A LITTLE more than a generation ago, the archetype of Australian manliness was Dennis Lillee. This was a time when the full extent of male grooming in Australia was summarised in a soap commercial — “Don’t wait to be told, you need Palmolive Gold” — and when blokes who wanted to make an extra effort for a hot date would marinate themselves with Brut 33. Men like DK Lillee didn’t just have long hair and hairy chests, they had hair everywhere and they didn’t give a toss about it.
I have always been a fan of Michael Clarke the batsman but was iffy at the prospect of him becoming Test captain, especially when he tweeted a few years ago that there was nothing better than a Friday night at home having a glass of sauvignon blanc and a Radox bath. You can’t imagine DK saying that, let alone David Boon, who would probably throw up at the very thought and not just because he’d drunk 52 cans of VB.
Clarke has gone on to become an excellent captain but he is still something of a pin-up boy for the new Australian metrosexual man. While most men of my generation still sit happily in the more unkempt camp, good luck to the likes of Clarke. If men want to exfoliate, defoliate and lather themselves with scrubs and mud packs, that’s their choice.
There is, however, growing evidence that at its worst this new trend towards the male obsession with appearance has veered off into something which can occasionally be weird, and also even dangerous.
When that story broke a few years back about a St Kilda player having a graphic photo of his teammate on his iPhone, the thing which struck me as strange (from a very crowded field) was the fact that shaving off your pubic hair is apparently the go for some blokes these days. Why any man would want to go down that path is utterly beyond me.
Still, denuding yourself isn’t going to kill you, unlike the more dramatic manifestations of what is becoming a crisis at the extreme end of male self-obsession.
There was a remarkable story in the UK this week about a young man called Oli Cooney who dropped dead at the grand old age of 20 from steroid abuse. Cooney was so fixated on his physique that aside from punishing daily gym visits he turned himself into a human pin cushion. He injected such staggering amounts of anabolic steroids that he had two heart attacks and three strokes before ultimately dying from his addiction, barely out of his teens. He had told his family that he felt “invincible”.
This week, a coronial inquest in Bradford specifically attributed his death to substance abuse, with coroner Dr Dominic Bell saying: “He had this weakness that he was driven to alter his body image to become more confident in society.”
On the face of it, this story sounds like one of those random yarns that comes and goes from the other side of the world, which we read with a perverse sense of curiosity and turn the page or click elsewhere on the website. The reality, as news.com.au reported this week, is that the late Oli Cooney is an exact example of a problem which is happening with increasing frequency in Australia.
THESE are the stats quoted by that website: “The injectable drug is becoming more common in Australia, with detections of steroids at the border skyrocketing from 1038 in 2010-11 to 6126 in 2011-2012, according to the Australian Crime Commission. Many Australians have died from anabolic steroid use. For instance, 24 NSW residents died from anabolic steroid use between 1996 and 2012, according to the state’s Department of Forensic Medicine. All of them were men with an average age of 31.7.”
The figures are remarkable and reflect what I regard as the bikerfication of Australian society, where more and more men seem to be influenced by a desire to affect the hard style associated with motorcycle gangs. They also show how dopey programs such as Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex are having an influence, where fully waxed, fully pumped party boys from the US and UK become not only household names but, mystifyingly, heroes.
It is often wrongly presumed that body image issues are the preserve of women, but there is mounting evidence that men too are being afflicted. I read an article this week in the Australian Psychological Society’s journal from 2012 in which psychology Professor Vivienne Lewis from the University of Canberra wrote about a condition called muscle dysmorphia, which she describes as “a significant and distressing condition involving a preoccupation with muscularity and leanness”.
“The condition is most prevalent in men and centred on a distorted body perception where muscles and body size are perceived to be smaller than they actually are. This perception is accompanied by engagement in excess behaviours such as exercise, weightlifting, dieting and use of often dangerous body enhancement products to build muscle, including the use of steroids,” she writes.
Aside from the fact that steroids can also send you mad — a point discussed earlier this year around the sickening phenomenon of coward punch violence — we know from the case of Oli Cooney that they can also kill the user, too.
