A Sophie's Choice of Selfies

Are abs the cheat code to jailbreaking the vagina buffet?

It’s been over a week since the disappearance of Emma Horsedick (don’t laugh) and the Horse Dick community is still reeling. While I have more evergreen stuff in the works, I’m still coping with her loss and shopping for grief counselors (not tariffed yet). While I try not to engage in junk news, in the same way I try not to eat too much junk food, it’s rare that I see a story I want to react to in the hot-take-reaction-economy-Samsara that so many Substackers (myself excluded) engage in. So I’ve decided to write about the Absmaxxing vs. Burlymaxxing discourse as an underemployed fitness professional, who is too jacked for Substack but too smart for a real job.

Before I take the bait and do the deed, I want to preface that the argument as framed thus far comes down to deciding whether one particular picture of some guy makes him look more attractive or if another one does—yes the discourse is intelligent this week—but this frame totally missing the point since both pics should dry the pussy of any woman who isn’t a medieval peasant thawing out from a centuries-long poison-induced slumber or else the product of decades of alcohol + pharmaceutical abuse and Troll doll-fetishism. The point is no biological lady you might want to put your penis inside should be particularly thrilled to chance upon either of these photographs which is why you should not take them. They will hurt you and it will be your fault.

To read an entire post on why you shouldn’t take pics like these, see Would Tony Soprano take a dick pic?

My bona fides and breadth of experience

Being that I am, at time of writing this, 40 years-old, a fitness professional, and extremely high in both openness and disagreeableness, I should mention that I’ve tried a lot of things over the years and have a decent data set on what works and what doesn’t and can therefore see how things affect your body. In addition to training loads of people over the years, I spent thirteen years vegetarian and later completed 3 years strict vegan, but am currently an omnivore who eats lots of beef and lamb and enjoys it. I have done calisthenics, powerlifting, kettlebells, and distance running but am mostly sticking to calisthenics these days as I broke my foot pretty badly a year ago and am just now able to test out running and deadlifting.

I spent most of my life natty but after a series of health issues in 2020 got on HRT. At 5’10” I have weighed between 135 lbs and 210 lbs. I have spent most of my adult life walking around between 160-178 lbs but after I got on the sauce, I absolutely blew up. I probably had pretty low test for most of my life and had really done as much as I could on a shitty diet and not-that-great genetics prior to my endocrine system getting especially fucked. Not for nothing I was able to do some pretty impressive feats like weighting pull-ups with an extra hundred pounds far in advance of tinkering with my hormones and would like to at least put it out there that it was not for lack of effort that I caved. Furthermore, I have seen many unimpressive gentlemen on the sauce in my day and would like to underscore that good results are usually the result of many factors like diet, lifting regimen, cardio, and bloodwork, not an optimization of one.

The other thing I should mention is a little delicate since I try to be virtuous and chaste as a married and middle-aged man, so I’ll be relatively vague and say that since age 19, I’ve never gone more than 2 months without sex but mostly not more than 2 weeks. Again, I’m not trying to be a dick here but it’s important to mention in light of the weight-differential and corresponding aesthetic changes that supposedly give you the cheat code to jailbreak the vagina buffet.

Neither is covered by your insurance, Neo.

According to the frame, one of these phenotypes is supposed to be more sexually successful than the other but as someone who’s been working out across two decades and 75 lbs, I’m here to tell you it just ain’t so.

Now, maybe I’m being a little provocative here

I’m not saying that having a nicer body can’t command you a more desirable woman but I don’t actually think how I looked statically played a huge role in my sexual success because most people overrate the importance of being photogenic (handsome) and underrate the importance of being telegenic (charismatic), which is probably why I did terribly on dating apps but cleaned up in-person. The caliber of the woman I normally connected with was based more on who was available for me to begin with. The one major exception to this line of reasoning entailed going out with my friend Nick who was a bona fide Ford model who women would very annoyingly throw themselves at and for whom I was always second fiddle, which is fine in New York since fiddle-fanatics abound.

Not all who pussy-pill are Hubermaxxed but all who Hubermaxx are pussy-pilled.

Lastly, I should also mention, I basically had the Patrick Dempsey McDreamy-type hair from ages 19-26 at which point my hairline was just beginning to peel back so I started shaving it and showing off this big fucking podcast head I have. And good news for bald guys, being bald never stopped me from getting cute girls either. My dad was a fat bald dude and women loved him because he knew how to talk. It just never occurred to me that not having hair would be any kind of impediment. I’ve just seen too many funny guys finesse it.

