Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

This essay is a follow-up to my previous essay Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic

Sabrina Carpenter

If, as I stated previously, modern masculinity means rejecting anything feminine in the self, what then is modern femininity? This matters as women’s appearances have come in for renewed criticism. Louis Theroux, in Inside the Manosphere, followed several men whose male reinforcement routines involve obsessive exercise and bodybuilding, making their bodies huge and brawny. Simultaneously, we’ve witnessed the recent rise in demand for feminine smallness.

Smarter critics than me have commented upon the rise in Ozempic bodies. Celebrity women who once tied their public personas to their larger frames, like Amy Schumer and Adele, recently lost weight so rapidly that it’s essentially impossible without synthetic pharmaceuticals. Large women gaining small bodies requires expensive drugs and full-time exercise routines, so it’s obviously impractical for most women. Yet it’s widespread enough recently to appear normative.

Some time ago, I read an essay—now lost—critiquing gender roles in “romantasy” fiction. The author noted a recurrent theme she called “size gaps,” presented as almost equally reprehensible as age gaps. Many romantasy novels feature hulking, muscular leading men, basically walking slabs of uncooked steak. Their leading women are dainty flowers, maybe skilled swordswomen, but usually small enough to ride piggyback on their lovers’ shoulders.

This underlines part of my problem: we define gender in our society oppositionally. Men are large, tall, and muscular; women are small, slight, and shouldn’t have muscles. Standards of feminine beauty have changed little since 1925, when Lewis & Young praised a woman for being “five foot two, eyes of blue.” A century later, feminine beauty icon Sabrina Carpenter (five foot zero) omitted trousers from a custom Louis Vuitton suit, specifically because of her height.

Not to criticize Carpenter personally; she had no more control over her height than I had over becoming exceptionally tall. But her social icon role, beautiful and sexy but not necessarily for men, includes her body type: short, buxom, with large facial features. We see similar behavior from other women who sway cultural standards. Lizzo, Melissa McCarthy, and Kathy Bates, all celebrated large women, recently lost weight with GLP-1 drugs.

Criticizing Hollywood bodies is nothing new. Women on camera have long been expected to maintain teenage proportions well into adulthood, a standard only possible for those who can afford personal assistants and pricy gym regimens. But the recent rise in waif-like women, coupled with the concomitant visibility of ox-like men, reflects a brutal reality: men must not look like women. And women must not look like men.

Braden Peters

Such attitudes have very real consequences. One of the best actors I ever shared the stage with, a beautiful woman with dynamic range and powerful singing chops, also stood over six feet tall. This made her too tall to gaze up soulfully into most men’s eyes, which precluded her from substantial roles. She bounced through some insulting comic relief roles that reduced her to a function of her unusual height, before leaving the industry altogether.

Switching genders, I see the culmination of this trend in the male “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, stage name Clavicular. Peters put himself through grotesque paces to achieve his appearance goals: drug injections, day-long bodybuilding runs, even beating himself with a hammer to maximize his jawline. The regimen has arguably worked, because he looks like an exaggerated caricature of a midcentury Hollywood leading man.

But he’s achieved his goals at a catastrophic price. By his own admission, Peters began injecting himself with synthetic testosterone supplements at age 14 to hasten adult characteristics. Within five years, he’d consumed so much fake testosterone that his body stopped producing the natural stuff. In essence, Clavicular chemically castrated himself. He maintains the external appearance of a sexy man, but his (ahem) primary sexual characteristic no longer works.

Sabrina Carpenter and Braden Peters are opposite sides of the same coin, and I do mean opposite. If women are shorter than men, then Carpenter’s exceptionally slight height becomes aspirational. If men are harder-featured then women, then Peters literally beating his face with a hammer to maximize his jawline becomes an acceptable price. Influencers define both binary genders by looking as little as possible like the other.

I’m using external appearance, like height and build, as metaphors here. The problem is much more pervasive. As American society generally becomes more accepting of alternate gender presentations, our cultural gatekeepers have become even more rigid and restrictive. This is still currently a fringe issue, mercifully. But then, so was the alt-right, until it conquered the government. Left untended, these positions risk becoming mainstream.