Do You Even Lift, Bro?: (Re)Capacitating the White Male Body

Abstract

In one of the top upvoted posts on the now quarantined reddit forum r/TheRedPill, a user named u/unrealenting summarized the significance of weight lifting to the recuperation of masculinity:

Throughout parts of the so-called manosphere, there is a tacit consensus that “lifting” is necessary for men to achieve self-confidence, sex appeal, and ultimately “alpha male” status. As this passage illustrates, lifting is more than a personal achievement, it helps reacquaint men with a primordial past in which muscles and aggression guaranteed survival. Thus, the mere sight of muscle is thought to activate somatic impulses that override the effects of socialization to unlock women's primal desires and command the respect of lesser men. According to the top posts archived on the controversial subreddit, there is virtually no problem lifting cannot solve. Do you want to attract the attention of women? Lift. Do you want the respect of your colleagues? Lift. Tired of being emasculated by a progressive “feminist” culture? Lift.

On forums such as r/TheRedPill, men routinely debate, share tips, and trade stories about the transformative power of weight-lifting. According to subreddit's glossary, “lifting refers to hitting the gym on a regular basis in order to maximize your strength, appearance and SMV [sexual market value]. To lift is known by red pill men as the most important rule towards self improvement [sic]. Not only does lifting increase ones SMV, but it also improves ones confidence, mental strength and IDGAF [I don't give a fuck] attitude.”² In hundreds of self-improvement threads featured on r/TheRedPill, lifting is exalted as the most important bodily habit that enables “betas” to transform into “Chads,” a slang term for “alpha male.” Throughout a virtual network of websites, forums, blogs, and image boards, men gravitate toward the masculine mystique of lifting that figures centrally into the philosophy of the “Red Pill”: a misogynistic doctrine that asserts that men's natural and rightful dominance has been usurped by feminist socialization, particularly its unmooring from traditional gender roles. A metaphor drawn from the 1999 film The Matrix, taking the Red Pill (TRP hereafter) signifies one's willingness to acknowledge that men have been socialized to acquiesce to women's power, resulting in sexual scarcity and a marked decline in men's social status in all aspects of work, dating, and social life. Adherents to TRP believe women are hypergamous, meaning that they continually climb the social and genetic ladder by pairing with physically superior men.

There are other “pills” one can swallow in the manosphere to suit one's particular grievance; some more bitter than others. For instance, some incels (involuntary celebrates) profess to taking the “Black Pill,” which names a fatalistic belief that no amount of self-improvement can overcome one's genetic inferiority.³ TRP is unique among “the pills” insofar as it is a self-improvement doctrine that teaches men that they must transform both their minds and bodies to “turn the tables on feminism” so that they can attain not only sex but a more fulfilling life.⁴ As I argued elsewhere, “to embrace the Red Pill is . . . to turn one's self into a project: learning and practicing the art and science of ‘gaming’ women for sex, recoding one's mind to be invulnerable to women, and expelling women's power and influence from one's life.”⁵ Although there is some disagreement between different communities as to how one can turn their misogynistic theories into practice, TRP is ultimately underwritten by a preoccupation with mastering the body, converting it to a signifier of superior and inscrutable masculine power. TRP transforms the cisgender male body into a site of invention, or a “vehicle” for the rhetorical performance of hegemonic masculinity.⁶ In TRP forums populated overwhelmingly with young white men, remaking the male body is also a political project dedicated to the recuperation of white male power at a moment in which hegemonic masculinity faces heightened scrutiny and intensifying economic precarity has made white breadwinner masculinity increasingly unattainable.⁷

This essay is concerned with TRP's fixation with bodily capacitation—the proliferation of digital rhetorics that construct the cisgender white male body as uniquely malleable and, therefore, worthy of being remolded as a signifier of physical and moral superiority. TRP embraces a logic of plasticity in which bodily augmentation, capacitation, and sculpting are enactments of the community's white masculinist values and anti-feminist commitments. According to TRP forums, lifting builds a subject who is dominant, virile, steeled against women's influence, and capable of overcoming virtually any obstacle. TRP body is both a material and rhetorical invention—not just a superlatively abled body but a master signifier of white masculine dominance. Indeed, rhetorical scholarship on bodies illustrates how the corporeal form is not only material but also operates as a “fluctuating signifier” that is shaped as much by cultural discourses as it is by biological forces.⁸ As Kevin M. DeLuca observes, there is no “a priori body,” but rather, “bodies [that] are enmeshed in a turbulent stream of multiple and conflictual discourses that shape what they mean in a particular context.”⁹ In this context, the white male body transforms into the site of a contest between white masculinity and feminizing social forces. Lifting produces bodies that are signs of extraordinary willpower, control, and agency over one's own destiny. And while technological advances continually transform what kinds of interventions can remake the body to fit a social ideal, pro-lifting rhetoric shapes what type of bodies are fit to be remade and what constitutes the aspirational body against which all men will be measured.¹⁰ As John Jordan writes, “The plastic body emerges as an influential, contested, and evolving configuration of meanings that circulate through the public sphere and are the impetus behind many body alteration desires.”¹¹ I suggest that TRP's concentration on bodily capacitation resignifies the white masculine body as possessing the unique capacity to transcend symbolic and material constraints on human agency, and in doing so invites adherents to take up a mythical political project that attempts to rupture society's feminist programming and restore men to the top of the sex/gender hierarchy.

