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Abstract

Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of 76 “day of eating” vlogs, this article explores how cis men adhering to the “If It Fits Your Macros” diet dynamically negotiate the meanings of their eating habits and their bodies to bolster their claims to hegemonic masculinity. Employing Foucault’s theory of disciplinary technologies and critical masculinities scholarship, the analysis serves as a case study of how the body work of dieting men reinforces normative discourses of masculinity. While dieting has previously been framed as a “technology of femininity,” this article argues that dieting similarly operates as an embodied practice through which men perform masculinities. Extending the literature on the subjective experiences of dieting men, I suggest that men navigate the ostensibly “feminine” terrain of dieting by via repertoires of self-discipline and embattlement against fat. Using these discursive tools, men portray dieting as a moral-aesthetic project that bolsters and secures their own hegemonic constructions of masculine status.

Keywords

men and masculinities the body gender diet

Introduction

Restrictive dieting is a common practice in the United States. Data collected by the CDC between 2013 and 2016 indicates that “just under 50% of Americans ages 20 and over” reported attempting to lose weight in the past year, with most of them altering their eating habits in some way (Ducharme 2018). Fueled by a “fat panic” (Cooper 2010) and popular fear surrounding the reported “obesity epidemic” (Saguy and Almeling 2008), dieting is often framed as a “women’s issue”, both in the sociological literature on the topic (Gough 2007; Mallyon et al. 2010) as well as within the public imagination (Bell and McNaughton 2007). While the CDC’s data indicated a relatively stable gap of around 15% between the proportions of women and men engaged in active weight loss—the most recent statistics implicate 56.4% of women and 41.7% of men, respectively (Ducharme 2018)—men’s weight loss efforts are on the rise, with an increase of about 10% across the last half century (Bell and McNaughton 2007).

Given this tension between depictions of dieting as feminine (and feminizing) and rising numbers of men participating in the practice, I use dieting cis men as an analytical opportunity to explore how men “do gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) and “do food” (Brady and Ventresca 2014) co-constitutively. I argue that dieting and the performance of food consumption represent a key practice in the dynamic negation of masculinities, particularly as a modality through which men strive to maintain normatively “masculine” embodiment.

Drawing on an analysis of 76 “day of eating” vlogs created by men following an “If It Fits Your Macros” diet, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on masculine body work, especially dieting, by exploring the implications of men’s body representation in new media. I contend that dieting men actively attempt to construct a “morally accountable body” (Gill et al. 2005) that reinforces dominant narratives of masculinity as disciplined, controlled, and in opposition to stigmatized femininity. They accomplish this by adhering to restrictive eating practices, actively performing body transformation as a means of demonstrating the legitimacy of their claims to dominant forms of masculinity. Their body serves as “evidence” that their performance of dieting and food is sufficiently “masculine” (in its adherence to hegemonically masculine norms). I call the conjunction of men’s gendered language and embodied practices here a moral-aesthetic project, through which they link a leanly muscular physique with gender-coded value talk. I draw primarily on two theories—Foucault’s disciplinary technologies and the framework of manhood acts (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009)—to argue that men portray dieting as a body-regulatory project that bolsters their claims to normative masculinities. Dieting men emphasize how the accomplishment of a lean physique affirms deeper values beyond aesthetics—which they then code as “masculine.” In so doing, they reinforce gendered scripts that reify masculinity and subordinate femininity in an embodied moral hierarchy.

Background

Dieting as Disciplinary Technology

Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary technologies describes ritual techniques through which subjects “individually” adopt the “subtle coercion[s]” of normative cultural expectations through their appearance and practices (Foucault 1984, 181). Dieting—as I use it here broadly, a program of eating that conforms to a set of restrictive rules—is one such disciplinary technology. The contemporary proliferation of dieting represents the intensification of disciplinary power in the everyday life of the eating citizen (Sanders 2017; Rifai 2020), as the practice of eating is increasingly “enclosed” within individual identity projects and reflexive body work (Giddens 1991). This intensification, however, is not solely an individual phenomenon. Rather, the body is a site of cultural inscription (Turner 2008; Steinitz 2017), where social actors negotiate the meanings of citizenship, subjectivity, and gender. As anxieties over fatness, fitness, and the body command an increasing degree of cultural attention, critical scholarship across disciplines—from medicine (Strings 2015) to psychology (Ogden 2011) to the social sciences and humanities (Anderson 2009)—has elaborated the social significance of diets and dieters.

