Modern or merely muddled?

What is a generation? Simply put, it’s a way of collectively referring to all the people born in a specific period. If it sounds made-up, that’s because it is, but only in the way nation-states, religions, marriages and brands are also made-up constructs we use to make sense of the world and our place in it.

We consider generational shifts important because people born in the same period live through the same large-scale events that shape the zeitgeist in unique ways, and the similarity of this experience can often cut across other divides such as religion, class, caste, and language. Naturally, there is a great deal of variance across a generation’s lived experience in different parts of the world, say the USA and India, due to different “large-scale events”.

Millennials are somewhat novel, however, because our differences are much less pronounced than those of previous generations.

This is attributed to several factors such as the firm establishment of a US-led capitalistic world order after the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991, the Indian economy’s liberalisation in the early 1990s, and the emergence of the Internet. As Tammy Erickson writes for the Harvard Business Review while comparing generations in the USA and India, “globally, Generation Ys’ immersion in personal technology enabled this generation to experience many of the same events and, as a result, develop as the most globally similar generation yet.”

The consumerist mindset

The greatest similarity lies perhaps in how consumerism co-opts every aspect of our lives and turns it into a capital or commodity of some kind.The food we eat, the workout regimes we try to follow, the language we use to caption our selfies and our professed ideological and political beliefs are all consumed by capitalism and regurgitated in marketable ways that help us feel unique. Courtesy of the Internet, these apparently unique identities can form nichés together and see the world through their chosen lens. This is great for the market because it provides easier and more accurate ways of targeting customers.

The illusion of the modern man

For instance, industries that monetise body issues have discovered a whole new market in millennial men. Beefed-up male bodies are now the norm in everything from Bollywood movies to daily soaps, social media platforms, and innerwear advertisements. A great body has also come to represent a form of social capital that helps create the illusionary image of the ‘modern man’, disciplined and masculine, ready to take on the world.

Personally, I knew I was a “Fat Guy” when my T-shirts betrayed me. As my belly protruded forwards and downwards week by week, the traitorous T-shirts receded up in shame, exposing a thumb-length or two of my flesh to the world, and I kept tugging at them though I knew it was a lost cause. A few months ago, I had given up on formal shirts because they did bad things to my delusion of being “stocky, not fat” like George Costanza in Seinfeld.

It’s not just clothes, of course.

A friend’s bike touched a speed-breaker and produced the sickening sound of metal against gravel when I was riding pillion behind him. I was ashamed because he had gotten it serviced just a week before. I produced copious amounts of sweat after climbing a flight of stairs and panted like a Siberian Husky in Delhi summer. A long romantic walk left me with chaffed thighs and I had the experience of going about town with sandpaper stuffed between my legs for the next few days. In the shower, I sucked in my belly every other day to check if I could still see my toes easily or not.

If all of this sounds horrible in a somewhat undignified way, that’s because it is.

It is quite silly too, and scary at the same time. I know I have a lot in life to be happy about, and I know that body image issues don’t correspond directly to health and fitness. I also know that the fitness-wellness industry is a $4.4 trillion ecosystem run either by big businesses that pour money into favourable studies and research papers or celebrity entrepreneurs who mould the pop culture in their own image.

I know all the arguments and vocabulary of body positivity.

Yet, I continue to deeply dislike, if not hate, my fat, loose, non-muscular body. I am certainly not alone in doing so. 

Reshaping manliness

In the last couple of decades, various factors have led to a shift in the perception of male bodies in India. Michiel Baas, an anthropologist and the author of Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle, estimates the origins of this shift to be in the 1990s, which links it inextricably to millennials.

It was a time when gyms reduced their focus on bodybuilding and became more lifestyle-oriented. Helpfully enough, our economy was opening up right around then. As Indians zealously invested in upgrading their skills, modernisation became the primary aspiration. Young professionals began moving to urban centres in droves, and a newly affluent middle class emerged with enough disposable income to invest in “self-improvement”. From learning fluent English and eating “continental” food to looking smart, everything became an expression of this improvement. 

