A growing soft spot for their hard bodies

On Monday night, I watched eight nearly naked men in bikini Speedos gyrate, pulsate and flex. They danced, they thrusted, they stripped off all garments -- except for their Speedos -- and flirted with the audience. It was a night of passion. Of sweat. Of hard work. Of sex appeal. Of bodies so carved they seemed to be the living embodiments of the Greek Adonis. It was a night to pulsate and gyrate to your heart's content. Not having seen a whole lot of gyrating in class that day, I decided to go to Zellerbach for the Mr. and Ms. Penn bodybuilding contest. After all, a little bit of healthy spectator gyrating and flexing never hurt anyone. I had always thought of bodybuilding contests as disgusting displays of over-muscled bodies built up on steroids and arrogance. But with the excitement of a pygmy marmoset in heat, I was determined to have the contest prove or disprove my understanding of bodybuilding competitions. It was a duel to the death. After pulling a muscle of my own lugging the exercise bike that no one ever used to the basement, and then eating a dinner composed of the four crucial food groups -- fat, grease, oil and starch -- my housemate and I left for the contest. It somehow seemed appropriate that we would be watching rather than participating. The contest began with eight men with eerily waxed and tanned bodies posing and flexing their muscles for the audience. This was where my nausea began. Friends screamed support, whistling, clapping and using megaphones to cheer for the contestants. Parents politely smiled and crouched in their chairs as they watched their sons, almost as naked as they had been at birth, display their sculpted bodies with reckless abandon. Not having pranced around nearly naked before a crowd since I was three and trying to avoid a bath, I was impressed. The contest looked like a bizarre cross between Star Search and MTV's Spring Break. With bodies as slippery as butter and as smooth as the Guereza hairless monkey of the tropics, the competitors proudly displayed their sculpted bodies. Minutes after the competition began, I started pinching my own fat to project how long it would take for me to get totally toned (10, maybe 20 years, I concluded). Twenty minutes later, I popped two Pepto-Bismols to calm the bile rising in my throat. No matter how much fat I pinched or how much Pepto I took, though, the truth was undeniable: The sleek athletes had won me over. Though I found their irregularly pronounced musculature repulsive, I couldn't help it -- I was impressed. I had never seen such toned people in my life. Trying not to get too depressed about my own hardly fat-free body, I left the competition in awe. Then I ate some cookies in honor of the bodybuilders. As nauseous as the foreign, freakishly muscled bodies had made me feel -- there's hope for all the men out there who don't go to the gym all day; not having an overly toned body can sometimes be more attractive than muscles -- I was won over, just like Alanis Morissette, in spite of me. It wasn't a contest about arrogance or steroids, as I had thought; it was about self-confidence and endurance. The contestants' willpower, dedication and hard work amazed me, because I knew that I would have had none in the same situation. No matter how repulsed or amazed we are by waxed, overly sculpted bodies, the Mr. and Ms. Penn Contest offers much more than a chance to see classmates nearly naked. Beneath its beauty-contest exterior, it represents the dedication, hard work and perseverance valued in all fields on Penn's campus. For this, the participants deserve a lot of credit in my book. After all, as a student sitting behind me said, "You've got to have balls to pose in front of 900 people to the Superman theme music."

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