Dieting and Masculinity

Feminist scholars emphasize that the spread and adoption of disciplinary technologies is gendered. The literature on diet culture demonstrates the ways that diets specifically target women to reduce body size (Bartky 1997; Chernin 1981; Orbach 1986). Sandra Bartky (1997) builds on the idea of disciplinary technologies through the lens of patriarchy, labeling dieting as one of many “technologies of femininity” that subject women to particularly harsh routines of body management within a patriarchal regime.

Alternatively, the literature on dieting men, while gaining traction (Brady and Ventresca 2014; Mycek 2018), has emerged relatively recently. Most dietetics purveyors through early 20^th century were protestant white men (Strings 2019), and prior work in food studies points to the perseverance of diets oriented towards men (Tunc 2018) and concerns over men’s fatness (Berrett 1997) throughout the last century. However, during this same time frame, men have largely portrayed dieting (Tunc 2018) and concerns over appearance in general (Gill et al. 2005) as pejoratively feminizing. Much of the scholarship that focused on weight loss in the 20^th century included men as an aside, indicating that men may also, at times, feel cultural pressures to diet (Bell and McNaughton 2007). According to this portrayal, anxieties concerning weight and appearance are “women’s work” (Barnett 2006; Cairns et al., 2010), a notion that both reifies weight loss as a necessary modality of health and constrains the analysis of gender-normative discourse surrounding fat and embodiment.

Considering the steady rise in men’s dieting in the U.S. and the increasing commodification of men’s bodies (Giddens 1991; Rousseau et al. 2020), more scholarly attention towards men’s dieting experiences and the rapidly expanding world of men’s dieting media is expedient. This paper argues that dieting men understand their pursuits within a framework of normative embodied masculinities. While I do not suggest that men diet in equal numbers to women or experience symmetrical pressures under the “tyranny of slenderness” (Chernin 1981), I contend that focusing on dieting men illuminates underexplored frontiers where the relationship between masculinity and food is negotiated. How do we make sense of an increasing number of dieting men—particularly in online spaces?

Masculinity and Manhood Acts

Rather than interpreting masculinity as a fixed social position or a set of characteristics, the contemporary masculinities literature defines gender as an “individual and collective accomplishment” (Lampe et al. 2019, 867). Within this “doing gender” framework (West and Zimmerman 1987), masculinities represent gendered performances. Far from being unconstrained, the performance of masculinities is contingent on the power relations that hierarchically order inter- and intra-gender dynamics and demand that individuals display “appropriate” gendered performances (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The critical masculinities scholarship, built on these foundational assumptions, explores how the maintenance of dominant norms of masculinity manifest in a variety of intimately embodied social contexts, from sport (Messner 1992) to sex (Burke 2014) to dating (Lamont 2015).

While the particularities of masculinities discourse vary over time and space, hegemonic masculinity remains oriented towards claiming privilege and power. In their work on manhood acts, Schrock and Schwalbe (2009) characterize masculinity as a “set of conventional signifying practices through which the identity ‘man’ is established and upheld in interaction” (279). Men internalize and leverage gendered scripts in order to lay claim to masculine status. The framework of manhood acts suggests that men strategically align their language and behavior—both consciously and subconsciously—to hegemonic norms, which posit an ideal-typical way of “being a man.”

While Schrock and Schwalbe suggest that “a male body is a symbolic asset” (279), they do not explicitly engage with the way in which the active cultivation of a normatively masculine physique may constitute a manhood act. I interpret men’s development of their bodies on two levels: 1) as a practice through which embodied actors internalize discipline and somatically understand their bodies, and 2) as a performance through which actors display their bodies and symbolically link them with hegemonically masculine value talk. This article puts the concepts of disciplinary technologies and critical masculinities into conversation by analyzing the discursive tools that men use to frame their dieting behavior. Succinctly, how do men “do” masculinities through food? How do vlogging men actively perform their eating practices in a way that bolsters their claims to normative masculinities via this medium? And how do their diet repertoires affirm gender normativity?