Alongside, popular culture was also reshaping the image of manliness.

Muscular bodies of actors like Sunny Deol and Sunil Shetty were replacing the paunches of previous generation’s stars that signified affluence, and Salman Khan took off his shirt in Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya (1998) to great public excitement.

According to Baas, these trends finally boiled over with Shah Rukh Khan’s chiselled 6-pack abs in Om Shanti Om (2007), trumped by Aamir Khan’s 8-packs just a year later in Ghajini (2008).

In the following years, this ideal pervaded all aspects of culture.

Who’s the anomaly?

Social media also had an outsized effect because it reduced the distance between celebrities and the masses. The diets and workout regimens that would earlier be found in lifestyle magazines are now just a scroll away on our smartphone screens. Moreover, the concept of “celebrity” itself has been diluted. We now have a multitude of perfect-bodied influencers who are more relatable than actors or socialites. As a result, they are more aspirational—if the literal boy-next-door can have washboard abs, why can I not be disciplined enough to have them too?

While someone could have looked at SRK or Aamir Khan and thought of them as anomalies, looking at regular people on Instagram will convince you that it is actually you, with the belly fat and the blunt jawline, you are the anomaly.

There are social factors too, of course. Christopher Forth in his insightful paper Fat and Disgust talks about how imagining the “feel of flabby body” invokes revulsion because of its negative association with everything “soft” or “weak”. Any experience with Indian men must indicate how this softness or weakness would translate to feelings of emasculation, and trigger in us a disgust for our bodies.

Male insecurities bring us, inevitably, to women.

Shifting power dynamics

Until quite recently, by the good graces of patriarchy, only women faced unreal body standards in our society. Stocky men may have been acceptable on the silver screen for previous generations, but one struggles to find plump leading ladies in films from any era. Institutions like arranged marriage, in particular, made a clear division between what was expected from men (financial stability) and women (beautiful bodies and housekeeping). While men may have just now started looking at their bodies as a capital of sorts, women’s bodies have always been held as an important or even the most important part of their valuation.

However, the post-’90s middle-class demographic that experienced a shift in the male body image also saw women get more independent with easier access to education and employment. Expectedly, this has upended the power dynamics. If women can also bring financial stability to the table, it stands to reason that men must also satisfy the standards of beautiful bodies and housekeeping capabilities. Whether women are interested in an updated dynamic or not, men already believe this to be the new reality.

Corresponding resentment is widely prevalent and can easily be observed online.

Young men, especially those exposed to the global incel culture and its infamous icons like Andrew Tate, ignore all nuance and place the blame for their low self-esteem or lack of romantic prospects squarely on modern women’s high expectations. Even among my friends, none of whom are young or stupid enough to fall for incel-flavoured nihilism, it is taken for granted that one’s dating prospects become exponentially better with six-pack abs and bulging biceps.

Men, it would appear, have fallen for the same con they pulled on women: to be deserving of love, one needs a perfect body.  

Mainstreaming body positivity

To our credit, millennials have made body positivity mainstream.

The subtext against shaming women for their bodies is now firmly lodged in our culture. People can agree or disagree with it, but the conversations are happening, and that in itself is good progress. Similar conversations for men are still some time in the future, I believe, because that would require us to move out of our own way and we have not been very good at that usually.

Meanwhile, there has been a lot of chatter in the Western media about miracle drugs like Ozempic. The anti-obesity gold rush has just begun, proclaimed a New York Times essay late last year. Like all American favourites, these drugs will make their way to India eventually and high pricing may be the only deterrent against their mass consumption.

Perhaps we should prepare ourselves, if we had not already with the costs of healthy food and gym subscriptions, to also experience lean bodies as commodities.

You can get one if you can afford it, and good luck fitting in if you can’t.

The author is a writer from Haridwar who lives, for the most part, in Bengaluru. He is an alumnus of IIMC and his work has appeared in various Indian as well as international publications. His interests lie primarily in cultural commentary, speculative fiction, and multilingual literary exploration. His book, Indian Millennials: Who Are They, Really?, was recently published by Aleph.