Despite my best efforts, I have the same build as my dad did at my age. My wife tells me I have a “dad bod,” which she says with equal parts cheek and affection.
My old man did not live long enough to witness the rise and short-lived reign of the “dad bod” as the ideal male form. This happened about 10 years ago. A college student wrote an essay for her school’s blog titled “Why Girls Love The Dad Bod,” and that was that. Normal bodies were normalized. Beer bellies were celebrated. For the next few years, photos of a plump Leonardo DiCaprio on the beach went viral.
That fad is over now. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Since then, something new has taken hold. I’ve lived long enough to watch a generation of young men flex for their cameras, obsessed with slim waists and sharp jawlines. These dudes hold each other to impossible beauty standards. The trend is known as “looksmaxxing.” I am sure you’ve heard of it. I am sure you are confused by it. Don’t worry, you are not alone. It is perfectly normal to wake up one morning bewildered by the world. This is life. I went to bed one night and woke up the next morning whispering, “What the hell is going on?”
The entire looksmaxxing philosophy was born in the dark, wet sewers of manosphere message boards, where insecure incels dreamed of becoming hairless alpha males. Chads, they’re called, low body-fat Greek gods with nose jobs.
They would have looked like angular balloon aliens to the grown men I grew up around, guys who’d have been baffled by the desperate vanity of these boys, and even more bewildered by the entire concept of a “dad bod.” To them, every male body was a dad bod. There was one shape: Man-shape. One size: Coffin size. My uncles, my Cub Scout master, the guy who ran the Greek diner. The old man across the street who used to sit on his porch in a lawn chair wearing nothing but a Speedo and bake in the sun like a giant sweet potato.
The ’80s gave American men chiseled Hollywood brutes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, but they were outliers. Superheroes. Living action figures. To be a normal dude in the 20th century was to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Eat onion rings. Chug beers. Rip cigs. Have reckless casual sex with someone you just met. It was fun. Mistakes were made. But the principle is solid: bodies are verbs, not nouns. They are meant to be used, not polished.
My dad was chubby. A big boy. Like father, like son. This was not his reality, though. His corporeal being was exactly what it was supposed to be: a mortal vehicle for ice cream sundaes. His body was built for fun, for mowing the lawn and watching football.
There was one year his old pants didn’t fit, so he cut back on waffles. My mom seemed to be into him, too. They were always mortifying me with wet kisses and long, lingering hugs, especially after a gin and tonic.
He just did not care what other people thought of his body. I would describe his confidence as a profound disinterest in the opinions of others, especially those of men he did not know or respect. I would like to think I inherited that swagger, but I did not. I have to work at not caring. I suppose the only reason I know about looksmaxxing is because the algorithms understand my insecurities better than I do, and that’s why my feed is crammed with videos of 20-something hunks showing off perfect bodies — smooth like the hoods of Cybertrucks — that look like too much work to attain. Looksmaxxing seems exhausting. Expensive. Miserable. I’m not the “remember when” type. I don’t normally think things were better in the past. But bodies aren’t temples. They’re bouncy castles.
To be a normal dude in the 20th century was to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Eat onion rings. Chug beers. Rip cigs. Have reckless casual sex with someone you just met. It was fun. Mistakes were made. But the principle is solid: bodies are verbs, not nouns. They are meant to be used, not polished.
Back then, old men were uncomfortable about their feelings but not in their skin. My dad wore a suit to work that disappeared the moment he was home, and if you knocked on our door after five o’clock on a weeknight, he’d answer, wearing a tight T-shirt, a pair of flimsy boxer shorts and a pair of black socks. The man served in the Army. He loved squirting lighter fluid on the backyard grill just to make the flames go higher. He drove the family Ford Mercury with one hand on the steering wheel, one hand hanging out the window, a smoldering stogie between his fingers. When we’d go to the library or the movies, he’d tuck his T-shirt into tattered sweatpants. He walked into the public pool locker room like he was a king, and I followed behind him.
The men’s locker room of the community pool down Kirby Road in 1985 was a Renaissance painting of masculinity that mesmerized and repelled me, a 10-year-old boy who frequently hid his chubby body underneath baggy T-shirts.
The pool itself was a concrete oasis surrounded by green trees in the middle of a small wood, a perfect nearby getaway during Virginia’s long, hot, humid summers. There was a small concession stand that sold popcorn and sodas. The lifeguards were all teenagers, and their job was to flirt with each other and smoke weed behind the concession stand and angrily blow their whistles, randomly, mostly at little kids who liked to run.
In order to get to the pool, and its dozens of mismatched deck chairs and broken umbrellas, you’d have to sign in at the pool house and then enter through the men’s or women’s locker rooms.
My old man never dressed for the pool. That’s what locker rooms are for, he’d opine. He’d take off his white guayabera and step out of his navy blue shorts and white socks and into short trunks. I’d have to sit there, on the wet, narrow bench as he, and what seemed like hundreds of other grown men, undressed, and showered, and talked to each other, their various penises hanging down like sleeping bats.
There were times the pool locker room was empty and silent, a few men shuffling around like monks. But on the hottest days, everyone was there. At least, everyone who didn’t have a pool in their backyard, or didn’t belong to the local country club.
