I, too, noticed how the “ripped James Bond” was being compared unfavorably to the classic James Bond… played by a bodybuilder.
This is a VERY common thing. People always say things like “I don’t like the ripped bodybuilder look. I like someone built like (insert some celebrity bodybuilder)” Or “Looks don’t matter. You don’t have to be Brad Pitt. Average guys like Ryan Gosling get laid, too.”
The equivalent bodyfat level/physique of a fit man is a “softer woman,” naturally. Women who work out and pay attention to diet are always going to have higher bodyfat unless they use steroids and go absolutely crazy with diet and exercise. Men with average testosterone levels can get ripped and have decent muscle mass with moderate exercise and attention to diet. Or at least a much larger portion of men have those genetic gifts without needing special help. A guy with a flat stomach and decent arms/chest/shoulders is probably the physical equivalent of a woman with a soft midsection and curves. Women just don’t have the test and natural muscular development. A guy with a 40 inch plus waist is just plain out of shape regardless of how decent his arms look or how much fun he seems to have a beer with. i don’t even want to speculate the equivalent women’s physique.
Me have it easy, really. No matter how fat we get, so long as we have height, broad shoulders and good bearing some women will find us hot. I’ve heard women extol the sexiness of John Goodman and Vincent D’Onofrio, for God’s sake (and yes, I mean in their current heavy incarnations; don’t show me a picture of Vince in Adventures in Babysitting).
The ideal body-builder body has changed - here are some shots of Sean, apparently at least one of them from the Mr Universe competition.
That’s a look that I think a person could at least aspire to (at least pre 30’s or 40’s), as opposed to the guys in Predator.
I had never heard of dad bod until my wife told me explained it to me a few years ago. According to her, dad bod describes a man who’s just slightly overweight. In other words a guy who doesn’t have a six pack but who still has good muscle tone to his arms and legs, and who would have a six pack if he lost about 10-20 pounds of abdominal fat rather than 50 or more.
ETA. Tom Brady is supposedly a good example of someone with dad bod.
But that’s the whole point.
If the Commercially Sanctioned Body is one that few people in practice are going to be able to attain, then there’s lots of money to be made in selling stuff to large numbers of people who’ve been convinced they should look like that, most of whom won’t attain it anyway. Bonus points if what’s being sold (diet “aids”, supplements, workout gear, newer and fancier exercise equipment, gym memberships) is something it’s possible to keep charging money for, over and over, even from the few who will pull it off.
If people get it into their heads that hey, most people look all right anyway, and running around the park with the kids or hoeing out the garden is perfectly good exercise – where’s the money to be made from that?
No, played by a person who used to be a bodybuilder and quit bodybuilding 10 years before he played Bond. Connery Bond was sporting a 1-pack and a farmers tan over arms that look like mine (that is, not particularly impressive).
A guy with kids who has two hours a week to spend in the gym is not a guy I’d want to be father to my young children.
When my kids were little, I worked 40+ hours a week. My husband worked 40+ hours a week. We’d both generally eat lunch at our desks in the hope of getting home half an hour earlier. There was a 40 minute commute for each of us each way - not including drop off at daycare. There was a house to clean, a yard to keep up, dinner to put on the table, groceries to shop for, laundry to do…and then there was the important stuff - children to read to, to take to the museum or the zoo, to take out for a walk or out on bikes, or to play on the floor with. Thirty minutes of workout also means getting to the gym, changing, working out, showering, changing and getting back - it isn’t 30 minutes - its a hour or more depending. A couple hours a week is a grocery store trip, a cleaned house. Two more hours of precious sleep (because I seldom got eight hours of sleep a night in those years). There isn’t anything sexy to me about a guy who prioritizes his appearance over his kids or his wife’s time (because unless you have domestic help - the wife is going to be the one picking up the slack). Get your workout lifting your kids, mowing the lawn, running around the yard playing tag - and you’ll get the sexy dad bod.
Two hours a week working out. It could easily be done at home with minimal equipment, it doesnt require a gym membership or travelling to a gym.
ETA: that is definitely not “prioritizing appearance” over his kids/wife’s time. That’s just caring about one’s health.
Wait… what? Seriously? And here I thought I’d lost all pretense of attractiveness. I can totally do fat Thor body, albeit without the beard or long hair.
Having gym equipment at home requires spending the cost of the equipment, which is generally not trivial, as well as the cost of the space in one’s residence that it takes up, which is also not trivial, especially in a home with children.
Not to mention you don’t have to work out in order to be healthy. Too many people get it in their heads that their preferred method of exercise is the “One True Way” that everyone should be doing. Runners are particularly bad about this. More than one occasion I’ve had someone bend my ear about running and how it’s the “absolute bestest ever” to the point I really want to tell them to sod off.
So I think there’s a false dichotomy going on. Men with “dad bods” aren’t necessarily indifferent to caring about their health. They simply don’t look like men who are trying to get the hardest abs on the planet. There’s a point at which strength training is less about health and more about vanity. “Dad bods” do enough to stay fit, but not much more than that.
The “dad bod” thing may be so popular because it’s not everyday we draw linkages between fatherhood and changes to men’s bodies. We do this constantly when we talk about mothers, but not so much men. Embracing “dad bods” is to validate men who are focused more on being nurturing parents than maximizing their physical attractiveness.
Two hours a week spent merely on yourself definately is, when your wife doesn’t have two hours a week to sleep eight hours a night. You are prioritizing your health over hers. You can definitely be healthy through playing with your kids, doing housework and getting all the other stuff a family with kids needs to do. You won’t look like you are going to be cast in the next Marvel movie as a Superhero, but that is fine. Two hours a week at a gym isn’t sufficient to get past “Dad bod” anyway.
I think the main thing is motivation, not time and space. After working all day on the job and then coming home to your second job of caring for children, you need to be highly motivated to invest sweat into your abs, biceps or whatever. Most parents of young kids don’t have that kind of motivation because they are just trying to survive.
Before I had kids, I used to wake up at the crack of dawn to go jogging. Could I do this now? Sure. Do I? No, because I’d much rather use that time to rest; every ounce of my energy is needed to just get through the day. As a result I have a “mom bod” and that’s okay with me. When it stops being okay with me is when I’ll suddenly have the motivation to wake up in the morning to jog again.
A lot of “average normal guys” are single, childless, or divorced without full-time custody of their kids. And a lot of “average normal guys” have flexible work schedules too.
Everyone’s lives are different and we make different choices. We choose not to have a an 80 minute round trip commute or have jobs which require more than 40 hours per week. My wife and I BOTH have zero trouble fitting in 2-4 workouts per week whether it’s by taking turns getting up early to use the treadmill or go to our gym 5 minutes away, or by meeting up after work to run together before one of us picks up the kid and the other does whatever else needs to be done that evening (a grocery stop, start a load of laundry, get dinner started, etc.).
Yeah, we’ll never be rich, but we value a lifestyle that doesn’t have us tied to the office and constantly stressed about work. We also won’t be starring in any super hero movies anytime soon but we do value maintaining at least a moderate level of physical fitness along with a healthy lifestyle both so we don’t croak too early and to present a good example to our child.
Mass media will inevitably influence conceptions of beauty and virtue, and, frankly, what’s real.
The only way to counter that is to pressure mass media to be more inclusive of the diversity of real life.
I prefer the term Vet Bod. It’s like dad bod but with more knee pain.
I had plenty of reasons to only spend 4 years in the infantry instead of 20. If I had considered staying, I would have thought long and hard about all the old timers with destroyed knees.