Looking at Pinterest drawing tutorials to make myself angrier and more full of rage
Much has been said about unrealistic female anatomy, but is it not even more bizarre and fucking terrible that <90% of generic male drawing tutorials show some kind of monstrous aftermath of bodybuilding, steroids and extreme dehydration and are like “this is a basic male torso”
In the nicest way possible, if you see this as “basic” male anatomy and all other possibilities as variations on this, your art will be Not Good except in circumstances of dumb luck
99% of men Do Not look like this, ever, at all, and out of those that ever do, they Do Not look like this 99% of the time.
Abs don’t appear defined unless you’re tensing and flexing your whole abdomen, and they don’t appear that defined unless you’re unhealthily dehydrated. You don’t get abs like that in the first place unless you’re doing intense workouts, dumping protein in everything you eat, and probably restricting food unhealthily specifically to get that kind of look
But it’s not a problem just because it’s unrealistic, it’s a problem because it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what muscle is and does.
Like, drawing bodies in dynamic poses is not going to be very fun for you if you don’t get that muscle is squishy when relaxed and you’re imagining it as this tough, stiff pulley system
like, if you look at renaissance and baroque paintings of men, which were painted by masters of anatomy who did intensive studies including disections to learn how to depict the male body, the men in those paintings and sculptures DONT look like the above. they almost never have defined abs.
for instance, if you look at rubens abduction of ganymede,
an idealised figure of a man who is meant to be very attractive. hes literally ganymede! but not only does he not have abs, you can see rolls of fat where his trunk bends. his arms are clearly muscular but the dehydrating looking hyperdefinition is clearly lacking. below is michelangelo, who specialized in painting extremely muscular men and did more dissections than the average doctor (apologies for image quality but it shows my point)
so yeah please dont learn to draw men from tutorials that look like that. learn it from secret pope-sanctioned dissections
you are handsome, valid, and amazing regardless of your body type. society’s crazy expectations do not dictate your worth. you don’t have to have styled hair to be good looking. you don’t have to have a six pack or muscular arms to look good. you don’t have to be 6’1 to be dateable. you don’t have to have a sharp jawline to be attractive. cellulite, fat, hair, whatever: you’re alright. you are incredible as you are. I hope you feel like it someday soon, if not now
loving yourself isn’t going to be easy. although I have recovered from self harm, I still struggle every day with treating myself kindly. but everyday we get ourselves out of bed, make that phone call we’re scared of, go in the shower…that is self love. that is a moment of care and love for ourselves and it will all add up in time. do what you can. don’t be so hard on yourself.
fat people deserve to be included when people talk about oversized clothes being cute! fat people deserve not to be made feel that they’re ugly just because a lot of people who think the “baggy clothes aesthetic” is pretty think so because it accentuates skinny people’s small size! fat people deserve for us all to consicously be fighting against our current internalized fatphobia! fat people deserve acknowledgement of the systemic and social pressures and discrimination they face and tremendous respect and positivity, not just on social media, but in real life! fat people deserve for people to be actively anti-fatphobic, for nonfat people to call out their friends on their fatphobia, to treat fatphobia as absolutely unacceptable! fat people deserve to not have to memorize stats and sources on how people’s ideas about being fat are wrong just to get people to respect them!
Z and I met when we were nine, and determined to make ourselves ugly in order to avoid the attentions of the Town’s men. We had few ideas and no money and not much of an imagination between us. So we harvested cigarette butts to rub on our faces, we stopped combing our hair, we limped and drooled, we chipped our teeth with hammers–these were the more trifling behaviors. I will not tell you the rest. Later, Z spent months touring the Town doing a poorly-received piece of performance art that involved humping the air and screaming while wearing a fluorescent skeleton suit and an upside-down cow mask. She still blames me for the damage she did to herself over those scant months when we were trying to take ownership of our flesh.
Today, we are flung out on her lawn like worms after rain, and I know that she hates me, a little, I know that she wishes I would die, a little, because I co-designed the body she has now and it is a body with much to hide. Z is painting her bathroom and has taken down her checkerboard shower curtains–we are lying on one of them. She’s wearing a moonstone ring–like her, it seems to aggressively resist being part of this world. In fact, both Z and the ring look like objects stolen by divers from an ancient shipwreck, and I am jealous of her long polished hairless body in its gold lamé bikini and cannot, as a result, stop staring at it and tearing up handfuls of grass.
When I am around Z I worry constantly about hygiene. I shave my arms and legs before one of our appointments, as if I’m preparing to have sex with a stranger. I select enormous sun hats that leave most of my face in shadow. I choose loose dresses made of the thinnest silk; they hint at my body without fully admitting to its presence within them. These dresses cost more than a week-long hospital stay and Z is the only person who sees them. Some women, it seems, have a knack for cleanliness; Z is one of them. She wanders over to her garden and eats a handful of nasturtiums. She seems to mostly live on flowers. On the windowsill she’s brewing one of her strange sun teas in a mason jar. I see lemon slices and feathery, celestial herbs.
