While campaigning at the annual Men’s Day event in Brooklyn late last month, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani attempted to bench-press 135 pounds while a crowd of onlookers cheered him on. Emphasis on attempted. Mamdani found himself unable to complete even one rep without the help of two burly bystanders. His opponents did not hesitate to seize the opportunity to call him out.
Mayor Eric Adams, who had recently posted videos of himself doing pull-ups on a streetlight in Brooklyn, posted a video of himself at that same gathering bench-pressing with minimal assistance with the caption: “64 vs. 33. A lifetime of hard work vs. a silver spoon. The results speak for themselves. The weight of the job is too heavy for ‘Mamscrawny.’ The only thing he can lift is your taxes.” Similarly, Andrew Cuomo posted that “it’s easy to talk, it’s hard to carry the burden. This guy can’t bench his own body weight, let alone carry the weight of leading the most important city in the world.”
While plenty have taken to the internet to swoon over “Mamdaddy’s” charming face, his body type doesn’t seem to have generated the same reaction. Falling into the category of what is colloquially called a “butterbody,” he is — as his opponents have pointed out — not muscular. But neither does his physique fit neatly into the categories of fat or skinny (or as Adams called him, “scrawny”). As evidenced by his quasi-shirtless appearance in a 2019 rap video (which has recently gone viral), Mamdani is closer to being “skinny fat.”
As much as the dictates of both decorum and the decreasingly popular #bodypositivity movement hold that belittling someone’s physique is off limits, Adams and Cuomo are not wrong to insist that a candidate’s body type indicates something about his fitness (or lack thereof) for political leadership. And while we can debate whether or not Mamdani’s body counts as skinny fat, the increasing number of young men with indecisive body types — neither totally fat, nor muscular, nor skinny — is a red flag warning that they are unprepared to build a path forward toward a sustainable future.
Despite having a normal BMI and body fat percentage, those who are “metabolically obese” tend to take on fat in their midsections while their limbs remain slim. The consensus among doctors, nutritionists, and fitness influencers is that this usually results from high cortisol levels (induced by stress), eating too much sugar and too little protein, living a sedentary lifestyle, or doing too much cardio and too little weight training.
In recent years, content geared toward curing skinny fatness has proliferated on the internet. I once searched for videos about how to stop being skinny fat. Ever since, my YouTube algorithm bombards me with fit-fluencers offering tips to “professional men in their early 30s who are tired of being skinny fat” with titles like: “Skinnyfat To Ripped: How To Decide If You Should Cut Or Bulk,” “How To Fix Being Skinny Fat,” and “My Skinny Fat Transformation.”
While skinny fatness does not discriminate according to gender, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of my male friends are — like myself — skinny fat. And I’d argue that being skinny fat as a man is more of a mark of shame than it is for a woman: While women are no stranger to “fat shaming,” skinny fatness deviates less from ideal forms of feminine beauty than it does from masculine ones. In addition to excess fat playing a biological function in the female body, added curves can accentuate a woman’s aesthetic appeal. Indeed, many find a Venus body type with extra padding to only add to her goddess-like attributes. Fat lacks a similar role in both masculine biology and aesthetics; extra padding would only cover up Adonis’s sculpted physique and slow Hercules down.
As a friend once complained to me, “I feel like I’m always in limbo … in the sense that I’m definitely not fat but I also don’t look aesthetically fit.” While this friend does work out, he admits to being “very noncommittal” about it. He “feels most out of shape at the beach or spa,” confessing that he is embarrassed to take off his shirt in public.
But beyond its aesthetic downsides, male skinny fatness is emblematic of both moral and social impotence. Skinny fatness is, frankly, rather useless. The skinny-fat man is neither skinny from a meager lifestyle or ascetic discipline in the name of a higher ideal, nor fat from eating rich foods out of a gusto for life, nor muscular from engaging in manual labor or adhering to a weightlifting regimen.
Lacking any pragmatic function in the real world, the skinny-fat man symbolizes our Baudrillardian age of simulations devoid of referents in reality, an age dominated by automation and technocratic experts who have no use for — and actively discourage — the agency of everyday men. Jean Baudrillard himself once remarked that the contemporary impulse “to conjure away the ‘organic’ body” and its natural functions has led to the proliferation — among both men and women — of “smooth, faultless, formless, sexless” bodies that are lifeless and sterile.
“The body doesn’t lie, and it can’t fool anyone. When I see a fit person,” says Iowa-based small gym-owner Joe Enabnit, “I immediately know a bit about them. This person can show restraint, do hard things, stick to routines, and perform some amount of hard work. At the very least, this person is capable of helping me move a refrigerator.” The skinny fat physique “demonstrates the dual weaknesses of modern man: a lack of passion and a lack of commitment. It is the physique,” Enabnit continues, “of the doomscroller, the clump of moss that aimlessly meanders down the dopamine river, avoiding anything that is too uncomfortable and never latching on to anything along the way.”
Indeed, skinny fatness speaks to the particular brand of narcissism of which myself and so many of my fellow younger Millennials are guilty. While we are full of lofty ideals, we lack the skills and work ethic required to realize them. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch chalks up such hollow idealism to a form of child-rearing that enabled the inflation of both the id and the superego without the adequate formation of the ego as mediator. Lasch warns that despite its heroic posturing, this mentality measures ethical rectitude by one’s ability to play the role of victim rather than by one’s ability to win the respect of others — a mentality far from conducive to turning ideals into concrete results.
Enabnit goes on to insist that “many skinnyfats will bore you with their vision for big changes in the world, but they will not even change their own body. How,” he asks, “can you end systematic injustice when you can’t even end the systematic destruction of your personal gut biome? How can you solve world hunger when you can’t even bench two plates?”
I am not exactly in a position to judge Mamdani for being unable to bench 135 pounds — neither can I. Also like Mamdani, I am a 33-year-old late-Millennial full of lofty ideas but lacking the commitment to follow through on many of them — often using Millennialisms like needing to “protect my peace” as cop-outs.
In our defense, men like us are products of our times. Surely, the numerous young men who lack the drive to build up a sustainable career — and settle instead for working gig jobs (or unemployment), spending their spare time smoking weed or vaping while doomscrolling, and being skinny fat — bear some responsibility for their dismal state of life. But the flimsy moral formation we received from our parents and teachers, on top of the neoliberal economic paradigm that allows only a select few the prospect of a sustainable career, hasn’t exactly helped those of us who are at least attempting to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps.
And it is precisely for this reason that I would be hesitant to run for a leadership position as influential as the mayor of New York … as well why I am not entirely convinced — despite his ostensible idealism and savvy campaigning tactics — that Mamdani is fit for the position. The reality is that he lacks the experience, the skills, and — indeed — the muscle to deliver the promises his campaign has made. While the other two candidates have their flaws, the fact is they come from a generation of men who were taught to build, to deliver, and “to adult.”
Regardless of the election results this November, the frail condition that Millennial young men like Mamdani find themselves in should be a wake-up call to parents, educators, and policymakers to look for ways to encourage young men to lead, build, and — at very least — lift.