White cis-hetero men who seek out TRP for self-improvement and sexual strategy are effortlessly routed into a vast networked ecology of misogyny and racism where rape, eugenics, and ethnonationalism are given open consideration.¹² Over the past decade, TRP sites have evolved into a sprawling network that has radicalized millions of young men, particularly white men in the West. As Debbie Ging explains, “The rapid propagation of Red Pill ‘philosophy’ across multiple platforms demonstrates how a compelling cultural motif has succeeded in balancing emotion and ideology to generate consensus and belonging among the manosphere's divergent elements.”¹³ Alexandra Minna Stern adds that “the red pill might lead to an epiphany about the rightness of white nationalism and/or the repudiation of feminism, multiculturalism, left-ism, and globalism, followed by an embrace of traditionalism, hierarchy, and inequality.”¹⁴ George Hawley maintains that the far right's ultimate goal is to use divergent strands of TRP to recruit and radicalize adherents into white nationalism.¹⁵ This essay adds that white body ideals expressed in TRP forums share a common lineage with the scientific racism that is expressed elsewhere in the broader community. Though warrants for white supremacy may not be explicit, TRP rhetoric is a philosophically supplement to strands of white supremacy that circulate throughout the manosphere.

This essay turns to weight-lifting rhetoric to illustrate how the rhetoric of capacitation aligns bodily habits and strength routines with the larger objective of TRP: white supremacy. Underwritten by principles of eugenics and evolutionary pseudoscience, TRP's preoccupation with bulk, strength, and power is part of a survival philosophy that capacitates subjects to dominate others within the brutal logics of late-stage capitalism. Specifically, I argue that the rhetoric of TRP fashions a superlatively capacitated white male body that can be rehabilitated from the so-called lazy, decadent, and emasculated man prominently featured as a foil in reactionary political rhetoric.¹⁶ I contend that TRP is not an isolated example of self-help discourse, but rather a turgid articulation of the aesthetic and bodily ideals that complement TRP's reactionary political ethos. The built man is primed to purge weakness from his life, kill his inner loser, intimidate feeble men, satisfy his primal sexual drive, climb social hierarchies, crush competitors, and embrace the will-to-power. TRP's turn to the body is emblematic of how reactionary political movements tend to fixate on male virility, physical prowess, and invulnerability to women.¹⁷ The nationalist populism that delivered Donald J. Trump the presidency was underwritten by the same white hypermasculine fantasies of subjugating the nation's enemies.¹⁸ It is no coincidence that many pro-Trump memes produced in the manosphere depicted the former president as a chiseled, muscle-bound action hero.¹⁹ Despite the allure of such fantasies, TRP's conception of the body is also profoundly shaped by conditions of neoliberal austerity, wherein alienated white men have turned to the body to produce compensatory value in response to dwindling economic opportunities and waning social status. In this regard, TRP completes the white male subject's transformation into pure human capital. Swollen muscles and extraordinary features become commodities that enable white men to compete in a marketplace that welcomes the demise of the public good.

This essay contributes to rhetorical scholarship on the body by illustrating how recent figurations of the white cisgender male body unites nationalistic commitments with neoliberal subjectification through a rhetoric of capacitation: discourses that resuscitate debilitated subjects back into the realm of productive, able-bodied citizenship. The trick, as Jasbir Puar observes, is that “there is no such thing as an ‘adequately abled’ body anymore,” meaning that one is always debilitated in comparison to what “one's bodily capacity is imagined to be.”²⁰ The aspirational body is always outpaced by the conditions of austerity that gradually wear it down through the routine reproduction of everyday life.²¹ Thus, the promise of an extraordinarily abled body further elides the very conditions of austerity over which TRP promises mastery. Yet TRP resounds neoliberalism's assault on the public good while it rewards those who reduce themselves to pure market rationality. By attending to TRP's aspirational body as an imaginative space of white sovereignty,²² this essay maps a shifting terrain of neoliberal body rhetoric that seeks to (re)capacitate white men but only to envelop them in bodily and aesthetic preoccupations that align with a racially exclusive vision of the polity.

His Muscles, Ourselves

As feminist and critical race scholars have argued, the white male body is the default subject of rhetorical theory. Classically influenced rhetorical theory often suffers from the same problem as democratic theories of possessive individualism insofar as both were informed by concepts of humanness that excluded women, indigenous people, and people of color.²³ In Judith Butler's words, white men have served as “bearers of a body-transcendent universal personhood.”²⁴ Despite offering itself for centuries as the template of universal humanness, the white male body itself has received limited attention from rhetorical scholars. In her recent review of scholarship on body rhetoric, Karma R. Chávez notes that “the abstract body on which rhetorical studies is based is, in reality, an actual body, that of particular white men. The white male body haunts rhetorical practice and criticism.”²⁵ Chávez argues that rhetorical studies tends to only see bodies when they are explicitly marked by difference; thus, the white male body has escaped the critical attention paid to raced, sexed, gendered, and disabled bodies. This lack of attention creates a strategic absence much like that of whiteness²⁶—the ghost that, according to Chávez, continues to trouble rhetorical studies. Susan Bordo suggests that the strategic absence of the white male body recalls colonialist dualities of nature/culture and body/mind—dualities that locate men on the side of civilization and relegate all others to the unrestrained passions of nature.²⁷ Kaja Silverman adds that the marked absence of white men throughout centuries of Western visual culture represents a collective psychical schema to disavow castration by locating lack in women's bodies.²⁸ Yet, as my opening anecdote suggests, the white male body sometimes begs for attention, particularly at historical conjunctures at which the cultural practices that aid in the consummation of white masculinity have—often with good cause—disappeared or lost meaning.

