Dear gym bros, are you guys okay?
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Loading... - Simbine onika
- 20 Feb 2023
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If you’re familiar with my byline, you know that I am chronically online. And in my most recent perusal of the digital hellscape that is TikTok, I encountered a Tok that made me Tik, if you will.
For the subsect of our readership that cannot access the TikTok, the video features a shapely young gentleman on a rowing machine. The text over his body reads, “Don’t bother bro she’s (sic) talking to a guy who can’t even bench a plate and cries when his flavoured air runs out. At least you look aesthetic and have functioning lungs.”
I tumbled further down the rabbit hole and found several other content creators who use the same formula — a muscular young man lamenting over a woman’s rejection and exacting his revenge by getting buff. Perhaps he intends to motivate similarly scorned lunkheads to return to the fortress of swole-itude and bulk up for the ladies.
If these videos accurately speak to the gym bro culture, then my dear, sweet steel-slinging studmuffins — you, sirs, have lost the plot. Your mindsets demonstrate a breed of manhood that refuses to truly understand women, much to its own detriment.
To preface — working out is great. If you want to have a muscular or toned physique, don’t get crazy and start eating unseasoned boiled chicken, because that can spiral into an eating disorder, but definitely go to the gym! I work out 4-6 times a week. It’s a huge part of my treatment plan for depression. I am very pro-exercise and pro-gym, just not pro-toxic-gym bro.
What troubles me about the gym bro philosophy is the way they’ve framed working out. It’s always, “I’m heartbroken and no women want me, so I’m going to get absolutely jacked and make the gym my entire life. Then, I will be the paragon of heterosexual female desire.”
Take this video, for example. Our muscle man is back with morose ambient music, supplemented by text that reads, “The real me died years ago but nobody noticed because there was no blood.” The caption — #paintok #sadtok #relatable #fyp #foryou. Read More…
