Skip to main content
Book cover

The Male Body in Representation pp 53–74Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘You’re a Real Man After All’: Fashioning the Male Physique in Twentieth-Century Boxing and Wrestling Magazines

  • 93 Accesses

Part of the Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender book series (PSRG)

Abstract

As part of their intriguing research on constructions of the ‘ideal male body’ in the US-American cultural imaginary, this article by Ana Stevenson and David Patrick examines three US-based boxing and wrestling magazines, popular during the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing specifically on advertisements in The Ring, Boxing and Wrestling, and Boxing Illustrated Wrestling News, Stevenson and Patrick show that the ‘perfect male physique’ the magazines fashioned served to interpellate male readers into connected ideals of economic success, physical strength, and sexual prowess. The ‘paranoid’ perspective adopted by Stevenson and Patrick exposes the magazines’ complicity with reasserting ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and reinforcing exclusive notions of the US national body as being based on the white male citizen’s body, which resonates with the era’s conservatism.

Keywords

  • Boxing
  • Wrestling
  • Bodybuilding
  • Manliness
  • Masculinity
  • Male body

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

eBook
USD   19.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • ISBN: 978-3-030-88604-2
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
Hardcover Book
USD   29.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Boxing and wrestling’s historical emergence from transatlantic sporting culture has been elaborated by Gorn (1986), Sammons (1990), Rickard (1999), and Boddy (2008).

  2. 2.

    The term ‘muscular Christianity’ first appeared in Saturday Review, specifically in T. C. Sandars’s book review of Charles Kingsley’s provincial novel Two Years Ago (1857) (Hall 1994, 7).

  3. 3.

    The most pernicious connections between white manhood and racial dominance were taken to their logical extension in Nazi Germany, where physical fitness became deeply enmeshed with fascism and National Socialism. Indeed, Adolf Hitler was deeply displeased when the African-American runner Jesse Owens prevailed at the 1936 Olympic Games (Blom 2015, 162–172, 355–372), as Owens’s multiple gold medal wins publicly undermined entrenched and widely propagated Nazi ideas concerning white superiority and fitness.

  4. 4.

    Interestingly, by relying on a pattern of ‘before’ and ‘after’, the typical bodybuilding testimonial of the 1950s can be read as precursor of contemporary representations in social media.

  5. 5.

    These representations followed logics of class. Indeed, economic success—they suggested—could preclude the allegedly inherent manly tendency to resort to violent behavior.

  6. 6.

    This magazine was later renamed Muscle Builder (1953–1980) and then Muscle & Fitness (1980–).

  7. 7.

    Kenneth R. Dutton suggests that assumptions about the relationship between muscularity and homosexuality may operate more at the level of cultural idea than reality, insofar as same-sex desire may be no more statistically prevalent amongst bodybuilders than in the community at large (2014, 221–222).

References

  • Alvarez, Erick. Muscle Boys: Gay Gym Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Archer, John. “Violence between Men.” In Male Violence, edited by John Archer, 121–140. London: Routledge, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Blom, Philipp. Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918–1938. London: Atlantic Books, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boddy, Kasia. Boxing: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boxing and Wrestling. Edited by Joe Weider, vols. 1–13 (1952–1966).

    Google Scholar 

  • Boxing Illustrated Wrestling News. Edited by Stanley Weston (later Abe Glick), vols. 1–9 (1958–1967).

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, Liz. “Ladies Last: Masculinization of the American War Film in the 1920s.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 43, no. 4 (2015): 171–187.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Devienne, Elsa. “The Right to the Beach? Urban Renewal, Public Space Policing and the Definition of a Beach Public in Postwar Los Angeles, 1940s–1960s.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines no. 3 (2016): 31–51.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Muscle Beach: Reassessing the Muscular Physique in Postwar America, 1940s–1980s.” Southern California Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2018): 324–367.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Dutton, Kenneth R. “Sexuality and the Muscular Male Body.” In Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality, edited by Jennifer Hargreaves and Eric Anderson, 218–225. London: Routledge, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dutton, Kenneth R., and Ronald S. Laura. “Towards a History of Bodybuilding.” Sporting Traditions 6, no. 1 (1989): 25–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • Evensen, Bruce J. “Boxing Journalism.” In Encyclopedia of American Journalism, edited by Stephen L. Vaughn, 60–63. New York: Routledge, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Donald E. “Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body.” In Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, edited by Donald E. Hall, 3–16. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hogg, Robert. Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Howarth, Patrick. Play Up and Play the Game: The Heroes of Popular Fiction. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gorn, Elliott J. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, David K. Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement. New York: Columbia UP, 2019.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kimmel, Michael S. The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Linker, Beth. “Feet for Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America.” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 1 (2007): 91–109.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Martschukat, Jürgen. “‘The Necessity for Better Bodies to Perpetuate Our Institutions, Insure a Higher Development of the Individual, and Advance the Conditions of the Race’: Physical Culture and the Formation of the Self in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century USA.” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 4 (2011): 472–493.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • McKenzie, Shelly. Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moskowitz, Marina, and Marlis Schweitzer. “Introduction: ‘The Spirit of Emulation’.” In Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community, edited by Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz, 1–22. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Padurano, Dominique. “‘Dear Friend’: Charles Atlas, American Masculinity, and the Bodybuilding Testimonial, 1894–1944.” In Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community, edited by Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz, 173–186. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patrick, David. Reporting Genocide: Media, Mass Violence and Human Rights. London: I. B. Tauris, 2018.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reich, Jacqueline. “‘The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man’: Charles Atlas, Physical Culture, and the Inscription of American Masculinity.” Men and Masculinities 12, no. 4 (2010): 444–461.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Richardson, Niall. “The Queer Activity of Extreme Male Bodybuilding: Gender Dissidence, Auto-Eroticism and Hysteria.” Social Semiotics 14, no. 1 (2004): 49–65.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Rickard, John. “‘The Spectacle of Excess’: The Emergence of Modern Professional Wrestling in the United States and Australia.” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 1 (1999): 129–132.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Sammons, Jeffrey T. Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–37. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shurley, Jason, and Jan Todd. “Joe Weider, All American Athlete, and the Promotion of Strength Training for Sport: 1940–1969.” Iron Game History 12, no. 1 (2012): 4–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Silbey, David. “Bodies and Cultures Collide: Enlistment, the Medical Exam, and the British Working Class, 1914–1916.” Social History of Medicine 17, no. 1 (2004): 61–76.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Spierenburg, Pieter, ed. Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • The Ring. Edited by Nat Fleischer, vol. 31–47 (1952–1968).

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomczik, Adam. “‘He‐Men Could Talk to He‐Men in He‐Man Language’: Lumberjack Work Culture in Maine and Minnesota, 1840–1940.” The Historian 70, no. 4 (2008): 697–715.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Winter, Jay Murray. “Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain during the First World War.” Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 2 (1980): 211–244.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern Queensland, QLD, Toowoomba, Australia

    Ana Stevenson

  2. University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

    David Patrick

Authors
  1. Ana Stevenson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. David Patrick
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Stevenson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. American Studies, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Carmen Dexl

  2. English Studies: Literature and Culture, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Silvia Gerlsbeck

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Stevenson, A., Patrick, D. (2022). ‘You’re a Real Man After All’: Fashioning the Male Physique in Twentieth-Century Boxing and Wrestling Magazines. In: Dexl, C., Gerlsbeck, S. (eds) The Male Body in Representation. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88604-2_3

Download citation