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PUMPING IRONY: CRISIS AND CONTRADICTION IN BODYBUILDING
ALAN M. KLEIN
Northeastern University
While the projection of ideal images is very important in American culture, it is in the subculture of sport and bodybuilding that it gets carried to tbe extreme. A 4 year study of bodybuilding's Mecca-Southern California- revealed a fundamental set of discrepancies between what the subculture projects as ideal and what actually goes on. These discrepancies are examined to determine which ones result from changes that have taken place in bodybuilding and which are structural to it. It is shown that as the sportsubculture altered its image to achieve cultural respectability, it inadvertently created new problems. The shifts are examined within the context of studies of deviance and point to the need for a long term ethnography in sport sociology.
Sociologists and anthropologists have avoided disciplinary conflict in part because they have drawn territorial boundaries that complement each others' interests, a feat that has as much to do with avoidance as it does engagement. Subject matter and methodology were divided so as to avoid turf issues. According to this simplified scheme, anthropologists study exotic cultures (preferably non-White and non-European) while sociologists seek out Westem societies. Anthropologists do qualitative analysis, while sociologists focus on quantitative. Enough is shared between them to constitute an intellectual demilitarized zone filled with anthropologists studying Westem urban contexts and rural sociologists working in areas like Brazil and the Philippines.
The study of sport reflects both the separation and complementarity between sociology and anthropology. Sport sociology has been even more separate from anthropology than have other sociological fields, making the potential contributions from ethnography more promising. The following ethnographic study will speak to the fruitful relationship between the disciplines of sport sociology, urban anthropology, and studies of subculture. In particular, the relationship between cultural ideals and behavioral actuality will be examined. While both disciplines share an interest in this relationship, they have framed it somewhat differently (e.g., Durkheim, 1953; Becker, 1963; Diamond, 1972; Linton, 1945; Freilich 1977). Using some of the more recent contributions from the field of subcultural studies, this paper focuses on the use of historical analysis and power relationships to look at discrepancies between ideal and real (Hebdige, 1983).
In sport analysis there is an immediate difference in the way the two fields define the appropriate subject of study. Sociologists study sport, while anthropologists deal with play. Play is certainly a broader category of behavior than sport, covering as it does, for instance, a child sitting alone making mudpies, as well as organized competition. By and large, however, anthropological studies of play view sport as less common in kin-based, nonstate societies, hence more properly the realm of other social scientists.
The association that each discipline forms also reflects these divisions. The North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) studies Western sport or occasionally sport in Eastern industrial society (e.g., Cantelon & Gruneau, 1982; Eitzen, 1983). Exceptions are uncommon, such as Lever's study of soccer in Brazil (Lever, 1983). On the other hand, The Anthropological Association for the Study of Play (TAASP) tends to look at games and play in a Third World context (e.g., Stevens, 1977; Schwartzman, 1980; Blanchard and Cheska, 1983). The commitment to ethnography and fieldwork is noted in the work on sport carried out by anthropologists, while their sociologist colleagues lean heavily toward quantitative methods. It is the possibility of a sport ethnography within the sociological domain of contemporary industrial sport that represents a fruitful merger of anthropological orientation and sociological setting. This study attempts such a fusion.
Sport Sociology and the Ethnography of Sport
Sport sociologists occupy a position of low status within the hierarchy of sociological specializations. Studying almost any institution, be it law, family, corporations, even deviance itself, seems more legitimate than the study of sport. Among sport sociologists there is an unstated consensus about the negative views their colleagues outside the specialty have of them. In partial response to this, sport sociologists have compensated with a hyperempirical methodology. Quantitative sport studies predominate as evidenced by the citations of work in leading texts (Coakley, 1982; Eitzen and Sage, 1978; Leonard, 1960). Journals such as the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Sociology of Sport Journal, also point to a gap at least as large as the one that separates the disciplines of sociology and anthropology.
Anthropologists have increasingly carried out ethnographies and fieldwork on games (Blanchard & Cheska, 1985). With few exceptions, however, these studies have been on nonindustrial peoples (e.g., Geertz, 1972) or marginal groups within industrial societies (e.g., Tindall, 1975). While these are worthwhile anthropological contributions that deepen our understanding of culture, they do little to inform our understanding of American or Western society as it is affected by and through sport. This reinforces the oft-held view of anthropology as having little to say about the dominant society. Anthropologists have developed their analysis of small-scale societies, however, seeing them as a set institutions and cultural variables which act to integrate and alter that society through consensus and conflict. This assessed through participant observation. More important, anthropologists stress the use of culture as a prism through which social life can be interpreted. While sociologists are aware of these techniques and perspectives, it is the anthropologists who have developed them more fully. As a result, they can be used to advantage where other perspective have previously prevailed.