Bodies are signifiers, which is to say that they are both governed by cultural codes and function as sites at which abstract principles take on corporeal form.²⁹ Yet some bodies are afforded more flexibility in how and what they are able to signify. As Daniel C. Brouwer writes, “cultural codes permit certain bodies—white, male, heterosexual, etc.—greater opportunities for abstraction, while other ‘marked’ bodies—bodies of color, female, homosexual, etc.—are disproportionately subject to scrutiny and subject to sedimented meanings about the characteristics and qualities of their flesh.”³⁰ Claire Sisco King contends that the white male body is often defined in terms of its adaptive and labile capacities, noting that “culture does not afford hegemonic privilege to bodies and subjects that are easily contained but to ones that imagine and perform themselves as limitless, variable, adaptive.”³¹ Thus, even abject embodiments speak to how white masculinity accommodates a multitude of expressions that are not available to others. In addition to its racist and patriarchal legacy as an emblem of white supremacy, the white male body is also a signifier of ability—a body that can move throughout public space without suspicion, impose its authority on other bodies, and assert its individual identity against collective mischaracterization. In more concrete terms, it is a body with that can openly carry assault weapons in public, flaunt COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates, and even storm the U.S. capitol without provoking police violence.³² As the rhetorical scholarship on ableism reminds us, ability, along with whiteness, is “the key feature of what constitutes being human.”³³ Thus, it is the range of symbolic and material capacities afforded to the white male body that unlocks racist, ableist, and sexist privileges. For those who do not share taken-for-granted access to humanness, violating cultural codes of mobility can have dire consequences.

Although the muscular white male body might signify moral and physical fitness, the muscularity of people of color often signifies innate athletic ability, lewd sexual appetites, fitness for servitude, or a monstrous criminality.³⁴ Ronald L. Jackson observes how the racist construction of the brute or the buck “scripts” a threatening form of Black masculinity characterized by a hulking physique and insatiable sexual desire for white women. As he explains,

Derived from symbolic economy of chattel slavery, the muscled Black body is pathologized, innately aggressive, and—absent the threat of violence—constitutes an existential threat to the white body politic. The history of slavery and scientific racism conjured images of Black, Asian, and Latinx bodies as numb, indifferent to pain, insensate, but also innately strong, athletic, and fit for a life of servitude.³⁶ This combination of pain tolerance and primitive muscularity continues to legitimize violence against people of color. As Tommy Curry elaborates, the same fear that propelled anti-Black lynching “as a technology of murder is the same anxiety and fear that now allow the white public to endorse the murder of Black men and boys as justifiable homicides.”³⁷ In the white imaginary, a Black muscular physique is prefigured as weapon that belies Black men's extraordinary vulnerability to racist violence, as well as the racism embedded in this bodily script.³⁸ In this regard, muscularity-as-personal-capital is ostensibly only available to white men. While white men's working on their bodies adds to their own “market value,” people of color's physical fitness has been scripted to add to their value as property.

Despite the historical connection between white masculinity, humanness, and ability, larger demographics of white men now find themselves in an uncharacteristic position of precarity. The neoliberal austerity that was once imposed on minoritized populations has metastasized into parts of the body politic that were formerly immune from capitalism's “creative destruction” of the public good. ³⁹ Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser argue that Red Pill masculinity is a symptom of neoliberal capitalism's failure to secure white men within its political subjectivity. They contend that networks of online misogyny and toxic masculinity are byproducts of the disastrous neoliberal policies that invited subjects to invest in delusional free-market fantasies.⁴⁰ White men were once the beneficiaries of a breadwinner model of masculinity in which a single-income male-headed household was afforded a taste of upward mobility.⁴¹ Forty years of neoliberal policies, however, created a “confidence crisis” characterized by the subject's failure to attain class respectability. “The result,” they contend, “is a networked masculine subject that feels threatened, and a collective figure is to blame: women.”⁴² Women and people of color have been particularly ravaged by neoliberalism's assault on the public good and its disregard for social inequality⁴³: matters made worse by how its failures churn the reactionary currents of victimhood, chauvinism, and ethnonationalism. As Bradley Jones and Roopali Mukherjee note, “Neoliberalism's rejection of the social—its appearance as culture-less, value-less, and above and/or outside ‘politics’—enables it to discursively bring together diverse reactionary movements against a more inclusive and just conception of citizenship.”⁴⁴ Despite their privileges, the white masculine subject of late capitalism has come to regard itself as incapacitated, immobile, and victimized by social change.⁴⁵ Such men constitute a public fit for the new rhetoric of white supremacy that cloaks its racist commitments in neoliberal tropes of multiculturalism, self-actualization, and positive identity.⁴⁶

The 2008 financial crisis incited the most recent iteration of the masculine body panic, as underemployment and precarious service labor subjected white men to the unstable working conditions typically experienced by women and people of color.⁴⁷ In previous decades, so-called body work, such as sex work and domestic labor, was relegated to vulnerable populations who often had no choice but to turn to the body to survive. Jamie Hakim observes that although white men have traditionally been high-powered decision makers, the intensification of economic austerity, along with the proliferation of technologies for bodily self-representation, places a premium on the body as a source of value.⁴⁸ Thus, “as a response to this new context some young men have used the tools made available to them by digital capitalism—smartphones and social media platforms—and, propelled by neoliberal ideology, have sexualized their bodies in a bid to feel valuable when the means of value creation that this social group were once able to rely on have been eroded by neoliberal austerity.”⁴⁹ Thus, TRP addresses a subject left with few places to recover its sense of upward mobility, making the body an important site for white masculine redemption.

