Mark Wahlberg, Jeremy Renner, top surgery, and me

some thoughts!

A few weeks ago, I had a piece about Mark Wahlberg go up on McSweeney’s. I am fascinated by Mark Wahlberg and his hard body, which looks a little more like a tuna someone hauled out of the Atlantic every day. I’m also fascinated by Jeremy Renner, whose body was crushed by a 14,000-pound snowplow two years ago and has since sprung back, veiny and hard, like a granitic soufflé rising in an oven of masculinity. I am fascinated by men and their bodies!

To clarify further: I am fascinated by these two examples of masculinity because their bodies are on endless display and because their fitness regimens are extreme. They’re not just eating spinach at every meal and taking brisk walks at sunset; they’re waking when it’s dark and sleeping when it’s light. They’re scheduling family time around their workouts and lifting weights with an army of personal trainers while velvet sleep is still crusting the eyes of everyone else in their house. (Lest you think I am merely being dramatic, here is Mark Wahlberg’s daily routine. He wakes up every day at 2:30 AM and is in bed by 7:30 PM. Jeremy Renner is less intense but he did recently say in an interview that he doesn’t allow himself to feel pain, which is def weird!!!) It is all in service of a goal, and their goal is not to be attractive. It is to be perfect.

What is the perfect male form? To begin with, evenly tan and meticulously groomed. A smooth, stiff torso, choked with abs, sprouting veiny arms and stout, oaken thighs. You feel that the flesh is firm, would not yield to touch. Branded merchandise should lightly graze these bodies. (Should it wick? Yes, it should wick.) There is no pleasurable ripple of fat, no outward sign of weakness. Sweat glazes the skin like a vase in a kiln. To gaze upon these bodies is to witness is a monastic commitment to firm flesh that says: I am Good because I have the discipline to make my body Hard.

It’s not just that the grind is the point, I think, but that the theatre of the grind is the point. It is not enough to see Mark Wahlberg looking swole at the premiere of an Amazon Prime original movie that is destined to max out at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. We must open our phones and see him lift, sweat, grunt, grind. We must base our opinion of him on how hard we know he works. The work is penance for having once indulged in earthly pleasures. The work is done so that one day Mark Wahlberg can arrive in Heaven covered in a thin sheen of sweat and favorably compare his body fat percentage to Jesus’s.

They - the hard men - certainly act this way because it is in service of the masculine ideal they’ve crafted in their own heads. Et cetera. I will not write a whole paragraph about the insane ways men act to convince themselves of their own masculinity, you’ve been to Home Depot before.

Joan Didion said that we tell ourselves stories to live, and I think that these men are no exception. Jeremy Renner played a strong archer in 13 movies and I sincerely believe he wishes he were a strong archer in real life. Mark Wahlberg wants very badly for you to forget that he blinded and almost killed a man 30 years ago, because he is now a family man and a devout Christian. Perhaps the answer for both men is to become swole, strong, impossibly solid and thick. Bodies as penance; bodies as testimonies to their ability to deny themselves pleasure in pursuit of an ascetic ideal.

[Bodies as Christ figure: there is absolutely a line stretching from the Christification of the body and the current Christofascist political moment that has outlawed abortion and sent innocent civilians to gulags in El Salvador.]

When I started writing this a few weeks ago, I was sitting in my living room with drains hanging off of my torso suctioning tit blood out of my chest cavity and wondering: what is my ideal physical male form? What is the goal of my body to be, to do, to look like? I find the hardness of these men’s flesh unappealing. I crave flesh that is firm but yielding and occasionally smeared with cream cheese frosting. To me the perfect male form is David Byrne dancing to Life During Wartime or Colman Domingo rocking a smoking jacket on the red carpet or Tramell Tillman dancing in the Severance S2 finale. I find aspects of masculinity I admire in George Saunders’ short stories and Luca Guadagnino’s films. I take all this to mean that my masculinity is artistic, playful, confident; I am more interested in masculinity that celebrates what makes me unique than I am in subsuming my personality in the service of a smooth, hard body that looks like every other man’s.

My dedication to fitness has changed and continues to change over time; I am mercurial and tend to alternate between cycles of working out consistently and periods of hedonistic inaction. But my goals have always been the same, and they reflect what’s important to me. I always want to be strong enough to chase my nephews around the park and toss them up in the air. I want to be mobile enough to safely spend time hiking and camping in nature. I want to have a broad, fleshy lap that is soft and warm enough for my cats to comfortably sleep on. None of these goals are tied to specific numbers or indices or require a commitment to abnegation. They are simply the demands that the life I want to live has placed on my body.

You can construct your own masculinity with whatever tools you choose. For Mark and Jeremy, the tools are weight machines and steak and ice. They are tools of hardness and rigidity and asceticism and self-denial. For me, the tools are pie and coffee and the way my friend rubbed my shoulders before I was wheeled into the operating room. They are tools of softness, of love, of creativity and joy.

(Here’s where I’ll post a picture of me for context, even though it fills me with dread to send a picture of my new body to 85 email addresses. The thing that made me change my mind was thinking that people should see more trans bodies, because they’re cool and not scary and trans people are everywhere!!! Ready? Here goes!!)

one month post-op. i know the nipples are weird, i’m literally working on it!!

Mark Wahlberg’s last good movie, as far as I can tell, was The Fighter in 2010 (my apologies to all the Deepwater Horizon stans out there). He has stopped working with filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese; his most recent project was directed by Mel Gibson. Maybe there’s something here about the glorification of the body at the expense of the mind, or even the soul?

No, it’s all too thorny for me to unpack here. I’m going to eat some cheese fries.