“If It Fits Your Macros” and the Day of Eating Vlog

If It Fits Your Macros dieting (IIFYM for short), otherwise known as “Flexible Dieting,” is a diet that exploded in popularity during the last decade due largely to the advent of the YouTube fitness community (alongside other rapidly growing diets with online followings, such as the latest ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, and the “vertical diet”). The diet is popular within fitness circles, and IIFYM vloggers typically create other forms of fitness content. IIFYM prescribes its adherents a set numbers of macronutrients (macros)—i.e., grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrates—per day based on their gender, weight, height, and activity level (a formulation to approximate metabolism). A dieter’s day might allow, for instance, 60g fat (fat contains 9 calories per gram), 180 g protein (4 calories per gram), and 300 g carbs (4 calories per gram), totaling 2460 calories.

IIFYM prescribes two processes of food regulation for the dieter. First, they must quantify each food item’s macronutrient profile. Second, they must align the consumption of these foods to their own overall “body plan” (Giddens 1991). IIFYM differentiates itself from other diets in its reduction of foods to their instrumental value as macros, partially as a pushback against the highly prescriptive (at least in terms of foods allowed) diets of yesteryear—a point of pride for many participants. By de-emphasizing the holistic “health” of individual foods, IIFYM allows for a degree of “free” consumption of pleasurable foods previously labeled “junky,” while ultimately continuing to restrict overall calorie consumption.¹ While foods may not be labeled “clean” and “dirty” within IIFYM, dieters transpose these judgements onto themselves (as I explore below).

IIFYM dieters understand their dieting as “a way of life.” Regularly, they suggest that their diets are “sustainable,” intended to last for years or even a lifetime. During this long-term project, they participate in three distinct modes of practice—cutting, bulking, and maintaining—oriented towards subjectively “improving” overall body composition. In a bulk, dieters eat a caloric “surplus” to gain weight. In a cut, dieters eat a caloric “deficit” to lose weight. In a maintenance phase, dieters eat “maintenance calories” to sustain their current weight. Dieting men alternate these goals depending on their perceived bodily deficiencies—i.e., if they do not have “sufficient muscle” or are “too fat.” Dieters situate their language within a view of dieting as a long-term cultivation of self—as opposed to a one-off attempt to shed a few pounds.

Many IIFYM dieters demonstrate their diet practice online by creating “day of eating” vlogs. Day of eating vlogs are video logs in which a dieter records all the food they eat in a day, while typically guiding the audience through their selections. Sometimes the vlogs are short, consisting of a simple voiceover accompanied by images of all the food the vlogger consumed on that day. More often, however, they are presented in longer form, as the audience “accompanies” the vlogger through the activities of their day more generally, while particular attention is paid to food prep and eating. Day of eating vlogs exist for practically every trendy diet, but the rise of the format largely coincided with a spike in IIFYM dieting, as the medium is highly amenable to detailed nutrient tracking.

Diet vloggers and IIFYM dieters have gained popularity within the broader context of growing echelons of online fitness “influencers,” whose gendered personas uniquely intersect with their eating practices. As fitness discourse and information is increasingly negotiated online, the mediated experience of the vlog blurs distinctions between the public and private body, as the intimate details of the day become a genre of diet and life advice (and advertising). As multimedia, the vlogs in my sample function as visual representations of men’s bodies as well as “journals” of dieting behavior. Given my methodological approach, I primarily analyze the language that vlogging dieters use to frame their eating behaviors for audiences. However, the visual components of day of eating vlogs capture a historical moment during which the visual representation of men’s bodies—particularly fit bodies—is on the rise (Giddens, 1991; Grogan 2017).

Methods

I use qualitative content analysis to investigate diet discourse across a sample of 76 days of eating vlogs created by men.² Using YouTube’s search engine, I collected video results from terms relevant to IIFYM dieting—“IIFYM Full Day of eating,” “If It Fits Your Macros Full Day of eating,” “Flexible Dieting Full Day of eating,” and “Macros full day of eating”—filtering results by highest to lowest viewed at the time of sampling. Each search term yielded overlapping results, indicating the flexibility of the terminology applied to these diet practices. I sampled the highest viewed videos from each search term, eliminating duplicates, limiting videos made by each creator to five, and removing four videos from the sample due to language constraints. I checked each video based on two criteria: Does the dieter in the video explicitly follow an IIFYM/flexible dieting approach? And does the video fit within the format of a day of eating vlog? All told, the sample included vloggers across gender, consisting of 150 videos from 77 creators.

