So it seems Blog Further has developed a crush on another blog. Its name is Male Pattern Fitness.
Of course, blogs develop crushes on other blogs all the time; it’s kinda what makes the blogosphere go round. But Blog Further has a particular kind of crush on Male Pattern Fitness— a sub-category that, for lack of a better term, could best be described as a fitness crush. More likely than not, you have had a fitness crush— that complex of giddiness, admiration, fantasy and identification experienced in the presence of someone whose physique, athletic ability, or just plain determination takes your breath away. Far from rivalry and ressentiment, a fitness crush is marked by gratitude, tenderness, and a certain weakening of the knees. I would hazard many of us developed an Olympic-size fitness crush on Michael Phelps this past summer. And, of course, a fitness crush can include an entire team, explaining why so many of us feel crushed when our crushes get crushed on the playing field.
Now, the roots of Blog Further’s crush date back to college when its editor— me!— first met Male Pattern Fitness’s author, Andrew Heffernan. I first saw Andrew in a freshman production of Working and was immediately smitten by his on-stage charisma and Marlon Brando good looks. Andrew had one of those Olympian physiques that every guy envies. In addition, he was a damn good writer, as formidable on the page as he was on stage. Andrew and I took many acting classes together (when he courted Lady Kate as the Henry V, the entire class swooned) and we competed not a few times for the same roles. We even found ourselves pitted against each other in our stage combat class— me playing a homely David to his beautiful Goliath. Everything about our situation should have provoked competition and a certain degree of distance between us— but the only thing that did develop, at least for me, was a fitness crush. More gentle giant than Goliath, Andrew had a way of making me feel safe (well, except for when he was bearing down on me with a rapier and dagger) as well as making me laugh.
So, imagine my delight when my college fitness crush blogged about me— ME!— on Male Pattern Fitness. I was like:
OMG! My fitness crush knows I exist.
He even addressed me by surname, beginning sentences with such deferential nods as “Durgin tells us…” It was like swimming the two hundred meters and having Micheal Phelps who, unbeknownst to you, has been trailing in the next lane, come up after the race and say, “Nice stroke. I had trouble keeping up.” Who wouldn’t blush?
When not blogging about fitness, training for a triathlon, or starring in Hamlet (agents and casting directors take note), Andrew can be found running his own personal training company Dynamic Fitness. Think of him as the brunette, West Coast version of our own crush-inducing Jamie Dreyer. We totally think our Angelean readers should check him out.
Now Blog Further can’t help but gush all about its fitness crush, wanting our readers to subscribe and swoon over Male Pattern Fitness as much as we do. I mean, how can you not love a blog with posts like “Remembrance of Twinks Past”?
Like so many people, I have become a willing captive of Facebook. The experience of reconnecting with old friends, some dating back to elementary school, has proven both exciting and uncanny. I marvel that the bully who once knocked me down in the dirt grew up to be a Facebook friend— and an interesting person to boot. And I shake my head in disbelief when I realize that old photo of a schoolyard chum is actually a recent shot of her nine year old daughter! Some friends even juxtapose old yearbook shots with those of their own growing families, only increasing my sense of dislocation and vertigo. But, while I do get kick out of perusing these family shots, both past and present, I can’t help but cringe at the queer memories they dredge up.
Playing Little League on a hot and humid Virginian night, for instance.
For me, Little League was nothing but an exercise in humiliation. I hated the heat, I hated the bugs, but mostly I hated being born bereft of that primate legacy all my other teammates seemed to enjoy: namely, hand-eye coordination. That and my short-sightedness (no one realized I needed glasses until high school) made catching a fly ball, or hitting a fast one, an impossible act. Skinny, effeminate (I threw like a girl), and athletically dyslexic, I found myself exiled to right field where the only thing I fielded were jeers of “sissy” and “fag” thrown carelessly in my direction. It was into this toxic mix of humiliation and homophobia that I— at the bottom of the last inning of the last game of the season, with bases loaded and two boys out and my team trailing— slinked up to bat.
The other team cheered as I approached the plate.
It’s Allen! YAY!
My own team groaned. It was clear to everyone— me, the coaches, the kids in the dugout, the parents in the stands— that I was playing for the other team. The other team yelled,
Come on, Allen. We’re counting on you.
But, being a sucker for fairytale endings where miracles can happen (like Pinocchio, I dreamed of waking up one morning to find myself transformed into a real boy) and all can be forgiven (Field of Dreams would teach me that any father-son relationship, not matter how distant or strained, could always be mended with a simple slide into home) I held out hope that I could still save myself, that I could hit it out of the park and prove to myself and everyone else I wasn’t a queer.