Sport ethnography is virtually nonexistent. Participant observation in the service of sport reporting is not in itself sufficient. On occasion, journalists with unusually keen insight and a sense of social analysis inadvertently cross over into the realm of ethnography (e.g., Lipsyte, 1975; Boswell, 1983). However, these efforts remain dilettantish rather than being serious ethnography. The observations of Janet Lever in her thoughtful sociological work on Brazilian soccer (1983), or those of Brower (1975) or Devereux (1976) on Little Leaguers, are not the same as those of Colin TurnbuU (1965) or Spradley (1970) or Lee (1979). Missing is the view of soccer or baseball as a self-contained integrated whole, a cultural diorama That totality and the insight and understanding that comes from the method and perspective of ethnography can be a critical element in the rise of sport sociology to a position of prominence.
Sport Ethnography and Subcultural Studies
The gap between sport sociology and ethnography can be bridged by looking at the analysis of subcultures. Although primarily the contribution of sociologists, anthropologists have not been altogether absent (e.g., Liebow, 1969; Spradley & Mann, 1975; Daner, 1976; Keiser, 1979). The theoretical debates have centered on the function, origins, and systematic workings of subcultures but have mistakenly placed such work within the area of deviance. Periodic, reassessments (e.g., Matza, 1969; Brake, 1980; Hebdige, 1983) have done little to change this view. Anthropologists are uncomfortable with the way in which sociologists have lumped disparate subcultures under the heading deviance. Despite cautioning us about the larger society's method of stigmatizing and labeling deviants, sociologists continued use of the label sanctions it (see Hebdige, 1983). In anthropology the tradition of cultural relativism is sufficiently strong to promote a view of subculture that avoids deviance connotations, in part by focusing on the study of cultural entities via ethnography. Through relativism, and by partially sacrificing the subculture's ties to the larger society, the ethnography can intensively examine a subculture, giving it an integrity that ethnographic tradition often bestows upon its subject. Admittedly, unless one is careful the relations between the part and the whole (i.e., the sub culture and the larger society) can be sacrificed; this hurts analysis but is more than made up for by affording a view at the subculture freed of the deviance label.
Some sociologists distinguish between subcultures on the basis of delinquency, thereby dichotomizing between delinquent and occupational subculture (Downes, 1966) or delinquent and subterranean subcultures (Matza, 1964). Sport subculture would seemingly fall into the category of the more acceptable work and countercultural groups. Many assume that sport as a whole is synonymous with socialization of norms (e.g., Phillips & Schafer, 1971). Others see this as the province of specific sport subcultures (Loy, McPherson, and Kenyon, 1978). Clearly there is a need for the establishment of a sport ethnography in looking at the machinations and function of sport subculture.
The neat division between delinquent and subterranean subculture that Matza (1969) points to, and the view of sport subculture as fitting neatly into the mainstream, is somewhat rattled by the case of competitive bodybuilding in Southern California.
BODYBUILDING AS SUBCULTURE
The respect by the larger society that has eluded bodybuilding for so long is finally within reach. This acceptance can be measured by the astounding growth in the past decade of competitive and noncompetitive bodybuilding. Trade publications estimate that as many as 85 million Americans engage in some form of weight training, and while only a tin, fraction will ever develop enough to compete, almost alt of them are expecting to see bodily transformation. In the sense they are all bodybuilders, body shapers, or body designers. Over 100 countries now sanction and promote it as a sport, making bodybuilding the 7th largest sport federation in the world. Southern California, and Olympic Gym in particular, is the pulse of bodybuilding. It is the nexus between bodybuilding as sport and subculture, and as such it is the ideal place to study its cultural properties. As the self-styled core of bodybuilding, Olympic Gym has been home to almost every great bodybuilder of the past two decades.