After transcription and initial coding, I became particularly interested in the gendered scripts that occurred within the videos produced by dieting men and reduced the working sample to 76 days of eating vlogs created by 33 men. While IIFYM creators do not explicitly market to men, the top three channels with the highest subscriber counts were men’s channels, and men’s videos received higher median views. In all, the videos included in this study represent men from five countries (The United States, the UK, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands). All were posted on YouTube between July 2013 and October 2019 and had views ranging between 29,369 and 1,336,119 at the time of sampling. Subscriber counts ranged from 10,000 to 2 million at the time of sampling. While the dieters in the sample had varying degrees of influence and visibility, all videos had a significant audience.³ Taking cues from prior research that employs public data from new media (Taylor and Jackson 2018), creators were assigned pseudonyms to preserve anonymity.

I employ an inductive approach to qualitative content analysis rooted in a discursive-analytic framework to investigate diet vloggers’ attitudes, goals, and values related to their dieting practices. My interest lies in analyzing how men’s everyday language “produces and reproduces” gender-normative ideas of masculine embodiment by drawing upon “discursive resources. . . [of] appropriate masculinity” (Taylor and Jackson 2018). I coded my transcriptions using an open coding approach to explore emergent themes present in the data. I coded for a wide variety of themes, with codes dedicated to dieters’ goals, dieters’ attitudes about their bodies, dieters’ feelings towards their food, whether dieters mentioned other diets, and how dieters tracked their consumption (via specific apps like MyFitnessPal).⁴ Based on the inductive coding, several dominant gendered repertoires⁵ emerged throughout the vlogs.

Findings

My analysis rendered two broadly recurring repertoires through which men discursively align their dieting practices with masculinity: Self-discipline as masculinity talk, through which men associate masculinity with total control over the self; and the battle against fat, through which men interpret fat as a feminine bodily tissue, against which force must be levied. Together, these repertoires serve as a framework through which the body work of dieting is given meaning by the men in the sample. By demonstrating themselves as crafting appropriately “masculine” bodies, dieting men indicate that they model appropriately “masculine” behavior, their lean muscular physiques serving as “evidence” of the practice of diet adherence. Dieting men situate themselves within a framework that characterizes dieting as a moral-aesthetic project, in which an aesthetic, “masculine” body is understood to reflect core values of hegemonic masculinity.

“Just Like Any Other Muscle”: Self-Discipline as Masculinity Talk

Men who practice IIFYM dieting invest their time in rigorous self-monitoring, usually taking the form of the weighing, measuring, and logging of foods via the tools of the trade—food scales, nutrition labels, and digital diet tracking apps. They measure their daily success by how closely they adhere to their macros, formatting videos around the mathematics of adding up macro counts to reach daily tallies and emphasizing their desire to follow their numbers as closely as possible. The code of self-discipline appeared the majority of videos in the sample, framing a large portion of both vloggers’ practical talk—such as tips for adherence and food selection—as well as their value talk—what kind of dieter is a “good” one? They likewise frame the cultivation of this skill as a masculine enterprise, understanding a state of control over the body as key to masculine diet practice.⁶ Jeff, a retired bodybuilder, expresses this idea by emphasizing that the IIFYM diet is not for wimps:

“This diet is for people who are training hard. . . Would I have someone who’s a couch potato eating like this?. . . [I] wouldn’t even be coaching them. So [this] is where I would start with a guy.”

-Jeff

The ideal IIFYM dieter, then, aside from being “a guy,” is no “couch potato” but someone who’s already demonstrated willingness to put in the work for a better physique.

Importantly, dieting men see IIFYM as a practice that reflects self-discipline as an acquired skill, which is in turn coded as a masculine standard. Take Dave and Jordan’s symbolic association between discipline as a value and the masculinized characteristic of strength.

“Like generally I’m fatigued and tired. . . [But] every time I cut, every time I diet, my mind gets like…I feel mentally stronger. . . Right now, I’m doing my 5-mile runs. I’m doing 5 miles 3 to 4 times a week. . . my mind goes to this motivational spot” [Emphasis added].

-Dave, supplement company owner [emphasis added]

“Self-discipline is like a muscle. We exercise it during the day. We’re constantly bombarded by decisions to make. What clothes to wear, what food to eat, decisions with business, decisions with family, so all these decisions take self-discipline, self-control, and ultimately it weakens just like any other muscle.”

