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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2227 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The latest craze on Youtube? A guy called Sam Sulek. Sam Sulek is a 21 year old bodybuilder and mech eng. student from Ohio who has, over the past six months, gone from about 50,000 to over 1.7 million subscribers. I've heard dudes at work that don't lift mention him, either. He is, for his age, ridiculously large, and has already attracted accusations of not being 'natty' (i.e. he's using PEDs). Regardless of how he gets his gains, his appeal, however, seems pretty genuine. Unlike the deluge of overedited, attention-grabbing garbage on Youtube, Sulek's videos are lightly edited and mostly show him driving to, working out in, and then driving back to the gym with occasional meals, while he provides a kind of stream-of-consciousness of his thoughts on training and diet. There's very little groundbreaking stuff here, his videos are nearly entirely unscripted (like his workouts themselves) and Sulek saves all his intensity for his lifting. In fact he comes off as a fairly charismatic, positive, intelligent student. More than that, though, his videos scratch a desire for society and friendship. Commenters describe them as relaxing, and Sulek as authentic, but really what they are is parasocial. Sulek isn't acting as a coach or source of information or salesman (though he does have a deal with Hosstile), but more as the lifting buddy that millions of people wish they had. And though it can hardly be any good for my very poor self-esteem and body image issues, it's difficult to stop watching.

I think all its all parasocial, and all in a bad way. I'll speak as someone very much guilty myself; Youtube views numbers are driven by lonely people where an algorithm grabs your interest to keep you watching. Here it's a workout video, but I find myself watching really inane political commentators where I really don't care about what they're talking about, but I just like looking at the cute face and hair face on the screen. Intentional or not, the unscripted long form draws you in and the interest in my case manifests where I find my myself watching to learn more about the person than whatever it is they are talking about or demonstrating. The video apes a social conversation but isn't truly.

It’s interesting to me that zoomer men primarily follow “influencers” who have extremely unrealistic bodies, in that they can’t be gained naturally. Even in the previous generation, the Zyzz physique obviously requires excellent genetics, perfect training etc. The 99.9th percentile, in other words.

Women don’t tend to do this as much. Female beauty, skincare, fitness, makeup etc influencers are usually attractive, that’s a given, but the most successful are rarely 99.9th percentile for looks - those people either tend to be followed mainly by men, or are actual high fashion / runway models with comparatively small followings. Women often follow people who are somewhat hotter versions of themselves in terms of face/body/hair/skin etc.

Men seem to prefer to follow the absolute physical ideal. They are less interested in the merely 80th or 90th percentile gym bro who lifts 3-4 days a week, cares about nutrition and has a naturally attainable body.

I guess in general lifting culture is interesting to me. It’s not broadly anti-doping, but at the same time so much of the culture is ostensibly based around techniques for training naturally, efficiently gaining, diet and other stuff that pales in terms of their effect on bulking when compared to many forms of doping. Are they tricking themselves, or are they being radically honest? Clearly coping is acceptable in the bodybuilding community and doesn’t count as cheating the same way, say, cheating in chess is cheating. But the advantage gained is so much that training as someone who dopes versus someone who doesn’t is like playing two completely separate games, or having two separate hobbies. They’re incomparable, and yet treated as the same by casual followers.

But the advantage gained is so much that training as someone who dopes versus someone who doesn’t is like playing two completely separate games, or having two separate hobbies. They’re incomparable, and yet treated as the same by casual followers.

I don't think casual followers understand this

There was a period, perhaps from the 90s to the 00s, where the trend went towards toned and slender. Steroids were made illegal in 1990, and though bodybuilders continued to get bigger, Hollywood turned away from beefy bodybuilders towards more uh, human-sized action leads. The apogee of this was Brad Pitt in Fight Club in 1999. Since then, bodybuilding and lifting have become more popular. Zyzz comes at kind of the tail-end of that, as bigger physiques became more popular again. At the same time, superhero movies were starting to dominate the box office, and with them, superheroic physiques became desirable again. Thor was 2011, for example (and it even has a joke about steroids). The internet has made it easier to get access and information on steroids, and in the competition to stand out on social media, it has to be the biggest and the best.

