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Bowflex Boy! Oh, my God, I hadn’t thought about him in YEARS..!

(insert shriek, squeal and giggle)

It all started when I saw this post title on Hugo’s blog: ““Bowflex Boy” and Kristy McNichol: desire, celebrity, and the sexiness of earthy reality.” I didn’t immediately cotton onto the meaning of “Bowflex Boy,” and I think Hugo and I must be separated in age by at least a few years ’cause Kristy McNichol is a very vague childhood memory of mine. But further down in the post, Hugo says:

If you remember the ’80s, you remember the ad. I’ve done a Google image search, and can’t find it, but the picture is indelibly carved on my brain. A young, dark-haired man is pulling off his white t-shirt, lifting his arms over his shoulders. His body beneath is tanned and spectacularly toned.

(this is where the shriek, squeal and giggle came in)

Oh hell yes, I remember Bowflex Boy! Now, I had no idea that poster was some kind of nationwide sensation, not at the time nor at any point since–as a matter of fact, all my little friends had their walls plastered with big hair band icons–I was the only girl I knew who had, of all things, a home gym equipment advertisement on my wall.

Hugo goes on to talk about how insecure Bowflex Boy’s amazing abs made him feel when hanging over his head as he was naked in college and trying to make out with some chick and (I think) by extension how this makes him empathize with women who feel stressed by the nonstop avalanche of perfect female bodies plastered on every available wall, billboard and media device. (I say I think because I had a hard time focusing on the rest of his post–I kept getting lost in fond reveries of Bowflex Boy.) I did manage to gather, though, that another of his points was that, while perfect bodies cause us to feel lustful, we shouldn’t trouble ourselves because we can and do feel as much or more lust for the imperfect bodies of the real people we find ourselves in bed with.

The thing about Bowflex Boy, though, was that it actually wasn’t his aforementioned awesome abs, or pecs, or biceps, that made me fall in lust with his poster at age sixteen. They were very nice, but honestly, Bowflex Boy wasn’t THAT muscular. He was well-defined, but actually on the slim side, and you could tell from his proportions that he probably wasn’t a particularly tall guy either. What got me going, and has definitely been a trend ever since, was the subtlety of the sexuality presented.

(Oh, yeah, SUBTLETY! Some dude taking his shirt off is SUBTLE?)

Yeah, really. This is what I remember of the poster: The lighting is dim–not dark or fuzzy, just a low quiet illumination. His shirt is halfway over his head, hiding his eyes and most of his nose. His head is inclined down and his mouth is relaxed, neither smiling nor frowning–just calm. Motion is implied, but smooth and gentle motion, without aggression or haste, but without production, either.

(Warning: The rest of this post may contain Too Much Information. Proceed at your own risk.)

My mom used to keep issues of Playgirl (and other magazines, but we’ll stick with Playgirl for the purposes of this post) around the house–I don’t know when she started, but I first happened across them when I was around twelve years old. I wasn’t too interested at the time, and in spite of my increasing interest in sex and sexual matters as the years rolled by, never really did get interested in them. Why?

The men in the pictures were naked. I didn’t have a problem with that, but their nudity consisted of staring fixedly at the camera, so by default fixedly at the viewer of the picture, in a stiff awkward pose usually involving one bent leg, one straight leg and arms akimbo at their sides. The penis, by contrast, was mostly flaccid and resting like an afterthought against whichever thigh was nearest. And it was the same with my girlfriends’ big hair band posters except that they had clothes on–the men staring directly into the camera, shoulders thrust back, arms akimbo–often staring down their noses at the camera–lips thrust out, rigid stance–it reminds me of Everything Zen by Bush, as in “…there’s no sex in your violence..!”

I have a naked picture of my boyfriend that I really like–I have been known to cart it along with me on business trips even. In it, he’s lying on the bed, clearly relaxed; he is holding his erect penis in his hand, not tightly squeezing or loosely cupping but holding with an interest, let’s say. He’s looking down at it; his expression is intent, with a hint of a smile on his mouth. I find this picture incredibly sensual. It is, in a nutshell, sex without violence–with self-knowledge, with ease and without aggression. He wants to please and to be pleased. He also isn’t a big tall guy–the lightness of his frame suggests grace, but his shape is pure male, wide shoulders and defined shoulders and biceps trailing to narrow hips–strength, but without force or crushing.

Of all the pictures and posters I saw as a teen and even into my young adulthood, only the Bowflex Boy offered that sensuality to a woman. What I don’t know is if what draws me so strongly is unusual, my own idiosyncracy, and most women are drawn to the large and forceful aggression generally pictured in the posters back then, or if that vision of male sexuality is simply what the heterosexual men who overwhelmingly dominated marketing in those days just decided that that was what women wanted to see. The fact that that poster was apparently so popular, though, inclines me to think that perhaps it really isn’t just me…anybody* have any thoughts on that?

*Note: I apologize for the heteronormative focus of this post–female het desire for a male is the only form of sexual desire I really have significant first-person experience with, though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Dudes, Fetii, Sex, This Thing of Ours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.