Women Are Not Rejecting Men For Being Too Muscular

(Maybe it's happened once or twice)

I initially wasn’t going to write about this because it felt a bit too “done” the second it went viral—like, almost too obvious CHH chum—but a guy’s before and after fitness photos went around Twitter this week, with men insisting he looked better after he got in shape, and women insisting he looked better before. TLDR: the usual annoying arguments ensued.

For those of you who don’t know what “the usual arguments” are, I’ll break it down for you. While women claiming to prefer the before image might have made some men feel relieved that they are good enough in their own skin, a lot of men felt a bit irritated because they just…didn’t believe them. I suspect many men felt gaslit by women’s claim that muscles are a turnoff, considering that male sex symbols, famous heartthrob actors, men on the covers of Booktok goon novels, and even Luigi Mangione all look more like the “after” photo.

My overall read of the situation is that you shouldn’t take women that seriously when they say muscles are a turnoff, even if they’re not actually lying (this sounds contradictory but it’s not, you’ll see why soon.) I’m sure it’s happened before, but in general, women do not reject men for the sole reason of being too muscular. Mainly because, well, the tier of musculature that would be “too much” to the point that it was actively a turnoff is so rare to find in nature that your average woman will probably never encounter a man who looks like that in real life, let alone have the chance to reject him, as

Aly Dee

pointed out:

I agree with most women that a competitive bodybuilder physique, where a man starts looking a bit like an oiled-up man-shaped challah loaf, is unattractive. But I spent my twenties going to the gym almost every day and while I did get hit on, I never once got hit on by a guy who looked like a professional bodybuilder. I have never rejected a man for being too muscular, and I would venture almost no woman has (I’m sure the four who have will jump in to correct me.) While plenty of women may be telling the truth about preferring the before image of the man above, the after image is not actually too muscular for most women, and I’d be shocked if I discovered any woman rejected him for that reason.