TRP's body rhetoric also speaks through a racialized history of muscles that helps facilitate the slippage between capacity and supremacy.⁵⁰ Bordo observed how a defined musculature once signified racialized and classed otherness—bodies that exhibited primitive strength or reflected a lowly life of hard labor.⁵¹ Thus, muscles underwent a rhetorical revision at the beginning of the neoliberal period when a chiseled physique came to represent the virtues of an upwardly mobile white class. In Bordo's words, “the firm, developed body has become a symbol of correct attitude; it means that one ‘cares’ about oneself and how one appears to others, suggesting willpower, energy, control over infantile impulses, the ability to ‘shape your life.’”⁵² The fitness culture of the 1980s compelled members of this ascendant class to embody their adherence to the mythologies of meritocracy.⁵³ Meanwhile, the newly hardened white bodies of the big screen—Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme—resounded with a popular culture preoccupied with physical fitness and a political culture underwritten by Cold War fantasies of containment and domination of “soft bodies.”⁵⁴ Defined muscle encapsulated the nation's ideological commitments, thus constituting a public addled by a consumerist drive for self-improvement and power.

As Richard Dyer argued, weight lifting and extreme fitness transformed muscles into signs of white supremacy that fortified white bodies against “being submerged into the horror of femininity and non-whiteness.”⁵⁵ He suggests that Hollywood's preoccupation with the white man's muscles—their definition, contour, and luminescence—forged an arbitrary association between white masculinity and physical perfection. It is for this reason that sociologist Alan M. Klein also chronicled how the culture of bodybuilding flirted with “fascist imagery” of physical perfection in ways that were “reminiscent of the Nazi notion of ‘purity.’”⁵⁶ The “epistemology of the locker room” and gym often reproduces forms of male homosociality that are premised on misogyny, homophobia, and racism.⁵⁷ In this regard, whiteness-as-physical perfection and self-mastery are part of a well-worn economy of tropes that pervades the exclusionary fraternity of weight lifting and makes its more reactionary adherents amenable to the tenets of white supremacy. The culture of weight lifting is inherently white insofar as it offers a model of body work and sociality that ascribe to the race and class aesthetics of whiteness.

The preoccupation with physical perfection is also particularly alluring to white men because it offers a fantasy of control over the very economic forces that compel them to turn to the body for value. The manosphere accelerates these body discourses and plugs them into a network in which men's rights, white supremacy, and violent misogyny all comfortably commingle. Here, the slippage between capacity and supremacy becomes quite lucid. This essay contributes to rhetorical scholarship on the body by attending to how the superlatively capacitated white cisgender male body offers a supplemental to the project of white supremacy—even in spaces where such ideological commitments are not explicitly stated. In the sections to follow, I illustrate how rhetorics of bodily capacitation suffuse into a politics of white masculine aggrievement. In this context, TRP treats white men as “objects of care” by singling them out as a debilitated population worthy of rehabilitation.⁵⁸ Here, I draw from Puar's contention that care indexes racism insofar as populations targeted for convalescence are always constructed in relation to “pariahs,” those degraded objects (or racialized populations) who serve as foils to populations deemed virtuous enough for recuperation into an able-bodied public. TRP can be characterized as a re-capacitation rhetoric that hails white men back into the domain of productive citizenship, but at a significant cost. The agency afforded by muscles takes on new biopolitical significance as they transform into signifiers of white men's fitness to rule over other bodies. TRP's re-capacitation of the white male body folds objects of care back into the body politic but as part of the project of white sovereignty.⁵⁹ The cost of interpellation is the body's enlistment as an alibi for the very system of debilitation that accounts for its experience of lived pain. Thus, neoliberalism serves as both cause of and solution to the logics of debilitation and disposability.⁶⁰ In this way, TRP hastens white men's transformation into human capital—their bodies earn their way back into cultural dominance by producing surplus value. This entrepreneurial subject's central preoccupation is investment in their body—the last remaining vestige of capital they can offer up as economic opportunities dwindle and their cultural status wanes.⁶¹

Do You Even Lift, Bro?

In the remainder of this essay, I examine the 25 top upvoted posts on the forum r/TheRedPill that explicitly address the importance of weight lifting.⁶² Reddit has operated as a hub for networked misogyny, connecting like-minded men in an anonymous environment with relatively modest editorial control. Much of the user-generated content on r/TheRedPill is vitriolic and sensational; thus, it engenders intense discussions that can easily traffic to other nodes in the manosphere. As Heather Suzanne Woods and Leslie A. Hahner argue, “Reddit influences public culture via its technological capacities, namely, the ability to fashion content and disseminate it rapidly across a multitude of sites.”⁶³ On any Reddit forum, users can “upvote” posts if they approve of the content. Posts that receive a significant number of upvotes—typically in the hundreds or thousands—move to the top of the subbreddit page so they are more visible to users. I selected portions of these top upvoted posts as indicative of the community's shared values, beliefs, and ideological commitments. The posts represent a tacit consensus among participants concerning the value of lifting in relation to the forum's express goals. These posts are by no means exhaustive but rather representative of the community's attitudes toward the body. I trace a series of recurring patterns that run throughout the forum and that align weight lifting with the underlying tenets of scientific racism, eugenics, and, ultimately, white supremacy