The men were all hairy. God bestows hair unevenly amongst the sons of Adam. It has been lost to history, but in 1985, body hair was almost a kind of thermometer of testosterone. The more you had, the more likely it was that you were irresistible to women and unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat.
I do not come from hirsute people. My dad’s distant European roots and my mother’s Mexican heritage doomed me to a few nipple curls and nothing more. There were times as a teen that I wished my chest were covered in curly, moss-like hair, like Sean Connery, or Burt Reynolds, or Tom Selleck, a dashing TV stud with a lush coat of fur tossed across his chest.
The middle-aged men of this locker room did not wear their hair long, though; the suburbs of Washington, D.C., were straightlaced. This was crew-cut country. Hair was high and tight. But underneath their button-downs, it was hair and potbellies and ribcages. The ’80s were also fitness-focused, but muscles, it seemed to me at least, were mostly the result of genetics. Sure, there were meatheads who pumped iron in their garages, but even those guys were modestly jacked by today’s standards.
The full majesty of genetics was on display during these dog days of summer. The tall and the short. The flabby and the svelte. The chinless and the jowly. There were mustaches, too, and bony knees, and grotesque flipper feet. The elderly wore their mottled skin like meaty shawls and the young glowed, especially the older teen boys, the ones on the cusp of adulthood.
There were men I recognized. A kind, lanky neighbor with thinning hair and giant rectangular glasses, who I was told did what he had to do to survive in Vietnam. A brawny middle-school math teacher who wore a gold chain and a towel around his shoulders, and only a gold chain and a towel around his shoulders. There was the pool regular who bore an uncanny resemblance to one of my favorite wrestling heels, George “The Animal” Steele, who was built like a minivan and covered in a full-body unitard of thick black hair.
Dad Didn’t Need a Taskrabbit
My dad fixed his car engine with a Pepsi can, I complain to Claude about my leaky faucet. What happened to men?The men of the community pool did not give a shit about what they looked like naked. No one was fat or scrawny there. It was a judgment-free zone. This was the men’s locker room, and it was full of men. Full stop.
The energy in the locker room was intense, but also… liberating? Freeing? The men’s locker room was for 40-something men blowing their noses in the shower and ripping the worst, god-awful farts you’d ever heard, sometimes while they were standing right next to you.
I would sit there as belly button after belly button passed by; innies, outties, half-moons and hellmouths. And then there was my dad, no athlete. Don’t get me wrong, he was on the rowing machine in the basement every morning at 5:30 a.m. for at least 20 minutes. If the weather was nice, he’d jog around the block a few times. But he would still put back a plate of chicken-fried steak drenched in white gravy for dinner on a Tuesday night.
Naked, he looked like an eggplant on tiny stilts. He would have preferred I change from street clothes to swimming shorts and back again on the way out but he knew taking my clothes off stressed me out. There were other boys there, too, each of them as shell-shocked as me, surrounded by the same winking belly buttons and pubic bushes.
There were three rules in the locker room. All of them unspoken, telepathically conveyed, save for the first one: “Always wear your flip-flops.” My dad didn’t have to remind me to do this, of course, because there was always some dude who would spit on the shower floor, the globule of sputum too fat to be pulled down the drain, and that would make my toes curl protectively.
The second lesson: don’t stare. There is no situation where it is polite to stare, at least when it comes to the basic bylaws governing male social behavior. Staring is rude, and men who are rude without being funny are, generally speaking, a pain in the ass. The last lesson, one that seems to have been forgotten or ignored by society at large, is that a man should not give a shit what another man thinks, especially when it comes to his body, but also his choices and opinions.
Those rules snuck back into my subconscious recently while reading about Chads injecting themselves with peptides and testosterone and subjecting themselves to painful plastic surgeries. I relate to self-doubt. I understand the anxiety of being seen, of feeling judged. But then I remember not to give a shit. This wisdom is my legacy, and I bequeath it to all dudes.
I am certain many of the men who spent their summers at the community pool down Kirby Road in 1985 are dead now, casualties of unhealthy habits. Too many burgers. Too much Scotch. A lifetime of emotional repression. Hours spent sitting in a lawn chair, broiling under ultraviolet daggers. Lung cancer killed my dad, a man who loved his cigars. I may live longer than he did, but that remains to be seen. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t smoke. I huff and puff on the treadmill. But, god damn, I love ice cream sundaes.
Once my father was ready to swim, he would lead me from the dim locker room (and its smells: mildew, rotten eggs, Aqua Velva) into the scorching-hot midday sunlight. A community pool is a riot of splashing and cheering. The breeze carries the acrid stink of chlorine and lotion. It was always disorienting at first, my eyes blinking and adjusting to the light.
We’d take a moment to find a deck chair to call our own, and he’d throw our towel on it. Then he’d take off his thick black glasses and pull his blue trunks up above his belly button, exposing the whites of his thighs, and he’d smile at me, gesturing to follow him.
He’d dive into the pool and disappear. There was a time, from when he first taught me to swim in a small motel pool near Ocean City, Maryland, at the age of 6 or 7, until that summer, that I thought my dad was perfect, the strongest man to ever live, Neptune himself, even without chest hair.
Then my father would bob up from the surface in all his big-boy glory, crowned by a spray of water that caught the light, each droplet a tiny crystal from an old chandelier. That was my cue to start running. Leaping. Cannonball!
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