-Jordan, fitness influencer

Dave portrays himself as having the strength to diet, regardless of the negative physical sensations he experiences. His ability to overcome painful feedback through performance—dieting and “doing 5-mile runs”—proves his dedication and macho fortitude. While monologuing, we see Dave shirtless in a low-lit gym, displaying a physique that must reflect his strong mind. The lyrics of the song he’s edited into the montage read “I’m a soldier, I’m a fighter.” Jordan, who refers to his followers as “swolediers”—a portmanteau of the words swole (which indicates muscularity) and soldier—likewise sees every choice, including what food to eat, as contributing to a disciplined or non-disciplined self—a self that is framed by normatively masculine language and anchored in the presentation of the body. He goes on to say that the same self-discipline allows him to “take care of [his] family, provide. . . And buy things for them,” setting himself up as a reliable protector and provider. Rather than seeing the arenas of fitness, family, and finances as separate, Jordan sees the practice of discipline in dieting as applicable to the maintenance of his core ideals of masculinity. The cultivation of self-discipline through dieting represents a “moral athleticism” (Schwartz 1986, 17), one which is framed through a normatively masculine language that sees a man’s disciplinary capacity as a muscle to be exercised.

Similarly, dieting men see a lack of discipline as objectionable and, often, feminine. Dieters set themselves up in opposition to other men who “let themselves go” and exhibit a lack of self-control via a loose diet, consciously putting in the effort to avoid their fate:

“We all know that guy who’s on the forever bulk. . . dreamer bulk [synonyms for the “dirty bulk,” in which men try to “get big” too fast], just ice cream and pasta his way past 200 [pounds]. Don’t be that guy. . . A bulk is really about slow progress, small adjustments.”

-Lorne, first time physique prepper

In his desire to gain mass and size—an ostensibly “masculine” goal—the theoretical dirty bulker in Lorne’s account loses control, indulging in an excessive amount of junk food, which presumably makes him large but fat. Lorne distances himself and his viewers from “that guy,” establishing him as a cautionary tale, against which his own—and presumably his viewers’—proper behavior can be measured. Lorne highlights an alternative model of bulking centered around “slow progress” and “small adjustments,” which require the participant to forego the easy access of treats in favor of a prolonged, moderate approach. Taylor, a recreational CrossFitter, likewise characterizes discipline as masculine by labeling his own moments of indulgence feminine:

“When I get in my feelings, I revert back to my old [eating habits]. . . Like any other 25 year old woman, I’m going to talk about my feelings, and I’m going to eat them away.”

To show his own authenticity, Taylor says that sometimes he, too, messes up on his diet. Tellingly, he characterizes himself as a woman in his moments of deviation from his diet, aligning his own loss of control with ostensibly feminine emotionality (Ezzell 2012).

“Tips to Get Shredded”: The Battle Against Fat

Several men in the sample frame fat—both as a bodily substance and as a nutrient—as more appropriate for women. Ascribing gender-normative cultural meaning to biological processes (Martin 2001), men essentialize gender by suggesting that men and women’s bodies “naturally” differ vis-à-vis eating behaviors and levels of leanness. In their estimation, “carrying” more fat is more suitable and desirable for a woman’s body. This is suggested in both pragmatic terms, which offer guidelines to viewers on how much fat they should consume, as well as chemical terms, which highlight biological difference as a mechanism.

“For women, just for the record, you can add 8 to 10 body fat units to each of these measurements. So the healthy lean for women would be something like 20–25% [body fat]. . . just keep that in mind going forward.”

-Guillermo, men’s physique competitor, while discussing his prep guidelines

“For the females, I’m not quite as aggressive. . . I’ll use a little bit less protein. Women handle fat. . . a little better than guys, actually. . . Most women. . . do a little better with a higher percentage of fat. . . I think hormonally the extra fats as a percentage of their diet is a very good thing.”

-Jeff

Regardless of the veracity of Guillermo and Jeff’s empirical claims, their essentialist language suggests the underlying femininity of fat in their understanding (Lorber 1993). This association operates at two levels. On the one hand, in giving guidelines for physique preps, Guillermo suggests that women can be competitive at a higher level of body fat. On the other, Jeff writes the association between fat and femininity into the level of hormonal regulation. In both cases, they suggest fat suits women and allows them to be more feminine.