Black squares, white squares, the spectacle of her body splayed over both. My body infecting the whole yard. You have less soul than a dog, I say to myself. What? says Z. She can easily hide her damage with makeup and tattoos, whereas I work from home and can only swim at night or while wearing a wetsuit. If you met me you would find me too effusive, because I desire so much to be accepted. I know people think I’m revolting; I watch them duck into shops and slide down alleys–everyone eventually retreats from my florid compliments, my wet eyes and close talking. Whenever anything I own is admired, I feel compelled to give it away. I press upon bewildered strangers my earrings, my sandwiches, my shoes.
I’d like to be able to choose the work I do, the hours I keep. I would like the cleanliness that I achieve only through great difficulty to mean that I am no longer distracted by the question of my own cleanliness. But in trying to exterminate my body I have, of course, rendered it more visible. I am marked over and over again by my own attempts to vanish.
Z is narrowing her eyes at me as she always does when she senses I am drifting. I want to tell her how difficult it is to concentrate on anything when I feel myself flowing over or shrinking from my clothing, protruding at odd angles, shivering then sweating. When I long to gather my stomach and my breasts into my hands and slice them cleanly off. But I do not have an attendant urge to appear less female. If I were capable of gentleness I would want my breasts to just fall off, like raindrops. I’d like to rise, and leave my body sleeping on the rubber sheets it requires: entirely oblivious, and made beautiful by my absence. I’d like to dissolve into substancelessness, like a bouillon cube dropped into boiling water. These are the kinds of stupid desires I form my life around.
The Town that surrounds us fills with snow and mist and the men in all of their despicable freedom saunter or skateboard right up against its borders. I want to ask Z: how do you manage to seem happy to be alive? But she will not let me get close enough to her scars to lift the edges and peer inside. The long slices down her face healed with barely a trace; her boyfriend the Chancellor terrorizes Z but he also funds many of her reconstructions. She will not speak of our time together. The more I see of her the more surely I know she has closed herself to me. How pitiful I was, how desperate and small, to have thought that we’d walk hand in hand to the door of this cage.
i know you’re lonely. i know it feels comforting to slip into the same old familiar loneliness. the same religiously good hurt of refusing yourself the things you need and the space to heal. i know it feels beautiful to have something to worship. i know in this cold, confusing world, having goodness be safely defined as thinness within a community with whom you can push for that ideal feels like a comfort. i know it feels safe and familiar. but if you think that this is something that you can compartmentalize and keep safe tucked in a corner of your life, you can’t; and if you think it ever ends, or that your ideal is something you will ever reach, you’re wrong. this disorder is a parasite, and it will take over every corner of your life and every minute of your time and in the end, you will not be rewarded for it. no one will like you any better, least of all yourself; no one will thank you for hurting yourself like this; the world will not turn rose-coloured, your head will not clear and your perfect life will not materialize. you will come out of the end of the tunnel and you will have lost years of your life that you can never get back, and you will realize you were worshipping a false god the whole time. you will realize you never needed to change to wake up with a smile on your lips and birds singing in the window, you never needed to change to dance in the kitchen with your significant other or feel the warmth of another’s presence and laughter. if this made you doubt yourself at all, come and take my hand. i know the grave is comfortable, but don’t let yourself sleep yet.
i know you’re lonely. i know it feels comforting to slip into the same old familiar loneliness. the same religiously good hurt of refusing yourself the things you need and the space to heal. i know it feels beautiful to have something to worship. i know in this cold, confusing world, having goodness be safely defined as thinness within a community with whom you can push for that ideal feels like a comfort. i know it feels safe and familiar. but if you think that this is something that you can compartmentalize and keep safe tucked in a corner of your life, you can’t; and if you think it ever ends, or that your ideal is something you will ever reach, you’re wrong. this disorder is a parasite, and it will take over every corner of your life and every minute of your time and in the end, you will not be rewarded for it. no one will like you any better, least of all yourself; no one will thank you for hurting yourself like this; the world will not turn rose-coloured, your head will not clear and your perfect life will not materialize. you will come out of the end of the tunnel and you will have lost years of your life that you can never get back, and you will realize you were worshipping a false god the whole time. you will realize you never needed to change to wake up with a smile on your lips and birds singing in the window, you never needed to change to dance in the kitchen with your significant other or feel the warmth of another’s presence and laughter. if this made you doubt yourself at all, come and take my hand. i know the grave is comfortable, but don’t let yourself sleep yet.
I was once that guy who goes to the pool with shirt on. That guy who is uncomfortable with his own photo. But I worked on those that I can change, and embraced those that I can’t. Don’t be ashamed of what you have, we’re all born differently.