I struck out.
The other team roared. My team sat sullen and silent. When I returned to the dugout, my coach said nothing, nor did my teammates, except for a few hissed,
Thanks a lot fag.
Later, my father would try to console me as I stared out the car window on the ride home. “Happens to the best of us. You’ll get ‘em next time.”
But my queer abjection was complete.
A lot changed after that wretched night. I got contacts. My frame filled out, and my effeminacy kind of just fell away, something I regarded with a strange mix of relief and regret. I came into my “manly” inheritance in college, unexpectedly gaining control over my limbs and acquiring a new ability to throw, catch, kick, hit, dribble, and whatever else it is a man is suppose to do with a ball. I also came out, my masculine bearing dovetailing with my newfound attraction to men. After college, I continued weightlifting and ventured into other sports such as gymnastics and triathlons. I also joined Team Aquatics, New York City’s lesbian and gay swim team. To my delight, I found all these sports teams— whether gay-identified or not— to be incredibly inclusive, embracing all sexualities and body types, all gender identities and ability levels. “Fats and femmes welcomed here” seemed to be the team cheer.
But, looking at the photos on Facebook, I feel a need to return to the sissy boy I once was. To remember how threatened that queer kid felt, how threatening his queer presence seemed to those around him, both adults and other children. And I wonder how many effeminate boys peer out of the Facebook family frame now; how these proto-gay kids fare on today’s playing field. My fear is that, despite Will and Grace, and despite Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick might still be right when she lamented,
for any given adult gay man, wherever he may be at present on a scale of self-perceived or socially ascribed masculinity (ranging from extremely masculine to extremely feminine), the likelihood is disproportionately high that he will have a childhood history of self-perceived effeminacy, femininity, or nonmasculinity.
To wage war on effeminate boys is to wage war on gay men, to actively seek their extermination. That is one reason I always cringe whenever I hear one of my butcher brethren speak disparagingly of the more fabulous among us. I want to recite Sedgwick to him, to remind him that “the scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large” and that
advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think.
Unfortunately, such gay affirming advice remains a mere drop in the torrent of hatred, rage, anxiety, and fear that swirls around the figure of the effeminate boy.
So, in the interest of declaring peace on behalf of sissy boys everywhere, I invite everyone this week to engage in a little thought experiment:
Imagine how to bring your kids up gay.
Now, I don’t mean how to merely tolerate femmy boys. Kids are smart; they know that tolerance is just another name for bigotry. I mean, how to actively desire more gay people in the world, to call more effeminate boys into being. What kind of environment (home life, school work, recreational activities) would prove most conducive to their development? What would be the proper way to nurture their effeminacy? And how might we create playing fields that are safe and inviting for them and ensure that all our kids play on the same team— whether they are fat, femme, or just plain incapable of hitting a curve ball?
For those of you who protest, “But that’s not normal,” repeat after Dorothy Parker:
Heterosexuality is not normal; it is just common.
And for those of you who need a little assist, here are two examples. The first is from the website Overheard in New York. In an Eckerd on the corner of Rockaway Boulevard and Liberty Avenue, a boy asks his mother
Mommy, is make-up just for girls?
To which, the mother responds,
Make-up is for girls and really fabulous boys.
Now that boy is going to turn out just fine.
Or, take your cue from this little music video:
Let Me Hear Three Cheers For Our Kids Growing Up Good and Gay!
As someone who has suffered from mild to severe depression most of my adult life, and who, at the same time, has found a great deal of relief and joy in athletic pursuits, I found this passage from the article both provocative and unsettling:
Studying twins allowed the researchers to distinguish genetic and environmental effects, and they found that the association of exercise with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms could be explained genetically: people disinclined to exercise also tend to be depressed. One does not cause the other.
I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised to learn a classical economy does not govern the relationship between physical activity and mood disorders, as if a mere uptick in exercise could immediately lower one’s stock in depression. After all, how many times have I confided in someone about my depressive tendencies only to be struck down, and dumb, with the well intentioned, but nonetheless nonsensical question, “Why are you depressed?” As if depression were that transparent, a malady whose root cause could be so easily rooted out. On the contrary, my decades long expérience with mood disorders— both as an object of study and a subjective reality— has only confirmed my felt-sense that depression is anything but simple.