Venice, California, is the perfect setting for a subculture as visually exotic as bodybuilding. Muscle Beach, Olympic. Gold's, and World's Gyms are all within a square mile of each other, making it easy for people to characterize the area as a haven for the practitioners of this sport. Venice, however, lends the entire complex a good deal of its own color. The ideologues of the sport-the Weider brothers who own the largest conglomerate of bodybuilding products in the world and who are headquartered nearby in Woodland Hills-view the free spirited and tolerant climate of Venice as somewhat excessive and potentially embarrassing. They strive to gam respect by projecting a persona of wholesomeness. By dovetailing with the fitness movement, the behemoths who determine bodybuilding's cultural images through their magazines are concerned with gaining cultural respectability rather than trendy popular cultural status. To come closer to mainstream culture, three values are heavily projected to the public via the leading publications: health, heterosexuality, and rugged individualism. As mainstream values, these three differ from values sought by other subcultures. Bodybuilding does not perceive the larger society as malfunctioning and in need of alternatives. If anything, the bodybuilding subculture is conservative, or as Matza might claim, an occupational subculture (1969).
A tension exists within bodybuilding's subculture, one between the ideal image as expressed in the three values listed above, and bodybuilding institutions that foster different and often contradictory behavior. In anthropology these discrepancies have been called "ideal versus real" culture patterns. First the status of bodybuilding in sports must be discussed.
Bodybuilding: Sport or Spectacle?
Bodybuilding rests precipitously between sport and spectacle. If professional wrestling or roller derby have become synonymous with spectacle, it is not because of their inability to meet basic definitions of sport Structurally, they meet the outlines presented by Coakley (1982), who cites physical exertion, competition, and organization as three key traits all sports must have. Bodybuilding has some unique problems in meeting these criteria.
All three of Coakley's traits can be found in bodybuilding. The International Federation of Body Building (IFBB) is the dominant organiation in the sport. Contests are highly competitive, but the physical exertion and demonstration of skills which most people assume runs in tandem with organization and competition, is conspicuously absent. It takes place separately and is linked to the contest only as a visual reportage-a posing routine. This transforms the contest into a nonphysical event that outsiders often see as being like a beauty contest. Insiders defend against this by claiming that the sport is both sport and art weight training is the sport, and posing and competitions are the art. Regardless of how they divide their field, the physical component is not contemporaneous with the organized competition, raising a claim that it is not a sport at alt but a spectacle. Belly dancing is not a sport, yet many of its practitioners engage in weight training and enter competitions. Even with bodybuilding there has been a tendency of late to exaggerate the spectacle with the use of props and outrageous costuming and makeup (e.g., The Night of the Champions, a professionnal contests).
Definition of sport is mediated by other factors, however, most notably the media's willingness to accept an activity as such and the public's acceptance of that decision. Within the past decade just such a passive acquiescence seems to have occurred through the dramatic rise in popularly of "trash sports" (Sewart 1983). Bodybuilding rode that crest first through the attention received by the award-winning film Pumping Iron, and second with network telecasts of some of the better bodybuilding contests. This supported the view that virtually any sporting event would generate sufficient ratings, and contests along with prize money proliferated during the late 1970s. The advent of women's body building made the most dramatic impact however, because it opened the sport/spectacle to a hitherto excluded group. And to the thousands of fans who willingly paid as much as $100 a seat to get into the Mr. Olympia contest the temporal break meant nothing.
Closely related to bodybuilding is the intemationally recognized sport of powerlifting. Here, one sees all three Coakley's traits functioning at once. Both powerlifting and bodybuilding stemmed from the 19th-century strongman acts of Europe, with the former monopolizing the strength feature while bodybuilding focused on the physique. Between them exists an uneasy truce marked by the condescension of powerlifters toward their counterparts. The 11 powerlifters at Olympic (most prefer more utilitarian, austere gyms) were given a wide berth and respect granted only to the top people in the gym. Yet it is bodybuilding, not powerlifting, that has risen to cultural prominence, a rise that bears testimony to the media's ability to redefine cultural institutions and their definitions.
While the status of bodybuilding is not universally accepted, its position as a subculture is even more questionable. Many of the practices and beliefs held by bodybuilders have undergone a degree of change as a result of the new-found acceptance of the sport. Media attention exacerbates this, with the result being that discrepancies emerge between what is consciously being presented about the sport and what actually goes on. Three of the more glaring examples are individualism as a self-definition versus socially determined self, (b) health versus illness, (c) heterosexual projection versus homosexuality.
