Masculinity

In this week’s reading the theme that popped out the most was the theme of masculinity. One example was Paul Solotaroff’s “The Power and the Gory”. Solotaroff writes about the life of Steve Michalik. Michalik was a bodybuilder who was addicted to steroids. He had been abusing the use of steroids to get bigger and stronger. It was a motivation that he had from being little because he was not in that shape before. Solotaroff explains, “Steroids, Michalik knew, were a kind of God’s play, a way of rewriting his own DNA. He’d grown up skinny and hating himself to his very cell level”. Since he had grown up to be a skinny boy he hated himself for being that way and used that as a motivation to grow in size. He started body building to gain mass and used steroids to enlarge his size even more. Arthur Kretchmer is another example of an author that talked about masculinity. He wrote about Dick Butkus. Butkus was an American football linebacker that played for the Chicago Bears. He was unlike any other linebacker. According to Kretchmer, he described him as “the meanest, angriest, toughest, dirtiest son of a bitch in football. An animal, a savage, subhuman”. Butkus was a tough linebacker that would destroy any other football player that crossed his path. The author made him seem as a big and scary man. In an interview once he was asked if he was scared of anything and his reply was that all he was scared of was him getting injured.

In the world of sports there will always be athletes that take the idea of masculinity in them. This especially seen through sports where athletes can use the effect of their strength be put into action. Sports that require strength like this are football, boxing, wrestling, and more. In sports like these, athletes want to come into brutal contact with their rival because the get a sense that makes them feel they are better than their opponents. An athlete will want to show his opponent who is the toughest athlete. In sports like this the toughest person can be seen as the better athlete and can even cause fear to their opponent.