Survival of the Swolest

Pro-lifting rhetoric frequently draws from the principles of natural selection to make sense of a vast range of social experiences—from dating to careers. Given the far-right's revival of social Darwinism, eugenics, and racist population science, it is not entirely surprising to find that the manosphere is populated with references to the concept of “survival of the fittest,” the brutality of the state of nature, and the inexorable laws of natural selection.⁶⁴ Here, domination, hierarchy, and aggression are not only personal virtues, but civic lessons. In a broader context, Richard Hofstadter observed that “survival philosophy” has tended to thrive during periods of intense wealth stratification as a “cosmic rationale” for brutal competition and extreme impoverishment.⁶⁵ For TRP, survival philosophy resolves the underlying tension between the material conditions of neoliberal austerity and masculine fantasies of mastery and abundance.⁶⁶ Although the applicability of natural selection to the social and economic order are taken for granted in the manosphere, its implications for bodily practice are quite specific to TRP masculinity. For instance, some adherents to “Black Pill” philosophy believe that no amount of self-improvement can overcome the laws of genetics. Some incels even advocate for radical plastic surgeries to overcome supposedly innate genetic deficiencies. Although they are preoccupied with bodily transformation, most TRP adherents abhor such shortcuts because they forgo the discipline, hard work, and bodily mastery required to become an alpha male. Men cannot purchase their bodily superiority through cosmetic tricks; instead, they must earn their place in the sexual hierarchy through painstaking labor.

Drawing from survival philosophy, pro-lifting rhetoric asserts that sex, dating, and the body are governed by the primal laws of the state of nature; therefore, only cultivating extraordinary strength can distinguish men as worthy mates in the “sexual marketplace.” Users assert that women's brains are hardwired to interpret pronounced muscles as signifiers of protection that ensure the survival of their offspring.⁶⁷ For instance, a prolific poster u/unrealenting asserted:

This passage centralizes the importance of survival to Red Pill philosophy, which is to say that constructing sexual relationships in terms of unconscious survival instincts justifies deliberate embodiments of aggression. Here, the state of nature is constructed in strictly Hobbesian terms. Nature is chaotic, unfeeling, and brutally competitive. Relationships are tacitly forged for self-interest—men attain sex, women attain quality genetic material and protection. Note, too, that the muscle-bound man does not deny his colonizing impulses—he subjugates competitors, women, and nature. The user articulated women and the natural world as virtually synonymous; thus, masculinity remains tethered to a survival mentality that dictates the subjugation of all challengers. It is not only a genetic but a colonial imperative for TRP man to embody muscular traits to signal his dominance. Thus, the user concludes that “no amount of social posturing can usurp basic biological urges.” Such expressions also illustrate the slipshod manner in which Red Pill philosophy draws dubious conclusions from evolutionary psychology to make essentialist claims about sex and gender. In this regard, natural laws come to supplant all systems of morality.

Although such unsupported conjectures are pseudoscience par excellence, many users boldly assert that modernity has not eliminated primal somatic urges. In fact, as users argue, postindustrial comforts only obscure the degree to which innate biological laws still govern social and sexual hierarchies. While this may be the source of beta male woes, for TRP men the persistence of humanity's primordial condition is a cause for optimism. Nature is a system that can be “gamed” by those willing to embrace its cruel logic. As u/KefferLime suggests, “Despite being the most advanced beings on this earth and having advanced exceptionally fast, Our biological evolution doesn't quite happen as fast. We still have our cave brain biology. And our cave brains still register the biggest, strongest guy as a good potential mate . . . a big strong Alpha would be able to look after her and his child and provide food and shelter for them. In today's terms a female brain still sub consciously [sic] registers these factors when she sees a big, strong, well built [sic] man.” Another user puts it simply: “all mammals know one language: size.”⁶⁹ Such statements dismantle any notion that sex and gender are social constructs and obscure how biological determinism naturalizes social inequality. In women's “cave brain[s]” size is synonymous with value; thus, large muscles are signifiers of inherent physical and moral superiority. As u/wingflier puts it, “It's important to understand how female psychology works in regards to what makes the Red Pill so successful. Women want to be with a guy who they perceive as being more valuable than they are. This is basic human psychology. This is hypergamy in a nutshell.”⁷⁰ This insight suggests that by right of size alone, the built body has unlimited capacities, particularly in relation to women's agency. Women's psyches betray them, meaning that they register their own inferiority when they are in the presence of superlatively masculine bodies. The muscled body is controlled and dominant—it concedes nothing to women's intentions. In the presence of muscles, women have no choice but to assent to and even desire their own subjugation. As u/Ronin11A observes, “Visible muscle mass has powerful, animalistic effect on women. They claim it doesn't matter, but present them with broad shoulders and muscular arms and they can't keep their hands off you.”⁷¹ These statements imply that women are held captive by their psychological and physiological needs. Consequently, men exercise agency over women's bodies simply by controlling and building their own. Most importantly, indispensable knowledge of women's primal condition presents a simple solution to retrieving an eternal masculinity: lift.

