Bodybuilders vs. the rest of us

As I approached the Columbus Convention Center, site of the 2009 Arnold Classic Bodybuilding Championship and Fitness Weekend, I saw a sign above the doors that read: "Welcome to the Freak Show." Before I could draw my camera and shoot, a bodybuilding enthusiast— who didn't appreciate someone's brave joke— ripped it down, crumbling the sign in his massive fists before throwing it in the trash.

Having competed in the Arnold Weightlifting Championships four times, I at least understood the metaphor. No event offers more silicone, steroids, and enhanced human physiques than the Arnold Fitness Weekend, a three-day festival of sport, bodybuilding and fitness held in late winter for the past 21 years.

This past weekend, more than 165,000 overly muscled men and surgically enhanced women descended on Columbus. Anyone who knows that only 15% of Americans even belong to a gym might imagine that the event organizers had emptied America's health clubs and bussed the better specimens to Columbus for the weekend.

Mascara-drenched Amazons

A casual observer might have mistaken the place for a porno set. Inside the convention center, men with melon-sized shoulders, chests spread like the horizon, and sides of beef for arms plowed through the crowd, stopping to occasionally ogle the artificially tanned women dressed in rump-hugging skin-pants and halter tops (if that much). And the main expo hall laid out avenues of stalls, behind which bikini-clad, breast-enhanced and mascara-drenched amazons hawked an array of products, from molecularly designed protein powders to thermogenic weight-loss products, as well as a few supplements—like the andros of the 1990s—surely headed for federal drug-law banishment.

The elevated platform in the main hall featured the amateur bodybuilding (men's and women's), fitness competition, deadlift championship, and six strongmen events (men only), where the average contestant stood at 6'3" and weighed 350 pounds. These titans of our species pressed train axles, pulled a bar laden with Hummer-tires (nearly 1,000 pounds) from the floor and finally had to master "The Circus Dumbbell," which required competitors to use only one arm to overhead press a three-inch diameter handled, 202-pound dumbbell as many times as possible in 90 seconds

The weekend culminated with the Arnold Classic Bodybuilding Championships on Saturday. Here, gargantuan freaks of nature enacted posing routines incorporating dance, pageantry and occasionally even gymnastic moves, all choreographed to exhibit— and be judged upon— the symmetry, definition, and enormousness of their musculature.

What drives 165,000 people to attend such an event each year? More to the point, what drives me to attend it and compete in it?

From philosophy to bodybuilding

Strangely enough, it was philosophy that first drew me to bodybuilding. When I was a grad student at Temple, my roommate and two friends took Richard Shusterman's seminar in aesthetics. At the time, Shusterman was still developing his theory of somaesthetics, which he has since fleshed out to understand the body as a subject and locus of aesthetic inquiry. The field he pioneered contends that many "body art" practices can help to answer the fundamental question of "how we ought to live."

The course textbooks included The Leatherman's Handbook (on sadomasochism), a treatise on tattooing, philosophical essays by Theodore Adorno and Nietzsche, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. While Shusterman despaired over the contemporary pedagogical problems of "asking students to lift weights or perform yoga postures," three of his students and I paged through Arnold's book in awe and immediately began hitting the gym at 6 a.m. for our training in bodybuilding.

Following Arnold's routines for only a few years drastically altered my body (I actually had to lose a great deal of my upper-body mass to become a good Olympic weightlifter). As my arms and chest grew larger and the striations between my muscles grew deeper, I not only began to view the body as a work of art, but I also stopped viewing professional bodybuilders as freaks and instead began seeing them as men and women who were actively redefining the limits of human potential.

Bodybuilders as physical and moral ideals

By incorporating the discipline that bodybuilding demands, I began to see a person's physique as a visual representation of character. Bodybuilders may still put their pants on one leg at a time, but by sculpting their bodies as works of art, they live their lives in a manner that's virtually unrecognizable to the average American.

Which is a shame. "Every man," wrote Thoreau, "is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships… We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." Judeo-Christian philosophy similarly promotes the notion that the body is a temple of the Lord. But in the U.S.—an allegedly Judeo-Christian nation, 60% of whose residents are obese— you can't help wondering, "What kind of temple do these people think God wants to live in?"

The Arnold Fitness Weekend is one if the few places in America where such questions don't arise. In this inverted America, everyone looks fit, young, healthy and proud. During the bodybuilding and fitness competitions, an awed silence descends on the crowd, and the sense becomes less one of pageantry (of, say, a fashion show catwalk or a Miss America contest) and more the hushed awe of a religious ceremony. But here, the ideals don't lie in some unreachable heaven; they pace the stage and walk among us as moral exemplars whose very appearance answers the question: "How should I live my life?"

But is it cheating?

Steroids aside, I would argue that bodybuilding is one of the most ethical endeavors in art history. The bodybuilder's commitment rivals the asceticism of a monk and pursues the same goal of attaining a spiritual ideal through physical discipline.

But what about those who use steroids and silicone? Aren't they cheating? If these artificial aids enhance a work of art, I would argue, who is being cheated?

To be sure, Michelangelo molded his statues without the benefit of drugs or modern tools. But who would vilify a modern sculptor for using a mechanized drill or acid?

A bodybuilder's art form incorporates an ethical component unknown to other artists. Michelangelo spent less time and less rigorous attention on his David than Frank Zane spent perfecting his physique. Michelangelo's sculpture expanded the definition of art; but isn't it possible that these "living sculptures" could further expand our definition of art (and humanity too) as well?

The freak show, revisited

The Arnold Classic weekend does not differ much from a carnival freak show except in one key aspect: Here, the word "freak" defines the unbelievably exceptional, the superhuman effort, the revelation of what individual humans can achieve with their bodies as well as their minds.

Only an unhealthy and obese culture would apply derisive terms like "Adonis Complex" and "athletic anorexia" to people who pursue bodily perfection.

My four weekends at the Arnold have opened my eyes to the possibilities latent in human potential. Watch the video of Kai Greene—this year's winner of the professional bodybuilding—and ask yourself which vision you prefer: an America populated by Kai Greene's type of "freakishness" or what you might see outside a sports stadium.

That "Welcome to the Freak Show" banner was indeed misplaced. It should have hung inside the exit doors at the Arnold, warning departing participants and visitors that they are leaving the temple and entering the sedentary circus that is 21st-Century America.