A Receptive Mass
“Physical culture has become my life’s work, and it is my ambition to see every person who comes under my care molded as physically perfect as myself.”
- Don Athaldo - Health, Strength and Muscular Power
Due to these new technologies of travel and industrial production, in the mid- to late-19th century in Europe and America we suddenly find a large group of people displaced into a new environment – an environment that does not necessarily offer the healthful benefits and wisdom that their indigenous surroundings had shared. Nations of farmers quickly became nations of urbanites.
This new population stood ripe for mass movements in many ways. The railroads, while also dissolving notions of time and space, surprisingly aided in the surge in literacy and printed culture. Compared to previous modes of travel (walking, carriage, horses, etc.) the railroad offered an impersonal mode of travel. Now, the traveler found himself seated in a confined space shared with strangers, and the only real thing to do to occupy the time was to read. Small trade paperbacks, newspapers, magazines, physiologies (books which aided in identifying different urban types in the anonymous city –from accountants to pickpockets). Literacy, and the publishing industry, boomed and took on their modern characteristics. These new, roughly literate city dwellers no longer worked on the farm, and instead morphed into factory laborers and office-bound bureaucrats. Physical Culture came to decry both. The laborer, often overworked, developed his body specifically, rather than uniformly and holistically. The bureaucrat, confined to his desk, severely lacked movement and physical challenge. Looking out in the burgeoning cities, we find not only an increasingly literate population, but one physically suffering from its new lifestyles.
This new population also stands open, ready and willing for the new invention called mass spectacle: vaudeville and other forms of theater, the rise in professional and collegiate sports, the previously mentioned rise in mass publishing and journalism, and perhaps most importantly, the spread of photography – with photographs, both moving and still – becoming commonplace.
Through pure spectacle and striking imagery, the bodies of the men of Physical Culture evoked the imagination and desires within those who viewed them. Young men, throwing off their parents’ confining responsibility for a more virile state of urban bachelorhood, witnessed a wild and rugged individualism (a philosophy doubly potent in America in the already-nostalgic final days of the “Wild West,” already immortalized in traveling shows, and books and widely distributed prints depicting events such as Custer’s Last Stand).
This affected not only men, but a large female audience as well. Two new societal roles, office worker and retail shopper, gave women new roles outside of the home (a loosely defined “liberation”). With images of attractive and barely clothed men suddenly accessible in publications and kinetescope films (conveniently placed in shopping districts and other arenas), women consumed them in droves.
source: ezinearticles.com
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