It is a mystery that has exercised the greatest male minds of civilisation, from Sigmund Freud to the posters of Reddit: What does a woman want? There is, however, one radical option that none of them has ever thought to try: ask her.
Which is what evolutionary psychologist William Costello did, posting before-and-after photos of the singer Olly Murs, either side of a “12-week gym transformation”. In picture one, Murs has visible muscles but is a little on the chunky side — a classic “dad bod”, in the thirsty language of the internet. In picture two, he’s straight-up ripped, body fat stripped away and every muscle on show — a lean, honed Adonis at the pinnacle of his physical development.
And yet: almost four times as many women chose the “before” over the “after”. But nearly twice as many men chose the “after” over the “before”, and a lot of them seemed as baffled by the “feminine soul” as Freud ever was. The moment Costello’s post went mega-viral was when another user screen-grabbed the results and shared the image with the caption, “why are women lying about this? like what’s the actual cause?”
In other words: even when several women tell you outright what they want, some men simply can’t believe it. Women must be being dishonest, said aggrieved men in the replies — or if not that, then they must be deceived by lighting or repulsed by after-Olly’s tiny shorts or anything, anything rather than being authentically more attracted to a body that doesn’t look like you could break a nail on it.
The gods of the discourse are capricious, but the gods of the discourse must be served. Did I ever think I would have an opinion on the sex appeal of Murs, arguably the most inoffensive man in pop? I did not, and yet I nevertheless have an opinion: the before is hotter. “Before” looks solid. “Before” looks like he could pick up a few heavy things without fainting. “Before” looks like someone you could hang out and eat pizza with. “After” looks like someone whose only concern is when it’s time to eat his next egg white omelette.
A ripped physique is for sure impressive, if only because of the obsessive effort it takes to achieve it. But obsessive is not the same as attractive. Competitive bodybuilders alternate “cuts” (fat-loss programmes) with “bulks” (which involve taking on extra calories to build mass), meticulously timing the cycle to ensure that they hit the stage at the point of optimum body composition. In fact, it’s impossible to cut indefinitely: at some point, if you keep losing weight, you’ll start losing a noticeable amount of muscle.
Achieving the perfect look for flexing is too brutally restrictive to do for very long. As Murs’ wife Amelia (herself not exactly a slouch in the fitness stakes) commented on his Instagram: “So proud of you… does this mean we get to eat the same dinners again now?!” Which is funny and sweet, but also points to part of the problem with the super-lean male body from the female point of view: any man who attains it isn’t going to have much attention left over for you after he’s given his all to meal prep. Women, on the whole, are looking for relationship material, and relationship material has time for you.
A woman doesn’t need to know anything about the quest for macros to know what she likes, though. All she has to know is that a man with a reasonable proportion of body fat — not obese, but with a little in reserve — looks healthy, at ease in himself and capable. The evolutionary explanation might involve something about a well-fed man looking like a reliable provider. Maybe part of the reason after-Murs is off-putting to most women is that they can see he’s effectively starving.
The bigger questions are why men can’t take a woman at her word — and why men themselves should be so attached to a wrong opinion about what constitutes an ideal body. Now, I’m not accusing the men of lying about what they like. That would be unnecessary. But I am fascinated by the lengths men will go to in order to acquire a physique that most women find a comprehensive turnoff.
Out in the incel wilds, men discuss the mythical “Gigachad”: a man so humungously swole (and charming and confident, but mostly swole) that he’s irresistible to women. In the sexual theology of the manosphere, the Gigachad is the counterpart to the female Gigastacy — meaning he has exclusive access to the most attractive women. Young men in forums sincerely discuss how they can achieve Gigachaddom, swapping tips on achieving calorie deficit while hitting protein goals in order to achieve that elusive washboard stomach.
The longer you spend reading those forums, though, the more obvious it becomes that the primary audience these men have in mind isn’t female at all. The meticulous dissection of delts, lats and abdominals (and even more importantly, the display of delts, lats and abdominals for the purposes of feedback) is for each other. This is a subculture of men looking at men, and projecting their preferences onto women. If it wasn’t for that last part, the supposed hotbed of frustrated heterosexuality would actually look pretty gay.
“The primary audience these men have in mind isn’t female at all.”
Gymmaxxing, as the incels call it, is not politically neutral. It’s Right-coded — so much so that when The New York Times recently profiled streamer Hasan Piker, a socialist who also (gasp) lifts weights, the headline described him as “a progressive mind in a MAGA body”. On the face of it, this is ludicrous, not least because no one who’s seen a MAGA rally is likely to confuse it with Mr Universe. But it is true all the same that the subcultures that are most concerned with traditional masculinity are also the most concerned with the arduous maintenance of a masculine aesthetic, however much they might deny that “masculine” and “aesthetic” belong in the same sentence.
If you want to get not merely ripped but really big, it takes more than diet and exercise. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, adheres to an “anti-ageing” testosterone regimen that has enabled him to stay unnervingly hench into his seventies: “its most obvious effects,” wrote Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic, “look a lot like juicing.” Podcasting king Joe Rogan has similarly described taking testosterone replacement therapy, and in both cases there’s a squeamish insistence on a health alibi for an appearance intervention that is not unlike me insisting I want Botox to cure my headaches rather than to fix my wrinkles.
But because masculinity is, supposedly, natural, admitting to taking hormones can seem high stakes. Which is how the fitness influencer known as the Liver King ended up, ludicrously, pretending that his gains were all down to a “primal” diet of organ meat. Even though he had a chest like two basketballs and the tell-tale corned beef complexion of the steroid user — neither of which, it should be noted, are considered particularly desirable by women. Nonetheless, he had a dedicated following of men who bought his supplements in the hope of looking more like him.
One reason for the coyness about steroids is to protect the idea that the ripped body is the product of concerted labour. No shortcuts. To the male gaze, it’s a good thing that the ripped body looks like hard work: it suggests effort that deserves reward, in the form of female attention. Meanwhile, there’s often a distaste for the effort women have to put into hotness maintenance: according to incel lore, Gigastacys can work out, but they don’t need to. Girls aren’t meant to sweat, just to be perfect objects without trying.
Men’s taste in men has nothing to do with what women want. The masculine dream of the ultimate six-pack isn’t about getting the chicks. It’s a fantasy of marble perfection: no softness, no flab. It’s also a cope: if you can convince yourself that women will only fall for the most extreme physique, you’ve already explained away your own sexual failures. Meanwhile, women will carry on preferring the man who looks like he can both flip a tyre and eat a biscuit without having a panic attack. Despite what Freud thought, women really are pretty basic.
