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1 1 The Nature of Body Panic Culture Image and Popular Culture A quick stroll past any newsstand will reveal a plethora of magazines devoted to health and fitness. “Healthy,” “fit” bodies are draped across covers. Serving as advertisements, cover models beckon, enticing readers. Take a closer look. Choose a magazine. Pick it up, and your eyes will undoubtedly peruse the finely tuned form on the cover, communicating the meaning of the words “health” and “fitness,” singing it to you through rippling muscles. As if they could speak to you, cover models ’ eyes look back at you with pride. “Hard work,” you hear the implied whisper. All of you can do it. The uniformity of bodily appearances that stretches down the wall of magazines stands in silent, sharp contrast to the cavalcade of bodies in all shapes and sizes moving past the bustling newsstands along such streets as 42nd Street in New York City or on the Third Street promenade in Santa Monica, California. Invariably, men’s health and fitness magazines feature an athletic man posing in a tank top, or shirtless. Usually he is white, has a “healthy” tan, and his vascular, cut form implies the successful engagement in and cumulative repetition of a variety of bodily practices. Bulging biceps, defined broad shoulders with rippling striations, cut six- or eight-pack abs, and wide, pumped chests merge into a singular ideal. Nearby, a second character awaits. Women’s health and fitness magazine covers “flesh out” this being in detail. She is “perky” and inviting with a coy smile, she leans, lilts or languishes, displaying a lean, tight, compact body beneath monochromatic smooth skin, in tight, revealing clothing. Frequently she wears a bikini. Also usually white, she is tight and toned, but lacks visible rips or cuts. Her muscles are long and lean, and certainly not “too big,” while her body possesses a subtle dose of curvaceousness. The differences between the two bodies are striking. Big. Little. Wide. Narrow. Bursting. Contained. Massive. Toned. Gender seems to permeate 2 The Nature of Body Panic Culture every aspect of bodily presentation. But look again and think about it. Complex social and contextual factors get us here, to these images. Ideologies of gender difference, the exacerbation of a “culture of lack” where consumer capitalism steps in to improve you, the reality of changing gender norms in postindustrial society, a wave of women who “made it” into sport, fitness, work, and the military—only to be remade out of the office, gym, or playing fields. The images reveal men experiencing a loss of certainty around gender norms, a cultural resurgence in the importance of sport for making boys into men, new emphases on the large male body in what some call a “crisis of masculinity” (Gillett and White 1992). And, for (some) women, challenging traditional gender norms of inferiority through sports and fitness has marked the new millennium. These forces are redefining idealized bodies and are making and naming the boundaries of difference. Like a siren’s song, the viewer is drawn in, not noticing what lies beyond. We began this project ten years ago as graduate students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and we are now both professors —in San Francisco (Shari) and Los Angeles, California (Faye). Endless sit-ups and bench presses aside, we were workout wonders and publication partners, perusing health and fitness magazines for workout tips, noticing what we thought was an acritically produced trend: the silent trope that we call the conflation of “health” with the maintenance of narrowly defined gendered bodily ideals. Students in our classrooms noted contemporary trends when they raised their hands to earnestly tell us, “It is healthy, right, to not have any extra fat, you know . . . extra . . . stuff . . . on you? Isn’t that . . . well . . . unhealthy?” Others told us about their gendered plights on treadmills or the stairmaster: “You know,” the women told us, “you’re not supposed to have anything that’s jiggling nowadays.” Some of our colleagues even added their own observations: had we noticed that women and men in the gym are changing roles? “The men are looking in the gym mirror and grabbing their extra body fat much more than the women, so . . . what’s up with that?” We hadn’t even put our ideas together yet, nor a book contract, and the mantras were there: The current cultural choices in the terrain seemed to be dichotomized around jiggly and disgusting, or firm and unable to detect...

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