The Body Shop: The decline of the American muscle man
Check out this Salon interview with author Paul Solotaroff about his upcoming memoir The Body Shop: Parties, Pills and Pumping Iron-or my life in the Age of Muscle. Solotaroff, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, writes about about his personal history with lifting weights, abusing steroids and the changing face of masculinity in America over the last three decades. It is a candid portrayal of Solotaroff’s struggles with everything from drug addiction to body dysmorphic disorder.
Here is an excerpt from the Salon interview about Paul’s experience with body dysmorphic disorder:
In the past few years, clinicians have identified “muscle dysmorphia” (sometimes called bigorexia) as a concern among many men. It sounds as though your case would qualify for it. How did you work through it?
I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever worked through it. I would say that I still suffer from it. At my biggest I was too small. At my biggest I would look in the mirror and see flaw after flaw, see things that embarrassed me. I think we all have that problem. We’re all operating out of this fundamental sense of our own frailty, our own unimportance, our own sadness. It’s very much a mixed bag. I see myself in two disparate ways. I see myself as someone who can still get noticed walking down the street because I’ve got these arms. And I’m entirely capable the next minute thinking, I’m completely invisible. How sad is that? After all these years, all this effort, I’ve completely vanished.
I’ll probably pick up a copy this summer, but if anyone grabs it before me and wants to write up a quick review, feel free to get in touch! The Body Shop goes on sale July 26th.
From the publisher:
As a scrawny college freshman in the mid-1970s, just before Arnold Schwarzenegger became a hero to boys everywhere and Pumping Iron became a cult hit, Paul Solotaroff discovered weights and steroids. In a matter of months, he grew from a dorky beanpole into a hulking behemoth, showing off his rock hard muscles first on the streets of New York City and then alongside his colorful gym-rat friends in strip clubs and inthe homes of the gotham elite. It was a swinging time, when “Would you like to dance?” turned into “Your place or mine?” and the guys with the muscles had all the ladies–until their bodies, like Solotaroff”s, completely shut down.
But this isn’t the gloom-and-doom addiction one might expect–Solotaroff looks back at even his lowest points with a wicked sense of humor, and he sends up the disco era and its excess with all the kaleidoscopic detail of Boogie Nights or Saturday Night Fever.