Indeed, users suggest that lifting unlocks a primal version of man whose dominance is unquestioned. This celebrated archetype is invulnerable to women and certain of his sovereignty over other bodies. To illustrate men's entitlement to power, users routinely valorize ancient archetypes that mirror Robert Bly's mythopoetic manhood: warriors, hunters, and kings.⁷² For instance, u/needless_pickup_line explains that “we might not be chasing down mammoths any more but you can still be a hunter and warrior.”⁷³ U/heathcliff aggressively asserts, “Listen, retard, you have the ancestral genes of marathon runners, hunters and soldiers. Your body is a machine built to crush and destroy things.”⁷⁴ U/unrealenting commands: “Speak deeply and richly from your gut, if possible, and carry yourself like a King. Be like a Mountain and she will be forced to climb on top of you if she wants to get over you.”⁷⁵ The valorization of ancient archetypes suggests that masculine sovereignty is literally encoded into men's DNA and can be retrieved by rebuilding one's body in a primal image. Most importantly, women's primal desire for this form of masculinity provides an alibi for sexual aggression, physical dominance, and even rape. For example, u/wingflier explains, “In the most primal and ultimate expression of our animal instincts, the man is asserting his dominance over her, his power over her, and increasing the void of value between the two of you to the most extreme level possible. You are her god and she is your slave. Why do you think women are so into bondage and rape fantasies? It's all power dynamics.”⁷⁶ Another user contends that women only respect men who are “are more capable of imposing your will on your environment. (the bigger the guy the higher the SMV).”⁷⁷ According to these passages, lifting capacitates the male body so that it can fulfill its natural purpose: to crush, destroy, and dominate. “Built” and “capable,” the male body's capacities (nature), will (desire), and ultimate good (ethics) are virtually one and the same. Moreover, the argument suggests that muscles activate in women primitive desires that override their consent, making them bend to men's will.

According to this iteration of TRP, lifting is the exclusive route to masculinity's recuperation. Such a belief is predicated on the notion that masculinity has been lost to “unnatural” social forces such as feminism and “progressive masculinity.” Although there are many posts containing advice as to how to have confidence and sleep with attractive women, users regularly intone the refrain “just lift” to suggest that all other masculine attributes necessarily follow from bodily capacitation. What distinguishes this rhetoric of TRP from that of pickup artists on forums such as r/seduction is the community's devotion to bodily strength and transformation over cognitive and cosmetic makeovers. While having more sex is no doubt a central preoccupation, it is incidental to the overall recuperation of male power. Besides, as participants remind us, the former always follows the latter. The presumption is that beta males are the byproduct of feminine socialization processes that have alienated men from their bodies. Thus, pro-lifting rhetoric is about remaking the body, using its capacities for building large muscles as a source of invention. For instance, u/heathcliff asserts that “If you are not maxing out on your physical capabilities as a man, then you are operating in CHILD mode. Your body is soft and weak and pathetic like a child, you are not a man . . . Exercise is imperative and non-negotiable. You must break sweat every single day of your life until you die. If you do not, you are not a male. You are not even fully human.”⁷⁸ Another user (u/InnerMir) reminds his audience that “men tell men to lift because it works. Lifting is masculine, and looking good can be one of the biggest confidence boosters you will ever have.”⁷⁹ U/manthefuckup tells prospective converts, “Let's face it, you were, or still are, a loser. You are probably flabby all over. But that's ok brother. You are here to learn and improve, which is why we want you to lift. Lifting is the first step in reclaiming your masculinity.”⁸⁰ Another user resounds these conjectures by noting that “the confidence that you will gain through your relationship with the iron will lead to a newly found believe [sic] (possibly discovery) in your sense of a masculine self. You will know your body more intimately than ever before. You will know what you are capable of and the strength you are developing will be noticed by those around you.”⁸¹ Finally, another user commands: “Lifting is said all the time for a damn good reason. People say ‘its said all the time for a damn good reason’ for a damn good reason. It will boost your confidence, it will develop discipline, it will make you tougher, it will ease your anxiety. You'll actually feel physically fucking dominant.”⁸² These passages construct lifting as a transformational process of self-actualization whereby new capacities facilitate control and dominance over one's body and personal circumstances. Lifting trains the body to discover an innate and timeless form of masculinity that promises innumerable rewards.

Most importantly, pro-lifting rhetoric makes the male body speak through the ideological framework of ableism. Muscles and sweat tell a story of a subject who earns their masculinity by maximizing their bodily capacities. This story conflates masculinity with ability; therefore, men who do not lift are by definition disabled—children, “losers,” and “soft” bodies. The ableist character of Red Pill masculinity draws from, in James L. Cherney's words, “an idealized norm that defines what it means to be human” in which “the disabled are cast as lacking something they are supposed to have.”⁸³ If bodies are by definition able, then beta males’ “lack” positions them outside the category of human. The conflation of masculinity with ability relies on the trope that “biology is destiny,” which, as Cherney notes, “has historically been used to justify discriminatory activities and ideologies like eugenics, social Darwinism, and denying women the right to vote.”⁸⁴ This trope, in turn, narrows the category of human by expelling degenerate and feeble bodies from its borders. When combined with eugenic theories that assert that psychology and physiology are governed by immutable laws, pro-lifting rhetoric assembles a vision of society in which incapacitated bodies, and ostensibly non-white bodies, are undeserving of membership in the human community.

Critical scholars of race have also shown how the very category of human, derived from Enlightenment theories of possessive individualism, is organized around the imperatives of white Euro-American subjects.⁸⁵ Although race is rarely if ever specifically mentioned in pro-lifting posts, it can be inferred by fact that the white able-bodied subject has been overrepresented in Western culture as the superlative example of humanness.⁸⁶ “Survival of the fittest” lends itself to the valorization of the white male body and its capacities, thereby naturalizing its dominance and overrepresentation. Pro-lifting rhetoric contributes to TRP's dehumanization of otherized bodies and forges a lifestyle politic that is indifferent to the struggles of those who lack or refuses to maximize their physical capabilities. Although beta males concede their genetic inferiority through a refusal to transform their body, the humanity of women and people of color is already nullified by their historical association with incapacity. Thus, pro-lifting rhetoric lays the groundwork for biological and genetic determinations of inequality.

