Once again rewatching New Girl and I cannot fucking believe they actually made Nick to be poked fun of because of his body. So this made me think about the recent representation of male bodies in media.
You cannot be serious and call this guy "fat boy", chubby, tell him he has a gut, while he has a decent amount of overall muscle and you can see his ribs.
Even though his weight fluctuates through the seasons, he's never shown to be actually "fat". Sometimes he's leaner, sometimes he's puffier, but never fat.
Nick is just a normal guy with a shit sleeping schedule who mostly eats take-out and likes to drink. He doesn't go to the gym, but spends time moving bottle-full boxes, is shown to play football with the guys, go on the occasional run, and still cares about how he looks, even if not that much. He wears baggy clothing for comfort, and looks damn good in a Henley, his jaw is quite defined and his arms don't look half bad. He's not athletic, he's a normal looking guy.
The leanest I've seen Jake Johnson is probably in The Mummy, and that's still closest to how he is in lots of New Girl than in one of the more recent things he's been in. You can't compare the two and say "Yeah he's fat". That's the biggest he's been, and he's 40 there, while on New Girl, he's put in huge flannels, made to wheeze at the slightest strain and called "chubby", but when his shirt comes off, he has a normal, healthy layer of fat on his stomach and hips. He's a 30 year old mostly sedentary man who doesn't actively work out. He looks fine.
I'll go as far as to make another comparison to one more of his characters.
In ITSV, one of Peter B's main characteristics is the fact he let himself go and put on weight. Being animated, the gut is exaggerated for comedy, pushing on how he's different from Peter Prime, older, fat, out of shape, depressed.
But in any other scene, while still sporting a bump, Peter is still in very good shape. He doesn't have abs or shredded muscles, but he's still toned and fit overall. The belly is mostly from his eating habits, drinking sodas and plain being depressed, and being almost 40 certainly doesn't help. The only activity he's doing is Spider-man work. He's strong, but tired. He's not doing that much movement anymore, but his body still retains 22 years of hard work muscle.
He has a strong, defined jaw, large shoulders, toned arms and legs, a series of specific extremely defined micro-muscles that allow him to move as swiftly and in control as he wants. He's fit. He just happens to have a pronounced stomach. He's "out of shape" for Spider-man standards.
To anyone used to a shredded, washboard abs Spider-man, Peter B looks "thicker", as May points out, which is relatively true, because he is. But again, just like Nick (even more so due to his muscle mass), he's a good looking guy who just eats messily, doesn't sleep well, and generally doesn't put that much effort in his appearance. He's not, in any way, shape or form, fat.
Now, this made me think specifically back to the early 2000s, where we had normal looking fit beefy Wolverine, Clark Kent, even Tony Stark, lanky but fit Spider-man and Amazin Spider-man, and underdog fat guys like Adam Sandler and Jack Black.
This sparked in my brain while watching Heated Rivalry. The main guys are toned and fit, they have Vs and visible abs, tho their stomachs aren't always flat. They're relaxed, rounder, shown to be soft at times, even when Shane is modelling, he has just a bit of muffin tops showing on his hips. And that's 2008-2014 peak athletic male form, but my brain almost immediately pointed it out like "Oh? Why aren't they sucking their stomach in?" Like what the actual fuck. For an ED recovering personal trainer who was a teenager on tumblr starting from 2014, that was a terrible, horrible thought to have.
As the years progressed, it got worse and worse. Dehydration, insane work outs and diets, the new "super hero standards". The more we go on, the more bodies like Nick's are made fun of and treated like a younger Schmidt. The male-gaze making it so that a normal guy, even a rather fit one, looks at himself with self-consciousness because of a healthy layer of superficial fat or the lack of bulging muscles.
The male-gaze makes women starve and wither away with the desire for petite-ness, and makes men poison and break themselves with the desire for greatness.
