Men! Do you yearn to be healthy, virile and handsome? To become herculean in stature, and to live a long life while retaining the vim and vigour of youth?
You might consider taking the following steps: daily cold-water plunges. Ditching caffeine and booze. Eliminating carbs from your diet. Controlling your sexual appetites. Getting outdoors. And hitting the gym to lift, lift, lift. Do all this and you’ll be on your way to attaining the “highest powers” reserved for the “robust and perfect man”.
Such is the advice issued by an unlikely wellness influencer: the long-dead American poet and self-styled Bard of Democracy, Walt Whitman, whose magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, made him one of the country’s most influential artists.
Whitman spent his 20s and 30s working as a freelance editor, typesetter, compositor and journalist. Among the hundreds of newspaper pieces he authored, there is one in particular that casts the poet in a fascinating light: a 13-part essay series from 1858 titled Manly Health and Training, which was published in erstwhile Manhattan broadsheet the New York Atlas under the pen name Mose Velsor (Velsor was the maiden name of Whitman’s mother). Whitman was established as the author in 2016.
Manly Health is a genre-bending self-help guide for men. Issued in the first person plural in hastily written, occasionally plagiaristic prose, it digressively covers everything from diet and exercise to education and appropriate winter fashion, oscillating between high seriousness and camp absurdity (“We have spoken against the use of the potato”). Its stated aim is to guide the male reader “along the great highway of manly health” upon which all men “must travel”. A necessity, given that the nation’s men, Whitman thinks, are infirm, prone to depression, and crying out for betterment.
With its promotion of ice baths and youth-restoring callisthenics, it is remarkable how similar Manly Health’s guidance is to that offered by the many current manhood gurus in the booming industry of male wellness. Whitman blames the beleaguered state of masculinity on the “artificial” lives led in modern society – sedentary “indoor employments”, disconnection from nature – and suggests solutions might lie in earlier modes of living. Similarly, in the world of contemporary male wellness, the imagined figure of ancient man and simpler ways of life are held up, time and again, as totemic solutions to the current male malaise.
The cold-water bathing and swimming that Whitman recommends in Manly Health is, in fact, one of the three pillars of the Wim Hof Method, a leading wellness trend with ostensibly ancient origins, which counts Chris Hemsworth and Tom Cruise among its many celebrity advocates. Devised by the Dutch motivational speaker Wim Hof – AKA the Iceman – the method centres on exposing oneself to extreme cold in order to trigger “age-old survival mechanisms” that will return our “body and mind” – made exhausted by such modern-day evils as mobile phones and “stiffening chairs” – back to their “natural state”.
Likewise, Whitman lauds the eating habits of the ancients, exalting, at great length, a “simple diet of rare-cooked beef”. Among other health benefits, he claims such a regimen is good for the complexion; it even prevents “pimples”. Today, the self-same diet has been repackaged with an algorithm-friendly moniker. The restrictive “carnivore diet” forbids carbs, fruits and vegetables and promotes exclusive consumption of meat, based on the erroneous belief that our ancestors thrived on little else than fatty, proteinaceous meat and fish.
The many contemporary champions of the carnivore diet include one-time men’s rights luminary Jordan Peterson – who recently tried to sell Elon Musk the miraculous powers of an all-beef lifestyle – as well as avowed misogynist Andrew Tate. Tate, who has grown his profile and (mostly) male audience exponentially by exploiting the mainstream commentariat’s insatiable appetite for provocative takes, is unequivocal in his praise of the diet, purporting that it aids weight loss, sharpens the mind, and trounces depression.
This is not the only overlap between Whitman’s wellness recommendations and the odious world of the “manosphere”, that grab-bag of aggressively heterosexual, red-pilled podcasts, websites and message boards wherein masculinist ideation becomes fused with misogyny, conspiratorial thinking and anti-establishment sentiment. Whitman’s advocation of chastity and “self-denial” as methods of improving male personal health and vitality have an affinity with both the “NoFap” and semen-retention movements, whose baseless claims include that abstinence from ejaculation spikes testosterone levels, increases muscle growth and improves sperm quality. In these movements, as in Manly Health, women are frequently cast as corrupting influences: “pestiferous little gratifications”, in Whitman’s words.
