Calling someone handsome is not a problem in my books. If you’re looking at a man with lust or are attracted to him it’s a whole different story.
I’m nowhere near being traditional Catholic (or Catholic for that matter), but I was going through looking for something else and thought it looked interesting. And not related to traditional Catholicism to the extent that I’m out of place making a comment…no offense, I hope.
Based on my experience, it seems like some of what you and your friends do is a little bit foreign to the experience of an average athlete from a wide variety of sports backgrounds. I’m not saying there’s anything morally wrong with it, and my experience in the weight room does have some things in common with yours. There are a couple of things that stick out as being different from my experience, though, whether it’s football, wrestling, swimming/diving, soccer, basketball, tennis, or volleyball. (I have a certain degree of experience in all those areas, at least in terms of having spent a good amount of time around such people in a weight room).
I honestly haven’t noticed much in the way of guy-to-guy admiration for the way muscles or body parts look. There is plenty of joking around (ie.- “Nice pecs, bro” and in response, “Thanks dude, nice guns, can I get tickets to the show?”) but I can only think of a time or two when a guy expressed genuine admiration along the lines that you’re describing (I think it had something to do with veins), and everyone who heard it immediately picked up on a weird vibe. Most of them said so at some point.
There is plenty of room for admiration, though, but this is what it usually looks like. If you’re a basketball player, you might comment on how someone has a really sweet hook shot, they’re unstoppable in the post, or they have a beautiful jumper. Shooting percentage doesn’t tend to matter quite as much for the last one; the aesthetics of performing a shot with perfect form is generally what’s in mind. Although the percentage does tend to be quite high when this is the case; think Ray Allen.
If you’re a football player or wrestler, there’s a bit of a tendency to have admiration for someone who works really hard in the weight room and is a beast, or if they’re extremely fast on the 40. But there, it’s less about aesthetics and more about the numbers you can put up. I went to a division-3 college where it’s pretty rare for any of the football players to get any consideration from scouts, but while I was there, one guy did go on to play in the pros (he’s active right now, actually). People didn’t comment on how his body looked or how his muscles feathered, though. They expressed genuine admiration for his overall level of skill (which is totally understandable) and they’d talk about how he’d intimidate new recruits with the amount of weight he’d put up. They weren’t worried so much about how his muscles looked- these guys were worried that they were looking at a football program that would expect them to do some things that they were a long way from being able to do.
It was the same kind of thing in swimming. At various levels of competition, people might make comments like “That guy looks like he’s got a body for swimming.” That usually had more to do with guys in middle school, though, and their odds of being reasonably successful long-term. As things progress, you might comment on how someone has extremely good flip-turns and a great core even though it’s not incredibly obvious and defined, but ultimately, people would be impressed with certain times in certain events no matter what your body looks like. I have heard comments comparing guys like Phelps and Lochte, but that only goes as far as saying Phelps is a bit more cut while Lochte’s got more bulk. And Phelps has condor arms, a really long torso, and kind of a goofy looking face. That’s the extent of it; aside from that, people admire performance.
I think that’s generally how it tends to be, and I can only guess at what makes bodybuilding different. Is there any element where you’re judged in a competition on the appearance of your muscles, or is it strictly the kind of thing where the most impressive person is the one who lifts the most?
Let me put it this way- I’ve done quite a bit of swimming, we wear practically nothing a good deal of the time, and different guys have varying degrees of bulk and cut. I’m capable of recognizing when one guy’s build would be more aesthetically pleasing than another guy’s, but that generally doesn’t correlate well at all with their swimming ability in any given stroke. It’s the kind of thing that has more to do with whether a girl would be attracted to him, and I see no value in telling one guy his body’s more desirable than another one of my teammates. Even if I do manage to keep it from sounding gay, what’s the point? Significant differences in relative speed are relevant as far as the value of their performance in the water, and their value to me as people has more to do with how they act and how I get along with them. The aesthetics of their bodies have very little to do with either of these. It just doesn’t have any direct connection to something that really matters to me.
It might be different with bodybuilding, though. Even if you aren’t judged on appearance, maybe your performance is more closely linked to having muscles that look a certain way. If you look at athletes from most sports- football, the other football, wrestling, swimming- your odds of finding a camera-worthy individual aren’t much better than if you’re looking at non-athletes. That might change when you start looking at bodybuilders. Maybe there is more of a direct link between great performance and a certain “look” or appearance.
), but the the body builders at the gym I go to do seem a little “different”. For some strange reason they are all hairless and a light orange color. They’ve never mentioned anything about any freakish accidents they’ve all been involved in together so I can only assume they are this way on purpose. My friend who is a body builder recently had all of the caps on his molars replaced because they were the wrong color. Who on earth can even see your molars?
They can knit bandages for leporasy patients, cook meals for shut-ins, offer to babysit so young couples can have a night out together. (Or do yard work for elderly neighbors, etc…)
