flag the uncertainty that surrounds the role of the traditional male breadwinner in the 21st century, especially among the working class, where identity has historically been wedded to productivity. Moreover, women show markedly less interest in pairing off with men who occupy a lowly position on the status hierarchy, compounding the misery for working-class men. The result is a growing mass of resentful, low-status men who are forming angry online subcultures that come marinated in misogyny and bile. Suicide rates among males are at record highs.

Nor should it be taboo to say that boys require male as well as female role models. This needn’t be about demonising single mothers; however we should perhaps look more judgmentally — a deeply unfashionable word these days — upon those weak and selfish men who refuse to take responsibility for the lives they bring into the world.

Innes-Smith wants men to find deeper meaning in the universe. Yet like so much of the Calvinist-inspired self-improvement oeuvre, this unrelenting search for betterment — the author fixates on “discipline”, “meaningful tasks” and “true fulfilment” — conflates suffering with a higher morality. He urges readers to cycle to work in a downpour. He warns against giving children access to computer games that provide “instant fun” and are thus “addling young men’s minds”. But where is the virtue in contracting pneumonia? And while there is something to be said for moderation in all matters, computer games have been shown in numerous studies to be beneficial for cognition.

I ought to confess that I spent most of my own youth railing against this broad-shouldered, unyielding masculinity. Innes-Smith is the type (because he says so) who believes you can “tell a lot about a man by the way he behaves on a sports field”. Which is to say he would not have thought much of me: one of my school reports contains five solitary words appraising my desultory performance in the sporting arena: “Not seen on the pitch!” Sloping off behind the bike shed for a fag – rather than putting my scrawny frame through a brutal pasting on the rugby pitch — may have been a moral failing yet somehow I don’t quite believe it.

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It’s not that I view physical prowess as an irredeemable expression of “toxic masculinity”, as some contemporary feminist authors appear to. It’s more a question of everybody being different. Indeed, I’m pleased to discover that my first conscious political belief — a bastardisation of the harm principle: you should leave a person well alone unless they’re hurting you in some way — remains the most enduring one a quarter of a century later.

But invariably this works both ways. If you believe — and the overwhelming evidence suggests this — that gender is a product of nature as well as nurture, then reframing every male pursuit as toxic will surely have a detrimental effect on young minds. Amid rising levels of involuntary celibacy, pretending that going to the gym and increasing one’s social standing will do nothing to improve a young man’s chances of finding a mate does him a horrible disservice. And I suspect there is something to be said for stoicism, courage and risk-taking over the narcissistic emoting that prevails among today’s ultra-woke.

However, I doubt younger readers will recognise Innes-Smith’s gloomy depiction of contemporary Britain as a “broken society [that] is crying out for a return to meaning and an appreciation of… deep, life affirming truths”. Not because alienation, frustration and malaise don’t exist. But the author’s impression is too bleak and his prescriptions too rigid.

There is an abundance of potential paths to the good life for men. Some involve ancient traditions, “new warrior training”, marriage by 35, flat-fronted trousers and restorative sex once a week in the missionary position. But other paths will — and really ought to — feature self-criticism, openness, adaptability and gender fluidity. Some may even have sparkly outfits and fluffy unicorns. Though we should expect this sort of thing to bring out a steely grimace in the deep male, who would prefer us to be rigging up a tent and marching off into the woods to do some yodelling.