The New Yorker:

In a new book, the author Casey Johnston argues that pumping iron helped her “escape diet culture.” But a preoccupation with strength can take many forms.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

The photo op is an emblem of a discarded time. Taken in 1991, during the second annual Great American Workout, a fitness event hosted on the South Lawn of the White House, it shows President George H. W. Bush with a hundred-and-thirty-five-pound barbell hanging in his grasp. He is flanked by two bodybuilders, only one of whom, a man of lesser renown, assists the grimacing leader of the free world, who is looking ever the country-club veteran in a polo and a pastel windbreaker. The other bodybuilder, grinning and finger-gunning at the camera, is a man we know well, an Austrian indispensable to the American consciousness, referred to by mononym: Arnold.

It was an amusing pairing that not long before would have been considered truly odd. In 1976, when the Whitney Museum pedestalled Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “living work of art” during a one-night symposium, bodybuilding was still, as a reporter for Sports Illustrated noted, “a sport with a low repute in this country.” Ian Frazier, writing of that event in The New Yorker, recorded a Columbia University art professor’s disdain for “well-developed body builders” who evinced “some of the worst excesses” of a bygone era. But the eighties, embracing excess, loosened Americans’ suspicion of flagrant muscle: gyms and “Rocky” films multiplied alongside the national debt. Never as rich as its aesthetics intimate, the U.S. met the nineties financially—and, therefore, spiritually—depressed. “America felt itself to be losing out . . . losing its sense of itself,” John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his best-selling account of this overlooked flash point, a period that saw the budding friendship of a President and a bodybuilder who would become a governor. In the meantime, as if to stave off the national mood, untold bodies across the country strove and strained, breaking themselves down in the hope of forming something better, stronger.

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