New Gym, New You

Although TRP is organized around appeals to natural law, users’ interpretation of the male body accommodates neoliberal rhetorics of capacitation. Genetic predetermination is tempered only by the assumption that the (white) male body is plastic. That is, men's bodies are uniquely malleable and capable of extraordinary transformations. Lifting would have no social and economic utility if biological destiny were completely predetermined by factors outside of an individual's control. Such beliefs are more characteristic of Black Pill philosophy, where the adherents believe that attractiveness and strength are hereditary traits. Pro-lifting rhetoric rejects both fatalism and cosmetic shortcuts, because neither instills in men an ethic of hard work, discipline, and self-reliance. Lifting trains the body to dominate, whereas cosmetics solutions simply project an illusion of dominance. This distinction matters to users on r/TheRedPill because they conceptualize the body as an index of man's commitment to self-improvement. As one user puts it (u/plumo), “Lifting is suggested as a seemingly ‘fix-all’ solution because it is a very simple representation of work towards a goal. You lift, you get stronger, you add more weight, until you collapse or stall [sic] What it subconsciously teaches us, is the mindset of a never ending journey. Our minds, as men, are geared toward goals.”⁸⁷ Lifting rehabilitates men back into productive citizenship by enabling them to compete in the marketplace. Lifting prepares men's bodies to be resilient, to overcome damage through habits of self-reliance. Though some men can buy their way out of misery, most have to improve their social and sexual value by turning their body into human capital. In this regard, users on r/TheRedPill frame the benefits of lifting in both cosmic and market terms.

First, pro-lifting advocates routinely tout personal narratives of spectacular body and lifestyle transformations as proof that lifting can overcome any material barrier to success. In one user's words, “Lift some damn weights and ALL your problems will be solved.”⁸⁸ As critical media scholars such as Laurie Ouellette and Helene Shugart have illustrated, narratives of bodily self-improvement provide civics lessons that train individuals for neoliberal citizenship.⁸⁹ Although TRP man welcomes the strictures of surveillance and self-discipline, the glorification of neoliberal body norms blames people of color and people living in poverty for structural inequalities that place material constraints on fitness and health.⁹⁰ Contrary to this insight, participants use their own body as evidence that one can overcome structural limitations through hard work. U/MetalGear222 writes: “I'm the happiest I've ever been at 180lbs with dedicated lifting habits, a great new career with huge potential, and success with girls everywhere I go . . . The wholesome, raw confidence, mixed with the discipline of a strict training regime is THE MOST valuable attribute I've gained since I began this journey.”⁹¹ This passage reflects a larger pattern across most individual anecdotes. Users assert that before TRP they were lazy and had no dating or career prospects. Many note they were addicted to marijuana, video games, and pornography. They owe their miraculous transformation to getting a gym membership and dedicating themselves to bodybuilding. Each story concludes with the lesson that lifting teaches individuals to be self-reliant and entrepreneurial in their efforts to overcome adversity.

Through turning their body into a project, TRP man asserts that he can transcend material barriers to success. The aptly-named u/theselfmadealpha argued that “The gym has changed my life. Transformed my body, brain, and attitude. It has improved every single aspect of my life in one way or another.”⁹² Another admits that “I had a shitty upbringing where I was a fat, weak loser and I would like to thank lifting for getting me to where I am right now.”⁹³ One post even suggests that lifting helped the person overcome COVID-19: “I thank it [lifting] for letting me get through COVID with no less [sic] than a bit of a fever and some sweating.”⁹⁴ As these stories suggest, lifting teaches vital attributes to succeed in the marketplace: discipline, self-reliance, confidence, and strength. Lifting not only transforms weak and fat bodies into resilient physiques but it retrains men's brains to advance in their careers and succeed in dating. Such stories suggest that hard physical labor is rewarded with personal success, regardless of where one starts in life. In the words of one participant, “I have no issues with body image. I love the way I look. I MADE this.”⁹⁵ Bodily transformation miraculously unlocks secret principles of success that spill over to all other aspects of an individual's life. The new body is evidence that the self-made man is not contained within the pages of self-help books—he can be found at your local gym, hitting the iron.

Second, pro-lifting rhetoric portrays life as a competition in which men must constantly strive to improve their social and sexual value.⁹⁶ As u/GayLubeOil boldly declared, “Beta males hate competition and hide behind contrived morals to justify their uncompetitiveness. Masculinity is competition. The most masculine animals are the most competitive ones. There is no climbing the dominance hierarchy without competing against other men and AMOGing [alpha male of the group] them in some way.”⁹⁷ Indeed, exchange value is relative; thus, men must relentlessly prove worth by dedicating their bodies to endless improvement. U/no_face adds that “as a TRP male, you need to constantly get better. When you stagnate, the lack of change will bore your woman and she will be susceptible to her innate hypergamy.”⁹⁸ U/RogerNorvell also confirms that TRP men must “strive to be a better man than you were yesterday. Then tomorrow strive to be better. ‘The only easy day was yesterday.’ Having a concrete goal and striving toward it gives you the power to believe in yourself. Seeing those lift numbers go up, the belly fat disappear, the increase in girls that literally have to touch your arms/shoulders/abs (swolestation) all allow you to view progress. Lifting is not just about getting jacked. Lifting is a discipline.”⁹⁹ Once again, the body is incontrovertible proof of market value: Gains can be objectively measured and compared to determine a commodity's relative worth.

