The fitness industry serves the meat industry
The fitness industry walks hand in hand with animal exploitation. Not only does being heavily muscled increase your chances of dying prematurely, but in doing so, you contribute to animal suffering.
Women want more than just a body
If men want to be muscular, it’s because they want to please women. What they often ignore is that women prefer a man of character over a man pumped with hormones. Men project their relationship with their bodies onto women: since physique is important for men, they think it occupies the same place in women’s minds. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the most anthropological level, a woman desires a man who is there for her, emotionally and physically. This dedication has disappeared today because we have entered an era of body consumption: people collect love affairs for pure pleasure, forgetting along the way the sacredness of sexuality and its primary function, namely reproduction.
Cheap men
The new generation has been raised by armies of single mothers who did not have the ability to provide a paternal figure for their offspring. They therefore turned to television figures: Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger… These same fatherless children now cling to equally muscular and masculinist caricatures: Andrew Tate, etc. When families were still the social norm and everyone had a father, masculinity did not take such superficial and toxic forms. A man in the old days was someone who kept his word, who worked hard for his family, who was unwaveringly loyal, who was a pillar to rely on. A man brings serenity and comfort. He is not the one who looks at himself in the mirror 50 times a day, who stresses because he will be late to have his protein shake. Youth has grown up with the image that being masculine means being violent, having a harem of women, and owning 10 Lamborghinis. As always, the truth lies at the intersection of two examples: the true man is neither a sultan nor an androgynous being. He is someone who possesses positive traits and is not there to harm women.
The Greek male model
The ancient Greeks understood almost everything. Being a citizen in ancient times meant being someone capable of defending the city. Greek citizens are above all warriors. Death always looms in the ancient world and one must be ready to sacrifice one’s life to protect one’s own. For a better ethical and warrior efficiency, sexuality must be a matter of necessity and not pleasure. A citizen who indulges in sensory pleasures becomes indolent and ultimately useless for the city. This trait distinguishes them from the Romans whose patrician elite gradually abandoned their moral and warrior duties to bask in luxury, prophesying the future fall of Rome. Being a man in the Greek model meant being like a lion or a bull, that is, a being with all his vitality. Vitality implies a certain restraint, notably the non-wastage of one’s masculine seed, synonymous with aggressiveness and prowess on the battlefield.
Philotimo
Greek men had to prioritize the love of honor (philotimo) above all else while cultivating other forms of love (agape, storge, eros, and philia). It is through his heart that a man is defined above all. A man with a heart is a courageous man, the main virtue of masculinity.
Being a man is having heart
What characterizes a man above all is his courage, that is, to overcome adversity through the will he deploys and the extra soul that allows him to achieve the impossible. A man is above all an inner reality. It is through the qualities of the soul that a man distinguishes himself and not through his appearances. Of course, strength of character can manifest itself through musculature or an athletic body. However, this is actually only the tip of the iceberg because what makes a man masculine are primarily qualities invisible to all but which nevertheless leave clues here and there like marks of generosity, sacrifice, or firmness.
Drawing inspiration from the samurais
If men partly need to prove their masculinity today, it is because fortunately – almost – they no longer need to do so on the battlefields. What concerns us is perhaps how people react to this absence of combat. Today, men work out to reassure themselves that they are still virile. In the past, especially during the peace period in Japan, the samurais codified the ethics of bushido, that is, the way of the warrior. It is because the samurais were no longer called upon to fight that they had to think and sublimate the ethics of the warrior. Bushido is a philosophy that aimed to maintain the martial spirit in a peaceful world. If today, the majority of men have a superficial vision of masculinity, centuries ago, bushido offered a much more beautiful and subtle answer to this quest for virility in a pacified world.
Bushido as a solution to a timeless and universal problem (especially modern, that of maintaining one’s virility in a peaceful world)
While everyone aspires to peace, men have a need to live and express their masculinity, which itself is nourished by a martial relationship with the world. There is an apparent contradiction. While, of course, we want both an appearance of virility and a peaceful world, there is a conflict of interests because ostentatious virility is built through war. Now, if the definition of being a man were primarily linked to virtue, this approach would allow the coexistence of peace and masculinity. Let us consider together the martial and moral virtues advocated by bushido:
- Rectitude and spirit of justice (meiyo)
- Honor (gi)
- Courage (yu)
- Benevolence, generosity (jin)
- Respect (rei)
- Honesty (makoto)
- Loyalty, fidelity (chugo)
Each of these values, although seemingly innocuous, is actually very difficult to maintain (we all have them at birth but our environment corrupts us). They are the epitome of inner masculinity but they leave clues through our behavior.
