Beauty standards are always shaped by cultural movements, which rest on the slow, grinding tectonics of politics and economics. The muscular male ideal we recognize today wasn’t always the pinnacle of male attractiveness. The ideal male beauty in the early 19th century was a gentleman, which is to say pale, slender and of romantic, melancholic demeanor. The upwardly mobile middle class—clerks, shopkeepers, office professionals—was more concerned with commerce than calisthenics, and visible muscle was considered the mark of a lowly field hand. “Very few upper-class ‘gentlemen’ would ever touch a barbell,” David Chapman wrote in Sandow the Magnificent. “It was too much like manual labor.” Sandow helped recast the male body as a site of ambition, reframing muscle not as brute force but as evidence of self-mastery. Strength, in Sandow’s world, was civilized and refined.
In postwar America, where Sandow’s heirs found their natural habitat in Southern California, muscle culture lost some of its respectability. During the late 1950s, Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach—a sunny stretch of sand that was once a family-friendly stage for gymnasts and acrobats—became dominated by bodybuilders, whose oiled torsos and theatrical poses drew mounting scrutiny. To many locals the beach took on a lurid edge; it was seen as a magnet for “sexual perverts” and, in more carefully whispered tones, homosexuals. In 1959 the city quietly shut it down. The lifters migrated south to Venice, where a small weightlifting pit known as the Pen offered them a new home. Venice lacked Santa Monica’s polish—it was grittier and more permissive, with tattoo parlors, smoke shops and roller skaters—but it became the spiritual center of American bodybuilding.
In the early 1970s, Ken Sprague purchased Gold’s Gym, a struggling fitness club just blocks from the Pen. Sprague believed it needed to be more than a training space—it had to be a theater. He organized competitions, invited photographers and let director George Butler use Gold’s as the set for his 1977 documentary, Pumping Iron. The film, which followed rising stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, became a surprise hit and helped legitimize a culture often written off as self-obsessed spectacle. Its success lured magazines and TV shows to latch on to the commercial fitness boom. By decade’s end, Gold’s Gym T-shirts—printed with a cartoon strongman inspired by Mr. Clean—were stretched across hulking torsos nationwide.