While not all the men in the sample made such explicit comparisons, the vast majority at the very least encourage other men to aspire to leanness—often to extreme levels of leanness. Joey, a nutritionist and trainer, explicitly creates a hierarchy that assumes a base level of low body fat while elevating an extreme level of leanness as peak masculine embodiment. His three categories, “lean,” “beach lean,” and “truly shredded,” favor the most extreme state of fatlessness:

“With beach lean, no magic tricks, just a slightly longer caloric deficit, so you have to diet for longer . . . it will be more difficult to get to that 8 to 12% body fat than it would have been to get to that 12 to 15%. . . It may take a little more willpower, but it doesn’t take anything special.

Now,. . . this next level I’m calling truly shredded. [text on screen: 5–8% body fat]. . . men’s bodybuilding level of leanness, so to get [a client] to the higher standard of conditioning that’s required for men’s natural bodybuilding, [they’d] have to continue to diet.” [Emphasis added]

Joey accompanies his discussion with images of increasingly lean men’s physiques. He not only reaffirms narratives of discipline—indicating that willpower is an essential part of the recipe of leanness—but also explicitly draws connections between superior modes of embodiment and longer diet commitments. In this case, the top of the normative embodiment “food chain” is the leanest man, who manages to achieve five to eight percent bodyfat, an astoundingly low figure.

This infatuation at least partially represents an influx of bodybuilding aesthetics into normative masculinities. While only a handful of the men sampled (6) compete in bodybuilding or physique⁷ competitions, the remaining fitness enthusiasts elevate bodybuilders as models for the everyday man. To borrow a phrase from Boyle (2010), the bodybuilder uses “his body as the clay out of which he carve[s] his exemplary self” (153). Most men in the sample discursively echo this ethos while prioritizing leanness over mass, with extreme degrees of leanness being uncontroversial (a seemingly contemporary development; see Murtha et al. 2021). This indicates a diffusion of bodybuilding discourse, which has become far less niche since scholars like Klein (1993) and Wacquant (1995) tackled the issue. The consonance between “hardcore” body sculpting and mainstream discourses of health and body size⁸ for men to some degree indicates the mainstreaming of men’s body work.

To reach this pinnacle state of leanness, men must expunge fat, often making fatphobic comments about their own bodies. While typically framed as comedy, it is telling that a sizeable group of already very lean men are invested in the business of self-regulating their leanness, verbally punishing even the idea of their own fatness:

“I’ve got this shoot on Sunday, and feel like it’s irresponsible of me to show up looking like a pudgy little fuck, looking doughy and soft. . . So what I’m going to do is to go back to cutting macros for the rest of the week.”

-Wesley, Manchester-based fitness personality

Wesley characterizes his (lean) body as fatter than he wants it to be, framing himself not only as “soft” but also potentially “little” because of it. Fatness makes him pudgy, soft, and small, somehow increasing and decreasing his size all at once. Further, it would be “irresponsible” for him to display this kind of soft, unprepared body in a professional setting.

In order to combat the feminine presence of fat in their own bodies, men overwhelmingly employ violent language, signifying their accomplishment of manhood through the language of the “cut.” Men employ words like “cutting,“⁹ “shredding,” and “ripped,” which suggest a violent attitude that renders the body work of decreasing size as a macho “battle” against fat and the undisciplined self. These keywords appear in 24 of the video titles and 44 of the video tags. This common usage, particularly its use in tags, which are used to attract viewers, demonstrates the salience of these terms to men’s body projects. Men in the sample align their language with masculine narratives of violence in sport (Messner 1992; Spencer 2014) while emphasizing the athleticism of a battle against the self. For them, the act of dieting itself may constitute a masculine battleground. While it is acknowledged that these men exercise, the diet comfortably takes the foreground as “pumping iron” slips at least temporarily to the background. In the battle against fat, the shredded body represents “evidence” of prior success and continued “readiness” (Lilleaas 2007). The cut body becomes a symbol for a man who is continually able to put proper effort into the heroic battle that a masculine body requires.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study extends the growing empirical work on cis men’s body work, specifically dieting (Erfving-Hwang 2021; Frank 2014); the stigma surrounding fat and non-normative embodiment for men (Monaghan 2008; Hurd & Mahal 2021); and men’s eating habits (Brady & Ventresca 2014; Mycek 2018) while offering a unique empirical angle on the performance of masculinities through the display of bodies in new media. Though my study is limited in scope, prioritizing depth over breadth, I contend that men’s diet narratives online serve as an illuminating case, as the growing prevalence of fitness influencers indicates an intensification of body concerns in contemporary times. My analysis suggests that these concerns are still deeply gendered, implicating dominant themes of hegemonic masculinity. Men justify the increasingly demanding toning and sculpting of the body through the lens of hegemonically masculine discourse.

