The trouble is, none of this is about fitness. It is far from inclusive to mainstream men. Instead, it's a sort of aesthetic hyper-masculinity for a select few who can achieve it.
Like the fictional thigh-gapped, 50kg Insta-woman, the ideal male of today (as per the internet) is 100kg with the chest of Henry Cavill (aka Superman) but only a 30-inch waist. He has "thick" thighs and glutes like a rugby player, bicep veins that can only be achieved through dehydration, and an impossibly flat stomach complete with "V" shape hips.
There are some genetically-blessed men out there who genuinely look like this when they've found their light and angles for the camera. He is technically real. But is he really helping other men join the fit fam? No way. He's telling other men that there's a virtual boys' club that they'll never be part of.
And while this ideal man is real (although rare), he has likely been digitally enhanced too – for further inaccessibility. Long have women been aware of the Kardashian/Facetune epidemic, whereby people alter their bodies – to create smaller waists and bigger booties – to post online. The men in the fit fam are quietly doing this too. They're photoshopping their chests and shoulders to look wider, their thighs to look distended, and their abs to look more carved out. The only way you can really recognise this is when said subtle tuning goes awry, and the background (or other people in the picture) are slightly warped; giving away the illusion.
Men can try and pledge their allegiance through hashtaggable concepts like #swole and #gymlife, but they will fail. Once they've closed the apps, these guys will feel like they're not fit enough or big enough. They will be left with the impression others can achieve something they cannot, because those hashtags don't follow through to their mirror.
I fell into this trap in 2018 during my year on Instagram. I actually do have the somewhat sizeable chest and the small waist, so I'd post shirtless selfies online in a bid to join this ultrafit family of men. Yet when I looked at my photos, I still felt "less than" the other guys. I felt too skinny and too small. I was a perfect candidate for the fit fam and I still didn't feel part of it.
I learned (only after leaving the social network) that most of the men's bodies I admired had been Facetuned. I had probably attained the ideal male body but didn't realise it, because I wasn't altering my photos to plumped-up perfection. I was thus too focused on what I hadn't achieved.
That's the only guaranteed way 99.9 per cent of men can join this allusive fit fam – subtle enhancement via some $6.99 image manipulation software. Done well, it is not obvious enough to be fake. It creates an illusion of being acceptable to a mythical "fitness" family, which is actually nothing to do with health and fitness and everything to do with aesthetic vanity.
Still, even now, I struggle to recognise that the men's bodies I see online aren't entirely achievable. This is what technology has done to us. It has confused us into a state whereby we can't tell what's what anymore, so we just keep fighting to keep up in hopes of being accepted. I'm no longer chasing membership to the fit fam, yet residual body image issues remain. In a society ever-consumed by life on the internet, I wonder, what's a boy to do?
