Getting Ripped at the Gym
The eroticism of embodiment
Content note: This article contains a discussion of anorexia.
I’ve been going to the gym lately. I’ve been lifting weights and running on treadmills and I’ve had a session with a personal trainer. For the first time in my life, I know the difference between a dumbbell and a barbell. There are protein shakes in my fridge, and they are revolting, but I drink them anyway.
I began going in January on the recommendation of a physiotherapist for sore hips (it turns out that when you lie in bed depressed for a long period, it’s not good for your body). It was not my first time in the gym, in my early 20s I frequently and inconceivably ran 5km on a treadmill after finishing my shift at a retail job, but it was my first time in the gym for several years and I had forgotten how everything works. I came back to the gym as a first-timer, creeping around the weight machines like an interloper.
I expected the gym to be many things, such as challenging, invigorating, and Good For Me in the way unpleasant things often are. I did not expect it to be so deeply horny. When I am forcing myself to go to the gym from my comfortable position on the sofa, there is only one way I can convince myself to put on my tracksuit and go - imagining how horny I’ll feel when I’m done. Both the growing muscles I get from the gym over the long term and the sore, tired feeling I get from it in the short term are surprisingly erotic experiences to me.
When I spoke to a friend about this he replied, “you are capable of being horny about literally anything” and maybe this is (delightfully, wonderfully, within reasonable limits) true. Horniness is a great motivator, working like an engine that rewards me with pleasure and excitement where previously there was none. Perhaps it is true that I am uniquely propelled forward by seeking out horniness, tearing apart every mundane experience until I can find something that gets me going, like a fox searching a bin for for an open bag of crisps.
However, despite my friend’s devastating assessment of me, I’m not alone in my gym fetishism. Researcher and sexual health worker Ben Weil wrote an article for GQ about the fetish known as “gaining” which they define as “a broad church of a fetish (or fetishes) for people – mostly but not exclusively queer men – who find sexual pleasure in the gaining of fat or muscle or both.” I have previously written about feederism in relation to the taboo act of women enjoying food, and gaining for men can follow a complementary path of male power being displayed and eroticised through increased size.
In their piece, Ben describes struggling with anorexia and debilitating body dysmorphia until they joined a gym in 2019 and began lifting weights, at which point their relationship with their body gradually flipped from shame to pleasure, writing:
I found it erotic. I found I could channel that erotic impulse back into the process, too, as a kind of positive feedback loop, fuelling the will to keep eating and returning to the gym week after week.
The act of gaining muscle, for Ben, was a way to reconnect with his body after the dissociation and separation that happens between body and mind in anorexia, where the body is a highly-controlled object separate from the self that is denied the enjoyment and vitality of food. Anorexia, in my experience with it, was a bid to kill my body while remaining alive. This could only be attempted with a terrible sleight of hand whereby I separated myself from my physical being so acutely that it was no longer part of me.
Perhaps going to the gym can be a homecoming into the body – one that, for me, began with gender transition and is being shepherded further by purposefully shaping and sculpting my body through regular exercise. Exercise to build muscle requires – demands – an unavoidable commitment to the camp bit of existing as a physical being.
Being present in my body has opened the door to being turned on by it. It’s been resurrected from a dormant, psychically dead object into a fleshy, fatty, muscled, wonderful and horny part of myself. Lately and not coincidentally, I have been repeatedly coming back to Huw Lemmey’s short story None of these words are in the Bible about an impenetrable and image-obsessed Saint Sebastian who discovers the joy of flesh and fucking:
He didn’t slowly slip into his fleshy body. He bounded into it. He was flung into himself at speed. There is no zealot like a convert; alive to himself he proselytised this new faith, touching and being touched in every situation. He fell to his knees with joy at what had been revealed to him. He greeted with a kiss; he let his hand slide down your back; he held your arm and lent close to confide a good word: I love my body. It can do amazing things.
There is a shift that occurs when you stop having a body and start being a body. You are, like Huw writes, flung into [your]self at speed when your mind finally reconnects with the pleasure of being in the world. The body is no longer an object to be graded and shamed, but rather it becomes a conduit for enjoyment. When Saint Sebastian becomes penetrable his body is no longer an image to be rigidly controlled and ascribed arbitrary value, but rather the link between himself and the world around him that can do amazing things. It can no longer be ascribed value by himself or others because its innate value as part of the world has been recognised – I see my own changing relationship with my body reflected in this.
The gym is both a space of self-discipline and self-actualisation, both of which happen to be my favourite things. I am nestling down and, like Saint Sebastian, bounding into my body with joy I have not felt since I transitioned. Like transitioning, committing to building and shaping my body has powerfully reawakened its sensuality. I don’t mean to over-advertise the gym - I am still body conscious at times, there are parts of my body I see as unsatisfactory images rather than parts of me, but the forgotten connection between myself and the world is slowly being rejoined. The pain after a heavy workout is a reminder that I did something with my body in the world – it is the same kind of memento as bruising or hickeys after sex, saying Robin and his body were here.
I was in conversation with my therapist this week, as I have done every week for the past five years. We were talking about replacing shame with compassion and I told him that recently I feel like a whole person for the first time in my life. He beamed at me (presumably hearing this is the therapist’s equivalent of finishing a satisfying craft project) and replied that the parts of myself that had previously been pushed away and isolated are rejoining. I turned this over in my head for a while and decided that it was true. I have pushed parts of myself away for a long time, including my body, out of shame and fear. By reawakening the connection between my body and the world, I am coming back to it after long time away and leaving my suitcase at the door. I am coming home and it is fantastically horny.
Looking at Porn is written around my full time job working on health inequalities. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, you can tip me on Ko-Fi here. You can follow my Instagram here and you can email me at robinccraig@gmail.com if you like. Please be mindful of emailing me your own trauma stories - I do not have capacity to reply with due care.
If you’d like to read more of my writing, I recently wrote some unsettling erotica for Irresistible Damage magazine called Fucking Cis Men.
Yep, this is how getting seriously into yoga has made me feel. I hope every trans person in the world finds a way of moving their body that they actually like and then does it.