Today he likes the big man with a gym: a return to the past

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bobby Gillespie, drummer of Jesus and Mary Chain and frontman of Primal Scream, was as good as a musician but as good as skinny. He did everything he could to lose that extra inch of waistline needed to slip into size 28 jeans, the same as the young Mick Jagger. I believe that very few men today look to Jagger as an aesthetic model: no Italian male wants to look like a slouching ephebe.

Although thinness has been a coveted goal for almost the entire spectrum of sexual identities for decades, in recent years the male population has abandoned the myth of a body like that of Betty Catroux and, at the top of their wish list, has placed the inverted trapezoid shape of the bòro gymnasium, a being whose pre-modern physical prowess is not the result of fatigue as in the case of an Ontario woodcutter, but of sports technology and its sparkling tools. Yet, while allowing itself to be crushed under the weight of a lat machine that has more gears than an automaton, Homo Italicus is convinced that it is escaping the domain of technique and sophistication.

By cutting the bridges with a physicality like that of Jagger, which they consider artificial and inauthentic, these towers of flesh, these tattooed kebabs delude themselves to aspire to a dimension of new authenticity. And in this great conceptual confusion, man takes a step back in time. Is it an involutionary leap or a regurgitation of ancestral impulses?

In my opinion, the muscular obsession of the new males is the alarm signal that heralds a (first) cultural and (later) genetic involution.

Dorian Gray’s portrayal of male ambition, or the representation of the desire for what new males would like to be, is in effect going back in time. And not because he recovers the aberrant steroid fads of a few decades ago, but because it points to an idea of ​​masculinity (almost certainly never existed) that has very little to do with the human and embraces the animal kingdom.

In order to free himself from the suffocating embrace of technique, the new male demonstrates (especially when he is in public and in the presence of his peers) a worrying passion for contact with nature, trekking, physical exercise and – final phase reserved for orangutans. hierarchs who hide in Milan – the campsite, a veritable metastasis of toxic masculinity. Everything to distance ourselves from what is considered artificial. Everything to eliminate any trace of sophistication from one’s life (and from one’s body)sometimes in the perverse belief that avoiding wearing a perfume will make him look like Marlon Brando directed by Elia Kazan.

Today the portrait of Dorian Gray has grown muscular, bearded and hairy. The young Jagger was artificial and sophisticated: terms that once embodied positive values, because they gave a glimpse of the future, of progress, of evolution. The new male, on the other hand, finds himself more in the crude and muscular image that was well embodied by a crude like Robert Plant.
And this involution affects not only the development of the biceps, but also that of the brain. Because moving away from technology means moving away from knowledge. Today ignorance is shown off as a medal of value, because in ignorance we delude ourselves in Pasolini’s way of finding a root of purity, an element of lost humanity (or animality).

In the sixties and seventies ignorance was stigmatized, suggesting the legacy of rubble (human, social and economic) of two world wars. In the eighties and nineties we began to pamper ignorance ironically, as if it were a clumsy but ultimately harmless and affectionate dog. He pretended to be ignorant to laugh with friends, like to exorcise the specter of true ignorancethe one that (in fact) terrified people in the previous two decades.
At this rate, monkey clans from the gyms will pour into the streets of our cities like those of 2001: A Space Odyssey, parades of primates staring up at buildings and skyscrapers, unable to understand what those monoliths are for. smooth, precise and suspiciously artificial.