Individualism Versus Socially Determined Self
Bodybuilders prefer to be thought of as rugged individuals. Their very presence in such an individualized sport speaks to that preference. Those who came to the sport with a previous sport background invariably note their disdain for team sports and what it implies: I began developing a strong sense of individuality quite early. I was always turned off by team sports. I just didn't like being part of a team and the backslapping and groupie sweating and all that. I would rather spend time in my basement pumping iron. I liked football and all, but there was too much sharing. I just didn't wanna depend on anyone. I wanted to do something totally by myself. Bodybuilding is it.
A recent study of bodyboilders (Sprague, n.d.) used the Cattell 16PF psychology test on a random sample of people and found that bodybuilders were significantly more self-sufficient and less group dependent than the mean population. Of the numerous interviews conducted between 1979 and 1984, the expressed lack of ties among bodybuilders was typical, with characteristic comments like, "I'm a loner" or "I'm not easy to make friends with."
Question: Do you hang around with anyone in the gym?
Answer: No, no. You don't hang around with those guys. You're not gonna get it (acknowledgement) from them. The gym isn't really a social situation for me. I don't think these guys make friends. You know what the problem is? Bodybuilders are selfish. and I been around for 10 years. They have to be. All they do is think about themselves That's why _______ was popular. Cuz in a sport where selfishness, size, and hustling count, he was the most selfish, the biggest hustler, and just the biggest.
Within the gym, however, there are distinct social and psychological categories, the most significant being gender. Women are far more likely to be social, more likely to bond with others than men are. They are also mare likely to lend mutual assistance (Klein, 1985b). However, because men make up the majority of the gym's population, and always have, the atmosphere still rings of indifference, and at times even surliness. The social solidarity of women is typified in the following:
Women are tighter. I've seen girls swap clothing, posing suits at contests. And they helped me with my hair and makeup when my hairdresser didn't show up on time. Some of the girls really help each other. Like P. She had gas. She said to C, "I gotta get rid of this gas. " So C starts taking her through these stomach exercises that will help her move the gas around, and she massages her stomach for it. It was really neat the way she put her own considerations aside... People help each other and that's what I like about the competitions.
The daily routine of bodybuilders and the relations they fashion and act in are all couched in atomistic behavior. Special dietary restrictions makes eating fairly dull and a more or less isolated act. The entire day is built around training, and much of the mental preparation is of the self-motivating form: no team sessions or mutual psyching (with one notable exception) as found in other sports. At the gym no one dares to break into someone else's routine or approach equipment until relatively certain that it is unused. Conversation, especially as a contest nears, is often kept to a minimum while working out.
While we're training, we don't wanna be bothered It's much more social for non-serious bodybuilders. Those guys have time to bullshit in the gym. I'm very sociable really. But I know when to cut it off. When I'm training I don't want to be bothered, like right now. I can't talk now, man.
Thus while the gym may appear as if it is rocking in collective exertion, it is, with the exception of the training partnership, really a long sequence of individual efforts.
It is in competing, however, that one glimpses the extent of the individualism. All pretense at social bonding abandoned, each bodybuilder views others suspiciously. Competitors in bodybuilding (unlike most other sports) train together in the same place, and each day of contest preparation is dotted with confrontations and guarded acts lest one's physical condition be prematurely revealed. To assure this privacy the body is swaddled in sweat clothes, no information is given, and a hostile bravado supplants a tentative affability.
As the contest nears, conversation, which is already at a premium, virtually ceases. This is as much the result of the pernicious effects of dieting as it is the anxiety of competition. Men give and ask for nothing. Backstage at the contest, sullen, scantily clad men stand alone in a crowd. The ruthlessness of actual competition is no more bruising than the isolated preparation that goes into it (Klein, n.d., chapter 4).
Economically, bodybuilders suffer as a result of their atomism. What each pro strives for are contest earnings as well as endorsements. Additionally, a world-class bodybuilder can parlay his or her winnings and titles into a lucrative mail order business. This is the economic ideal: individual competitive success followed by self-employment. The result is that every successful bodybuilder competes for a finite market against others, as well as the leading entrepreneurs. In the face of such fierce competition, more rational attempts to conduct business such as joining forces or not duplicating efforts would seem imminent. But the individualism that is so pervasive works to prevent this. Needless to say, the possibility of a bodybuilders' union, as was attempted in 1979, is doomed from the start.
continues...