‘Fit is the new rich’: male embodiment in the age of austerity

Investing in the perfect body is hard work and very little play

In July 2014, cultural commentator Mark Simpson coined the term ‘spornosexual’ to signify a new articulation of masculinity that had begun emerging across different locations within contemporary culture. A portmanteau of sportsman and porn star, a spornosexual is a young man who attempts to fashion a spectacularly muscular body in order to share images of it on social networking sites. Simpson elaborates:

with their painstakingly pumped and chiselled bodies, muscle-enhancing tattoos, piercings, adorable beards and plunging necklines it’s eye-catchingly clear that second-generation metrosexuality is less about clothes than it was for the first. Eagerly self-objectifying, second generation metrosexuality is totally tarty. Their own bodies (more than clobber and product) have become the ultimate accessories, fashioning them at the gym into a hot commodity - one that they share and compare in an online marketplace.¹

Simpson, who popularised the term ‘metrosexual’ in the 1990s, wrote this article at the peak of a much longer period during which many young British men started to go to the gym for the purposes of appearance (as opposed to fitness or health) -and at a time when they were also producing and sharing on social media images of their bodies that drew on the visual tropes of pornography and glossy magazine shoots. This can be evidenced in a number of ways. The most significant indicator of the rise of these practices comes from data produced by the Active People Survey in 2014, which measures weekly sports participation in the UK and is carried out by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Beginning in 2006, this annual survey of approximately 200,000 people found a substantial year-on-year increase in the number of 16–25 year old men going to the gym: in 2006 14.7 per cent of this group went to the gym at least once a week; by 2013 this figure had increased to 21 per cent. This was one of the largest increases in any demographic segment doing any type of sport. A year later, market research company Nielsen found that sales of sports nutrition products that are designed to ‘strip’ body fat and build muscle had increased by 40 per cent in Britain’s ten largest supermarkets. This was the second largest growth in sales of any product sold in supermarkets in that year.

This substantial increase in young men attempting to fashion muscular bodies at the gym is paralleled by the sorts of media that this social group is both consuming and producing. In 2009 the men’s gym and fitness magazine Men’s Health became the best-selling title in the British men’s magazine market, and it now sells nearly twice as many print copies as its nearest competitor - the well-established GQ. It is gaining market share at a time when overall magazine circulation is dramatically decreasing. In terms of digital media, the word ‘selfie’ was named the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013. The term ‘healthie’ was coined around the same time to signify a fitness-related selfie. At the time of writing a substantial number of ‘healthies’ have aggregated around the following hashtags on popular social networking site Instagram: #fitness (91,612,347), #fitfam (26,221,853), #fitspo (21,488,398) and #muscle (12,628,642). Many of these are faintly sexualised images of men displaying their (semi-) nude bodies.

What does it tell us about the current historical moment that this particular set of cultural practices - men both fashioning muscular bodies and sharing images of them on social networking sites - has significantly risen in popularity? In this article I argue that their emergence points to reconfigurations of power that have been occurring in Britain during this period of continued neoliberal austerity. For some time now, but especially since 2008, young men’s traditional breadwinning capacities have been eroded, and as a result many have begun to deploy a strategy of value-creation historically associated with less privileged groups - namely, body...