I like a belly. There, I’ve said it. That’s hardly a shocking revelation from a man who describes himself as a bear, but a belly on a man can be a wonderful thing. Soft, hairy, round, substantial, or solid and firm; something you can put your hands on, something warm to lie against, something that gives a man shape and presence. I love the curve of a belly under a T-shirt and the weight and solidity of a bigger man when he’s close to me. It can be incredibly sexy.
My taste in men isn’t actually restricted to bigger guys, though. I’m not particularly into twinks, but some skinny men are bloody hot. Stocky men are gorgeous, muscular men can turn my head, and big hairy bears very definitely can. There isn’t a particular body template that someone has to fit before I can find him attractive. Different bodies have different things about them that appeal to me, and I’ve fancied men of all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Yet there’s something slightly ridiculous about all of this, because despite having a fairly generous idea of what an attractive male body can look like, I struggle enormously to apply any of that generosity to myself.
I like a belly. I hate mine.
There are days when I look at my own body and don’t merely wish I were a little slimmer or fitter. I find it genuinely repulsive. I see a stomach that hangs in ways I don’t want it to, loose and sagging skin, a chest I don’t particularly like and an ageing body that doesn’t look the way I want my body to look. Somehow the softness and size that can be so attractive on another man become evidence against me when I see them in the mirror.
I’ve started wondering whether the problem isn’t really that I’m big at all. If size itself disgusted me, it would be rather difficult to explain why I’ve looked at plenty of big men and thought they were absolutely gorgeous. I’ve certainly never looked at a bigger man I fancied and wished someone would remove his belly. Quite often his belly is part of what I’m attracted to in the first place.
Perhaps what I hate isn’t my belly so much as what I think my belly says about me.
That’s a rather more uncomfortable possibility.
When I look at another man’s body, I don’t know its history. I don’t know what he looked like twenty years ago, how much weight he’s gained or lost, whether he goes to the gym, what he eats, whether illness has changed him or whether he’s spent years fighting with himself about what he sees in the mirror. I just see the man standing in front of me. His body doesn’t arrive with a dossier explaining how it came to look the way it does.
Mine does.
I remember being younger and fitter. I remember having a body that felt more solid and powerful, and I remember what training could do to it. I know every change that’s happened since then and can attach a story to most of them. When I look in the mirror, perhaps I’m not simply seeing a fifty-year-old man with a belly. I’m seeing ageing, lost fitness, things I wish I’d done differently and things that happened to my body whether I wanted them to or not. I’m comparing the man in the mirror not just with other men, but with every previous version of myself and perhaps even with versions of myself that never existed outside my imagination.
Which raises another uncomfortable question: what would I think if I saw my body on somebody else?
Not an idealised bear who happens to carry his weight in exactly the places I find attractive. I mean genuinely my body: my stomach, my chest, my loose skin, my scars, my proportions and my age. Would I find that man attractive?
I don’t know.
I don’t particularly want to manufacture a reassuring answer to that question either. There seems little value in writing a thousand words about body image only to arrive obediently at the conclusion that I’m beautiful just the way I am. Perhaps one day I’ll feel that way, perhaps I won’t.
What bothers me more is the difference between not finding someone attractive and finding them repulsive. If I met another fifty-year-old man with my body, I don’t think I’d examine him with the same forensic hostility I can turn upon myself. I wouldn’t see his sagging stomach and conclude that it represented some sort of personal failure. I wouldn’t think his ageing skin made him lesser. Maybe I’d fancy him and maybe I wouldn’t, but I suspect I’d simply see a bloke with the sort of imperfect middle-aged body that blokes quite often have.
I’d almost certainly be kinder to him than I am to myself.
And that’s where I’m leaving this, because I don’t have the satisfying final paragraph where everything suddenly makes sense. I still look in the mirror (sometimes) and hate what I see. Knowing intellectually that I’m applying a different standard to myself doesn’t magically change the emotional response, and recognising a contradiction isn’t the same thing as resolving it.
I already know that ageing is compatible with being sexy, because I’ve found older men sexy. I know being bigger is compatible with being sexy because I’ve desired fat men, and I absolutely know that a belly can be sexy because I’ve seen plenty I’ve wanted to get my hands on.
Apparently I have no difficulty believing any of those things about other men.
I just haven’t worked out why they stop being true when the belly is mine.
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