Similarly, Whitman’s endless veneration of the “colossal” ancient Greek athletes and his catty (self-conscious?) put-downs of “puny and dandy tribes of literary men” sounds rather like the alpha male/beta cuck discourse that lends structure to much of the manosphere. In its simplest terms, this reductive worldview claims that women practice hypergamy (partnering with men of higher social and sexual capital) and are thus responsible for reinforcing a social hierarchy, wherein putatively high-testosterone (“alpha”) men rank above low-testosterone (“beta”) men: a circular hypothesis that nevertheless fuels the righteous indignation of self-identified betas and “incels”, who pejoratively describe themselves as such to contextualise and legitimise their feelings of isolation and perceived sexual disfranchisement.
The veneration of the hyper-masculine alpha male is at the heart of Whitman’s wellness tract. The perfect man, for Whitman, is necessarily able-bodied, robust, muscular and powerful; this perfected male body is attainable; and it is incumbent on all men to attain it. Why? Aside from personal happiness and wellbeing, an eyebrow-raising motive is offered: the stated aim of Manly Health is to perfect the “physique of America” by helping to create “an entire nation of fighting men”. Individual male health is coequal to national health, and a muscular man makes for a muscular nation state. Getting shredded thus becomes a national imperative. When read alongside the libertarian, anti-intellectual bent that runs throughout the essay series – Whitman’s suspicion of “doctors, the metaphysicians, and the moralists” whom he accuses of “deplorable ignorance” – his twinning of masculinity and patriotism mirrors another unpalatable voice in male wellness: anti-government patriot and second-amendment diehard Alex Jones.
Jones was first launched into the mass millennial consciousness after his memeified “gay frogs” rant – a depopulation agenda conspiracy theory which posits the government spiked the water supply with hormone-disrupting chemicals in order to “feminise” men (and amphibians). He is the business-savvy brains behind far-right fake news website Infowars, which generates the majority of its considerable revenue by selling its own brand of dietary supplements to the website’s millions of monthly visitors. A tincture called Survival Shield Iodine Spray promises to help paranoid patrons “fight back” against the “globalists” whose aim is to make Americans “run down and unhealthy”, while the Testosterone Boost supplement for men offers a “powerhouse formula” that will improve strength and physical performance. You can even get it marked down in the Spirit of 1776 Super Sale. All freedom-loving American men should try it. As one satisfied customer opines: “Patriots love protein!”
What to make of all this? Should we read Whitman as a patriotic chauvinist, or a hack looking to make a fast buck with a bunch of offhand wellness hokum? While Velsor was writing Manly Health, Whitman was busy penning a glut of new poems to greatly expand the third edition of Leaves of Grass, transforming the critically unloved collection into an expansive dream-catalogue of America that would, by and by, become canon. In those poems, Whitman offers a prismatic conception of masculinity in which bodily veneration, the perfect man and pseudoscientific influences loom large.
But there can also be located, in the poems, a curative to the expressly steroidal strain of toxic maleness Whitman appears to endorse and presage as Velsor: ever-present calls for intimacy, kindness and tenderness between men, and a belief that such affirmative physical and emotional male bonds can transform society for the better.
As for the uncanny overlaps between 19th century and present-day self-help for men, it speaks, perhaps, to how little has changed in culturally dominant ideas of manliness and male beauty. More importantly, it attests to how uniquely vulnerable our notion of “masculinity” is, and how readily men allow it to become hijacked by bad actors and nefarious forces. If there is a desire to safeguard against this, it surely requires men to first recognise and admit that vulnerability. And this would require us to forfeit something inherent about what we think it means to be a man – our pride, our unassailability, our power. In doing so, we would be embarking on a true act of betterment.