Physical Culture

Larry Wolf, Physical Culture (2022)

I'm taking an online art history class from the Barnes Foundation: Sexuality and the Modern Male Body taught by Ty Vanover. This week's talk is London: Victorian Sculpture and the Virile Male Nude with a suggested reading by Michael Hatt, “Physical Culture: the Male Nude and Sculpture in Late Victorian Britain.”

Physical Culture is alive and well. It wasn't just a late 19th/early 20th Century phenomena - the muscular male body was seen as normative, wholesome and presumed heterosexual. While some of us (that would be me), counter this through a queer lens, the muscular male body is sexual and can be viewed as such. It is also a myth-busting reality that manly men can be gay just as femme men can be heterosexual. 

Which is to say nothing about this moving company, other than to smile at the continued pairing of mind and body.

Note that H. U. N. K. S. is an acronym for Honest, Uniformed, Nice, Knowledgeable, Service. A continued redirection from the sexual to the intellectual.  https://www.collegehunkshaulingjunk.com/