And uh, I might have been a cause of it too. The past twenty years have seen gay men go from the butts of jokes and distrusted perverts to accepted and even celebrated. And our tastes put a small but forceful finger on the scale, almost always pushing towards bigger and more extreme. It's hard to exaggerate to what degree male beauty standards are shaped by this tiny minority who most men have no interest in - and yet it does, mysteriously, like dark energy invisibly curving spacetime around it.

the most successful are rarely 99.9th percentile for looks

I mean, I don't know if 99.9th percentile for looks really makes sense. In the realm of lifting, bigger and stronger is better and there's always someone bigger and stronger, but in the realm of physical appearance, once you're 'very attractive', the difference between you and the next very attractive lady is mostly just personal taste or vibes. But then, that's the appeal of lifting - there is a hierarchy, there is a 'better' and a 'worse', and therefore you can be driven by the desire to become better. A woman who sought to make 'constant progress' in her own makeup abilities wouldn't even make any sense.

I guess in general lifting culture is interesting to me. It’s not broadly anti-doping, but at the same time so much of the culture is ostensibly based around techniques for training naturally, efficiently gaining, diet and other stuff that pales in terms of their effect on bulking when compared to many forms of doping.

I agree there's an interesting contradiction here. Doping is an open secret, and one that people don't really know how to deal with. The refrain is the same - bigger and stronger is better, you should be willing to do anything to succeed... but not the thing that might actually work better than anything else. That's embarrassing and shameful, except that most of the people idealized are on gear anyway. People like Sam Sulek dance around it, they talk about their training technique or how they time their carb intake or 'mindset' or a million trivial details that matter far less than raw biochemistry. And though the 'fake natties' are bad, so are the 'natty police' who lob accusations of steroid use around, and who encourage others to treat it as a shameful secret.

At the end of the day, you still need to have your training and nutrition dialed in to have a top tier physique, drugs or no. To casual followers, the dedication is what they relate to and use for motivation.

What actually draws people in is results, not dedication.

Reading the comments, nobody expects to get similar results any time soon.

It could be overcompensation, in that most men have few to no archetypically masculine men in their own lives, let alone any balanced masculine role models in media or even literature that most consume.

Unfortunately I see a lot of the hyper masculine alt right type stuff as a consequence of the masculine archetypes being forcefully eradicated from our culture via an unholy mix of feminism and jealous lower status men sniping at positive masculine role models. The surge in hyper masculine media figures is a natural response as far as I can tell.

Sampled a few videos. Maybe it's because I don't lift atm, but I don't really see the appeal. He seems like a decent person, and is clearly built as hell, seems authentic, but then there's the doubt of whether it's natural. And all he talks about is lifting and eating. Nothing else?

For many people that sounds like a good relationship!

He is, for his age, ridiculously large, and has already attracted accusations of not being 'natty' (i.e. he's using PEDs).

It's either him being a literal mutant (with much lower myostatin levels, like that "bodybuilder cattle"), or PEDs. My bet is on PEDs.

I'm 95% certain he's not natty as someone that has barely lifted 100kgs on a bench in my life. A 21yo would have the best chance of anyone, anywhere in gaining muscle mass, but I don't think you can do that without juicing. I'm not against performance enhancing drugs in the private sphere; just against influencers pushing an impossible ideal while pretending they did it without help.

Tbh, I find the 'is he natty' debate to be pretty uninteresting. Does it actually change the ground reality of what he's doing or what he's saying?