My study suggests that diet vloggers’ weight management constitutes a manhood act, in which they rigorously manage their appearance while couching this management in the moral-agentic terms of self-discipline and domination over fat. While these men fetishize terms like “shredded” and “ripped” and employ a visual language of semi-nude masculine bodies, they do not explicitly demarcate beauty as a goal. The literature on bodybuilders has explored the tension between normative heterosexuality and the eroticization of men’s bodies in body-sculpting projects (see Boyle 2010; Bridges 2009; Klein 1993). Notably, however, the themes of sexual conquest and attractiveness to women are largely absent from the discourse of day of eating vlogs. The men in the sample rarely express anxieties over perceived sexuality and or a stated interest in attractiveness. While men orient their behavior towards achieving a gender-normative “look” (in fact, their appearance is highly determinative of their success in the medium of the vlog), they rhetorically avoid expressing concerns over appearance as such (Hurd and Mahal 2021; Erfving-Hwang 2021). Instead, they code appearance as a metonym for character, framing their work as a moral-aesthetic project.

While it might be argued that the discursive reiteration of discipline and fatphobia simply reflect the momentum of neoliberal diet trends and discourse regardless of gender, I argue that the data implies the specific gendered importance of manhood acts for dieting men. Dieting men look at other men’s bodies as a barometer of what “successfully” masculine embodiment looks like while marketing their own bodies as worthy exemplars. They obfuscate the role of beauty in their body work by premising the validity of their pursuits on internal character and moral achievement. Men in the sample express admiration for the bodies of other men by highlighting the willpower necessary to achieve their physiques. This tension highlights the precarity men experience in negotiating their dieting performance, illuminating the gendered strategies involved as men distance themselves from the “feminine” domain of aesthetics while participating in dieting practices oriented towards bodily transformation (Mycek 2018; Barber 2008).

Likewise, the data implicates the growing role of virtual space in manhood acts (Moloney and Love 2017) and the gendered socialization of the body. Diet vloggers are not alone; they draw in significant audiences of men who learn from them, interact with one another in the comment section, and potentially internalize and model their messaging. Vloggers and vlog audiences act within a homosocial virtual space, where men acquire diet advice from other men from a distance and apply the intricacies of food-tracking to their own lives. The popularity of this format and the raw output of thousands of videos in the genre indicate that the availability of diet strategies geared specifically towards men is increasingly available and specialized. Amidst this pluralization of consumer options, the active gendering of diet discourse proliferates. Talk within fitness spaces continues to define being a fit man within the playbook of hegemonic masculinity, implicating the severely limited range of gendered expression in these spaces.

This discussion suggests further questions: How do distance and isolation contribute to men’s body projects? Men attempt the task of restrictive eating on their own, with the necessary technology and (gendered) motivation. Are similar methodologies of dieting imaginable without the facilitation of virtual spaces? What possibilities and limitations does the atomizing effect of virtual spaces allow? As men relate to other men from a distance—and through a mediated genre—what forms of gendered self-concept are permitted? Does the proliferation of online media allow for innovations in discourse surrounding masculinity, or will it continue to reinforce existing hegemonic narratives? The data here indicate the latter while hinting at an increasing commodification of men’s bodies in the contemporary moment. While these shifts might represent doors of possibility, the continuity between vlogging men’s discourse and the literature on masculinity and hegemony casts some doubt on the progressive potential of these new forms.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Warren Jensen

Notes

Author Biography

Warren E. Jensen is a graduate student in the sociology department at University of California, Irvine. His interests center on the body, gender, and health. His current projects focus on the role of masculinity in new religious movements, with a particular interest in the meaning and negotiation of masculinity in “men’s work” groups. He can be reached via email at jensenw@uci.edu.

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