That's men for you:Maybe I read the wrong magazines but the days of the Charles Atlas ads promising that "you too can have a body like mine" seem to be over, writes Padraig O'Morain.
Now, I do not want a visit from the heirs of "the World's Most Perfectly Developed Man" as he called himself so I had better say right now that the Charles Atlas company is alive and well on the internet.
Throughout much of the 20th century, Atlas promised that if you bought and faithfully followed his mail-order course you would no longer have to suffer the ignominy of being "a 97-pound weakling".
Instead, you could develop yourself into a muscular man able to defend his honour and that of his adoring girlfriend.
This really only matters because the Charles Atlas ads provided many young men with an image of how they ought to look. To look like a 97-pound weakling was bad. What happened to such persons was that when they were lying on the beach with their girlfriends they got sand kicked in their eyes by some muscular thug.
The only road to redemption was to buy the Atlas course, become a perfectly developed man and take revenge during a future visit to the beach. This redeemed the former weakling in the eyes of his girlfriend.
When I was growing up in Kildare the chances of getting sand kicked in your eyes were remote unless you happened to be lying in a sandpit at the time and that was a pretty remote possibility too.
Indeed, most 97-pound weaklings at the time probably didn't have the price of the course if they lived in Ireland. And even if you could afford it, that meant buying a postal order and the person behind the counter would know exactly what you were doing since everybody had heard of Charles Atlas. This could lead to embarrassing conversations as it was not an era in which people kept their observations to themselves.
So those of us who saw ourselves as weaklings had to suffer in silence. Is that, I wonder, the reason why I have never had any interest in lying on a beach?
It is said that Charles Atlas - originally named Angelo Charles Siciliano, so you can work out where he came from - was himself a weakling who got sand kicked in his eyes by a bully. He responded by becoming a muscle man. In the 1920s he won the title of the World's Most Perfectly Developed Man twice in a row and it was decided that there was really no point in holding it a third time because he would just win it again.
Statues in the United States and elsewhere of other great men actually depict Charles Atlas - sometimes from below the neck - because the perfection of his physique brought in commissions to pose for sculptors. He posed for the statue of George Washington in Washington Square Park in New York City.
Although the Charles Atlas physique was marketed as a means of impressing your girlfriend, I suspect it had more to do with impressing other men in the same way that women dress to impress other women on the basis that men wouldn't really notice if they were wearing a sack.
In Ireland, when Charles Atlas was in his heyday, men were less concerned with their body image than they are now. Today the concern with body image is growing. There are gyms and we can afford to go to them, though I have passed on this option myself and wish I could get back to being a 97-pound weakling.
Becoming a one-man self-admiration society in the gym is one thing. More worryingly, increasing numbers of young men take steroids to build up their muscle mass. In doing so they increase their chances of developing heart disease later on, of developing a psychological dependency and of suffering depression when withdrawing from them. Frankly, I would rather get sand kicked in my face.
Padraig O'Morain's at www.justlikeaman.blogspot.com