So back to these two pics and why we all have to talk about them now. They show Olly Murs, a pop singer from the UK juxtaposed in the classic, before/after Total Fitness Transformation format. What happens is William Costello, an evo-psych PhD candidate at UT Austin, takes a poll on X asking whether people prefer the look of the before or the after, striated by sex.

Turns out ladies like the huskier before and gentlemen think he looks better in the after. In my unscientific but experienced frames, it looks like he probably has roughly the same amount of muscle in both pics (maybe even slightly less in the after) but he has significantly less body fat in the after. I point this out because people are calling this “bodybuilding” but it basically looks like he just executed a tremendous cut after having a moderate amount of muscle on his frame. The muscle he has looks great but no one who’s jacked thinks Mr. Murs is all that built in either pic. Surely there are 16 year-olds in Florida or Texas who can turn Mr. Murs into mincemeat. The British mind simply cannot comprehend the American Gulf Races.

Pretty sure they don’t have teen stabbings in the UK.

So what’s going on?

To restate: Simply not taking a picture like this would be the ultimate upgrade but since we’re forced to do a Sophie’s Choice of cry-for-help pics here’s the deal. Guys know how hard it is to get abs, especially by the time they’re balding so they can basically appreciate the effort Mr. Murs applied to get them. They intuit beers that didn’t get drunk and delicious treats that didn’t get gobbled.

I rarely really post my workouts or physique on any socials anymore but I can attest that the overwhelming amount of comments just come from other guys (straight, mostly married or at least with kids) saying something encouraging like, “You got this bro,” or “LFG.” Disappointingly, women don’t typically get all thirsty in the comments unless they’re perimenopausal Spanish mamis whose husbands left them two decades ago.

In general women appreciate men for all kinds of qualities and are extremely generous in giving men many ways to get laid like having:

• muscles,

• humor,

• money,

• nice punim,

• musical ability,

• culinary ability,

• penis-skills etc.

But, if we are going to sort for body-type, they are basically looking for something appealing but not too ostentatious. Put another way, they like the idea that you can be a formidable defender of their honor and basically pick up everything they can’t. They also want you to break down every single Amazon box they ever get for some reason. And reaching everything past their fingertips and into commercial airspace is also your purview. What they don’t want is someone who’s going to take longer than they will in the bathroom or be more self-conscious about looks than they are. On net, they want someone bigger than them who will order steak and not salad when they go out and give them French fries even though they said they don’t want any. Some calluses on your hands and the ability to give them a piggyback ride (how I secured my wife + penis skills) is also helpful. They want you to look like you can fight but they don’t want you to go around picking them.

The political coding

In truth, Olly’s politics (not even going to bother looking them up) likely didn’t change across the 12 weeks it took him and the internet content machine to get this thing going. Again, it’s the same guy and he has probably been fucking his wife with about the same frequency the last three months too. But, for some reason the thiccer Olly codes more to the right and the leaner, more shredded Olly codes more to the left.

See these notes from

Stephen Bradford Long

and

Mikala Jamison

regarding Hasan Piker’s build here:

No disrespect to Stephen or Mikala but I actually think that the woke are more correct on this one and that Hasan does not code as temperamentally left/liberal in the same way that Chris Cuomo does not code as temperamentally left/liberal, in the same way that many NFL players may vote Democrat but very few of them will be at this year’s Pride Parade. This is because with the exception of young boys who are mostly solipsists and terrorists, those who rely on kindness, redistribution, and protection/chivalry to get along, those who cannot physically defend themselves tend to skew left/liberal according to what

Dmitry

might source back to their biofoundations.

Do these chinos make me look bulky?

Those who develop the qualities needed to thrive in harsher, more dangerous conditions will necessarily tend to walk around with more overall mass and express more right-leaning dispositions (less Sweetgreen, more Chechnya). Which is why it looks like the left cedes muscularity to the right. But it isn’t ceding anything because it’s always been this way and always will.

As former athlete Thomas Sowell says, “If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.” As of right now, the right may be too disorganized in its barbarism to pull it off but the left is too wimpy to stop it.

But spring is here. The first bits of sideboob are beginning to show themselves. And summer is just around the corner.