Although users often frame bodily improvement in market terms, asserting that lifting “pays dividends”¹⁰⁰ and generates high “ROI [returns on investment],”¹⁰¹ most are ultimately concerned with the concept of “SMV” or “social/sexual market value,” a term that denotes the ranking of men's bodies in a brutally competitive marketplace. U/wingflier characterizes SMV as “increasing your actual/objective value through physical means like lifting, losing weight, or making money. Increasing your perceived self-value through meeting goals, meditation, and psychological training.”¹⁰² U/kylerosa21 also testified that lifting is “the holy grail of activities/hobbies that raise your SMV. It is the backbone of becoming a true alpha male and every single person on the subreddit should be lifting.”¹⁰³ U/plumo similarly testifies that “Our confidence, self-esteem and transitively, social market value are based on how well we progress on this journey [lifting].”¹⁰⁴ Though SMV denotes an increase in confidence, the term subjects bodies to a ranking system that skews heavily toward muscular physiques over other features of attractiveness. The ranking system invites men to never be content with their existing body and to chase new fitness goals in pursuit of personal success. TRP body attunes itself to the demands of neoliberal austerity wherein body work becomes both an alternative to traditional market value and a supplement to more conventional marketplaces in which men strive for success. Put differently, the body is both a medium of exchange in places not conventionally understood as markets (sex and relationships) and an asset that compounds value in conventional marketplaces (employment and finance). In both senses, the community's preoccupation with maximizing SMV constructs all social interactions through market logics, which engenders the triumph of neoliberal hegemony over the social good. Those who refuse to transform themselves into human capital are weak and lack intrinsic value. As u/GayLubeOil crudely retorts, “At this point there is literally no excuse beyond being lazy or retarded. Beta Males know looking like shit is their fault and their fault alone.”¹⁰⁵ Reiterating the logic of the self-made man, those who worked hard on their body are rewarded with an abundance of sexual and career success, while inferior men have no one to blame but themselves for their dearth of opportunity. Life is a competition and only the strong survive.

Can I Get a Spot?

Fusing “biology is destiny” with neoliberal competition, TRP forges a masculine subject who ruthlessly pursues dominance and refuses to concede that structural barriers constrain how one can maximize one's bodily capacities. To the extent that material inequalities exist, they are either the fault of the individual or evidence of innate biological inferiority. TRP hails a capacitated white body—a body that has been overrepresented as the exemplary human. In this regard, white supremacy appears without being named. The bodily traits valorized on r/TheRedPill could theoretically be embodied by racialized subjects; however, its idealized version of masculinity shares more in common the cultural inscriptions that define the white male body: self-possessed, self-reliant, able-bodied, dominant, and sovereign. This essay has argued that pro-lifting rhetoric constitutes a political project organized around a newly capacitated (white) male body. TRP man lifts in order to earn his place on top of the social and sexual order, which necessarily entails competition, subjugation, and violence. This body rhetoric constitutes a reactionary response to neoliberal austerity that has imperiled the very subjects for which capitalism once promised a life of abundance. Yet TRP embraces the very biopolitical and market logics that have accelerated the so-called “crisis of masculinity,” which is to say that human capital and the philosophy of survival are the very concepts responsible for white men's feelings of aggrievement.

Rather than ameliorate this crisis, TRP invites white men to invest in fantasies that a superlatively capacitated body can withstand anything, master any problem, and subjugate any opponent. TRP body is primed for participation in reactionary politics wherein might makes right and weakness must be ruthlessly purged from society. At the very least, TRP builds a subject who is indifferent to inequality and the pain of others. As Cherney reminds us, this is a politics we have seen before: “Survival of the fittest” and the “struggle for existence” have been taken up by genocidal movements that seek to “perfect” the social order by eliminating the feeble-bodied and feeble-minded. The central contribution of this essay, then, is to illustrate how such logics linger in the white masculine imaginary and are resurrected during periods of intense precarity to re-secure white male subjects within capitalist and nationalist ideologies. This essay has shown how rhetorics of bodily capacitation assert affective inertia that pulls white men closer to a ruthless politics of authoritarianism. This essay illustrates what Lisa Flores characterized as a slippery and evasive rhetoric of white supremacy, or “the ease with which racial and racist discourses morph and shift, often too easily slipping out of sight.”¹⁰⁶ And while there are some health benefits to weight lifting, it is also a practice that can become attached to larger political projects that signify one's place in the polity. If lifting is evidence of physical and moral superiority, the body can be easily enlisted to naturalize and normalize inequality. Lifting extends the political commitments of the far-right to a lifestyle struggle against “progressive masculinity.” It matters that pro-lifting rhetoric also exists within a far-right media ecology that is a gateway to white supremacy.¹⁰⁷

When lifting is framed in terms of dominance, competition, and physical supremacy, it ceases to be about self-care and becomes an alibi for cruelty and indifference. It behooves body rhetoric scholars to attend to the present white masculine preoccupation with physical fitness, as it provides clues about how minds and bodies are prepared for white supremacy—assumptions and axioms that become embodied in muscular tissue and thus operate at the edges of language. Indeed, for rhetorical theory to own its legacy of rendering the white cis-hetero male body invisible and implicit, scholars should attend to this body as its messy entailments as they spill out of screens and into our local gyms—or worse, the hallowed halls of Congress. TRP body is an unbearable weight only lessened by Chávez's call for a “textual stare”—to linger on its disavowed frailty, thinly disguised by large muscles that are incapable of the transcendence it so desperately desires.¹⁰⁸

Notes