Also though steroid use is more widespread than ever, it's still, like, illegal. I don't know how strict things are in the US, but I think people are reasonable to choose not to talk openly about it, if you could get arrested, lose your job or your place at college over it. Sulek has never claimed to be natty, and at the end of the day isn't selling training programs or boutique supplements or diet plans under the promise that others can get the same results. He's not selling anything except himself... But it's worth asking if that makes it better. The pressure to look good, to be big and strong, to earn the respect of other men, to be accomplished and confident and popular are still there.

As I understand it the effect of steroids is so significant that someone who lifts regularly and cares about nutrition can be easily outbulked by a largely sedentary person who takes them.

If that’s true, it essentially means that all the healthy eating, diet, schedule, discipline stuff is invalidated, at least mostly. It’s like a PUA type ‘teaching’ men to seduce women and then it turns out all the women he’s ever been with have been prostitutes, like clearly he’s playing a different game and his advice is theoretical at best.

That’s the root of the sentiment expressed with the facetious “tren hard anavar give up” line, preaching self improvement and a way to be healthy and masculine but actually everything is just the result of illegal and often risky doping.

It depends. To me it makes sense to lift natty for two years and then add in the steroids, but I wonder if that's my Puritan heritage kicking in: why lift natty for two years when you can do the same on gear in 6 months? I think the key is discipline: steroids can be done relatively safely and effectively, but it requires a level of discipline that's best gated by first getting ripped natty.

It's usually a safe assumption that any male influencer that stands out for his hypertrophy is on gear, though. The number of natty men with impressive physiques is far outweighed by the number of men on gear with impressive physiques who want to claim to be natty for cred.

I'd also note that the impressive men on gear still require discipline, healthy eating, and lots of hard work. Gear just makes that (much) easier to display.

That is a wildly incorrect understanding of steroids. They don't work on their own, they make other things you are doing work better, and make it possible to work harder. The Natty or Not debate matters at the extremes, which is to say the interesting parts.

How exactly is it incorrect? There are studies that show that muscle gain on juice without resistance training beats resistance training without juice.

That study is confounded by the effects of water retention in muscles of steroid users. It's also just looking at a ten week period, you're not going to keep gaining muscle sitting on the couch.

Also, the no steroids exercise group managed to not increase their triceps size at all which doesn't really make sense.

This is an overcorrection. Steroids help build muscle at all levels of training. You definitely don't need to be elite for it to matter.

But no one really cares about the non-elite. I don't care if a guy used test to deadlift 405 when he would have achieved the same thing Natty in a few more months.

The idea that roids will cause you to gain significant muscle sitting on the couch is false.

I mean, you personally might not care whether a given person can or can't deadlift 405, or the timeframe he achieves that in - it might matter to him.

My point is that no one deadlifting 405, natty or dirty, influences the discourse.

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Tbh, I find the 'is he natty' debate to be pretty uninteresting. Does it actually change the ground reality of what he's doing or what he's saying?

No it doesn't. I threw a comment out there (while drinking) and I don't really know if he's presenting as natural or not. I don't mean to derail on that front.

and at the end of the day isn't selling training programs or boutique supplements or diet plans under the promise that others can get the same results. He's not selling anything except himself

Fair enough. Seems like the guy is presenting himself in a 'lifestyle' way, as in 'here's me doing meal prep and driving to the gym. What a good session!' Good luck to him.

Took a look...his ad revenue must substantial. The last week of views: 400k, 550k, 530k, 770k, 620k, 1M, 400k. All are >30 minutes. Following internet rumours for CPV that's what, >$20k?

He's the heir to Rich Piana's legacy, providing a constant stream of blindingly parasocial, unfiltered, steam-of-consciousness buddy chats while going through a fitness-centric daily routine. And the great thing is that, unlike Rich, who was probably not a great role model for his young male audience, Sam Sulek is unfailingly humble, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. Real positive masculinity shit. You love to see it.

Well, in both cases their success is predicated on having outrageously developed physiques. The message I'm getting is that what really matters is the size of your biceps.

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