A book I have found particularly good to think with, though, is Dr. Peter C. Whybrow’s A Mood Apart: The Thinker’s Guide to Emotion and Its Disorders. In describing emotional behavior as a homeostatic system tied up with sleep, sex, appetite, energy and motivation, Whybrow makes a helpful distinction between mood and emotion:
Strictly speaking, mood is the consistent extension of emotion in time. An emotion is usually transient and responsive to the thoughts, activities, and social situations of the day. Mood, in contrast, may last for hours, days, or even months in the case of some depressions….To return to my earlier analogy, expressed emotion is evidence of the homeostatic regulator at work, while mood is the set point around which it oscillates— a set point that for most people is fairly neutral and stable, much as an active thermostat maintains the steady temperature of a room.
For those in depression, the thermostat is set lower, or broken. Thus, they experience such daily emotions as anger, distress or elation very differently than someone whose mood has a more stable, neutral setting. Antidepressants— whether in the form of push-up or pills— seem to work rather obliquely, and in a way not fully understood, by “resetting” the thermostat:
Drugs do not directly replace some lost chemical in the brain, but achieve their effect by disturbing the melancholic set-point in limbic behavior and changing the activity of neuronal networks in a two step process that takes time to occur.
But perhaps, the most intriguing part of Whybrow’s book— and the one most relevant to the study cited in the Times— is his discussion of temperament. According to Whybrow, temperament is “a habit of mind,” “an enduring emotional style— a way of relating to the world— that is consistent over a lifetime.” Genetically determined, a depressive temperament may “disincline” one to exercise or “tend” one toward depression, but this particular way of being does have its advantages. As such recent books as Lincoln’s Melancholy and Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism make clear, leaders and writers whose lives have been marred by depression have also seen their depressive temperaments as precious resources to be cultivated and exercised.
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least— and it is commonly more than that— sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
Henry David Thoreau may “have met but one or two persons in the course of [his] life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” But, after reading over this week’s posts, I would hazard that I know at least four writers who have a knack for such sauntering, of seeing the connection between the seemingly pedestrian matters of training and fitness and the higher exercises of the mind. For these writers, working out is something one does not just in the gym, but also on the page.
I close this week with Thoreau because I think he provides a much-needed corrective to conversations currently taking place around health and fitness, especially in America. A certain Puritan work ethic pervades our fitness magazines. Covers cajole us to train harder, run faster, bike longer. Even walking must be done with purpose and austerity, as figured in the “power-walker.” No doubt, Thoreau would be horrified. Exercise, so conceived, becomes a heroic act of will one must constantly re-enact lest one backslide into apathy and gluttony. But when I think of exercise like this, I can’t help but reach for a fluffy pillow, rationalizing,
I’ll work out better after a good nap.
What I like about Thoreau’s sauntering is the notion that one might cultivate a more relaxed relation to (physical and mental) exercise— “working out” as a meandering rather than a mission.
Thoreau also understands that to compartmentalize fitness from other aspects of one’s life is mere folly:
the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours— as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far off pastures unsought by him.
A lifestyle coach if ever there was one, Thoreau urges us to view health holistically, as something that permeates all our daily activities. For Thoreau, walking, thinking, sleeping, eating, and writing are not mutually exclusive, but one in the same.
Forty-five minutes to an hour probably will yield at least one productive insight. Some recommend this formula: State the problem, forget the problem and wait for an answer. Once you’ve posed the question in this way, take a hike. More often than not you’ll get a surprisingly good answer.
I invite everyone this week to “take a hike”— or, rather, a “saunter.” Then, share your experiences, insights and favorite pedestrian haunts with us.
Blog Further is a well-informed conversation and community among health conscious individuals.
Interdisciplinary in approach, the blog features weekly writers with smart, distinct, and compelling voices. While our bloggers hail from very different parts of the country— from the Midwest to the South, the East Coast to the West— and while each of them comes to fitness from a very different place, each shares a commitment to good health and good writing.
Here is what to expect:
Every Monday— Further Ahead
Jamie Dreyer blogs on the latest trends and research in exercise and fitness.
Every Tuesday— Further Man
Robin Follet offers anecdote and analysis on men’s health and the various ways fitness intersects with his roles as father, coach, athlete, teacher, and writer.
Every Wednesday— Further Woman
Jeanine Casler writes about women’s health and her own relation to health and exercise as a seasoned marathoner, mother and scholar.
Every Thursday— Further Fun
Robert Speck muses on what it means to return to fitness after a long hiatus.
Every Friday— Further Thoughts
Allen Durgin closes the week with his own revels and reflections.
Blog posts will run the gamut from lyric essay to investigative reportage. Some blog posts will critique current trends and research in the field, while others will simply share the writer’s experience or expertise. Either way, each post will encourage a healthy dialogue— sometimes heated, sometimes hilarious— on various issues surrounding exercise, nutrition, men’s health, women’s health, sports, lifestyle and fitness.
So, subscribe to Blog Further, and workout your body and your brain.