Maybe there is something to be said for the Palmolive Gold era after all, when men were smellier, haired, less pimped and preened — and happy to shamble towards middle age with a gut, rather than risk their lives and those of others at this new temple of vanity.
david.penberthy@news.com.au
I have always been a fan of Michael Clarke the batsman but was iffy at the prospect of him becoming Test captain, especially when he tweeted a few years ago that there was nothing better than a Friday night at home having a glass of sauvignon blanc and a Radox bath. You can’t imagine DK saying that, let alone David Boon, who would probably throw up at the very thought and not just because he’d drunk 52 cans of VB.
Clarke has gone on to become an excellent captain but he is still something of a pin-up boy for the new Australian metrosexual man. While most men of my generation still sit happily in the more unkempt camp, good luck to the likes of Clarke. If men want to exfoliate, defoliate and lather themselves with scrubs and mud packs, that’s their choice.
There is, however, growing evidence that at its worst this new trend towards the male obsession with appearance has veered off into something which can occasionally be weird, and also even dangerous.
When that story broke a few years back about a St Kilda player having a graphic photo of his teammate on his iPhone, the thing which struck me as strange (from a very crowded field) was the fact that shaving off your pubic hair is apparently the go for some blokes these days. Why any man would want to go down that path is utterly beyond me.
Still, denuding yourself isn’t going to kill you, unlike the more dramatic manifestations of what is becoming a crisis at the extreme end of male self-obsession.
There was a remarkable story in the UK this week about a young man called Oli Cooney who dropped dead at the grand old age of 20 from steroid abuse. Cooney was so fixated on his physique that aside from punishing daily gym visits he turned himself into a human pin cushion. He injected such staggering amounts of anabolic steroids that he had two heart attacks and three strokes before ultimately dying from his addiction, barely out of his teens. He had told his family that he felt “invincible”.
This week, a coronial inquest in Bradford specifically attributed his death to substance abuse, with coroner Dr Dominic Bell saying: “He had this weakness that he was driven to alter his body image to become more confident in society.”
On the face of it, this story sounds like one of those random yarns that comes and goes from the other side of the world, which we read with a perverse sense of curiosity and turn the page or click elsewhere on the website. The reality, as news.com.au reported this week, is that the late Oli Cooney is an exact example of a problem which is happening with increasing frequency in Australia.
THESE are the stats quoted by that website: “The injectable drug is becoming more common in Australia, with detections of steroids at the border skyrocketing from 1038 in 2010-11 to 6126 in 2011-2012, according to the Australian Crime Commission. Many Australians have died from anabolic steroid use. For instance, 24 NSW residents died from anabolic steroid use between 1996 and 2012, according to the state’s Department of Forensic Medicine. All of them were men with an average age of 31.7.”
The figures are remarkable and reflect what I regard as the bikerfication of Australian society, where more and more men seem to be influenced by a desire to affect the hard style associated with motorcycle gangs. They also show how dopey programs such as Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex are having an influence, where fully waxed, fully pumped party boys from the US and UK become not only household names but, mystifyingly, heroes.
It is often wrongly presumed that body image issues are the preserve of women, but there is mounting evidence that men too are being afflicted. I read an article this week in the Australian Psychological Society’s journal from 2012 in which psychology Professor Vivienne Lewis from the University of Canberra wrote about a condition called muscle dysmorphia, which she describes as “a significant and distressing condition involving a preoccupation with muscularity and leanness”.
“The condition is most prevalent in men and centred on a distorted body perception where muscles and body size are perceived to be smaller than they actually are. This perception is accompanied by engagement in excess behaviours such as exercise, weightlifting, dieting and use of often dangerous body enhancement products to build muscle, including the use of steroids,” she writes.
Aside from the fact that steroids can also send you mad — a point discussed earlier this year around the sickening phenomenon of coward punch violence — we know from the case of Oli Cooney that they can also kill the user, too.
Maybe there is something to be said for the Palmolive Gold era after all, when men were smellier, haired, less pimped and preened — and happy to shamble towards middle age with a gut, rather than risk their lives and those of others at this new temple of vanity.
david.penberthy@news.com.au
