“Xiao Zhan, stop weightlifting!”: Mainland Idol Fandom & Masculinity in Transition
When it comes to capturing public opinion and market shares, there’s nothing like a celebrity transformation. For male celebrities, these transformations are often staged upon the body, a plastic site of masculine embodiment. This post is an exploration of masculinity and body image in mainland pop culture, in which I seek to understand why a vocal portion of mainland fans are disgusted by men with developed musculature, and live in fear of their favorite idols taking up weightlifting. I anchor this exploration through Xiao Zhan, whose domination of the fanspace in China is one of The Untamed’s most salient legacies, and the window through which I’ve tumbled headfirst into Chinese pop culture.
It starts with two videos. In the first, an interviewer asks Xiao Zhan what he thinks of male celebrities who start lifting weights, and Xiao Zhan confesses that he’s started to do it himself:
I remember that when I decided to start weightlifting, it was because — hei hei [the most adorable chuckle ever] — somebody said I was too skinny. You’re so skinny you wouldn’t be able to pick me up, my scene partner, the woman actor. Wa, shame! So I better get stronger. Even though I’m not much stronger now than I was before, weightlifting has still been very effective.
Xiao Zhan’s likely referring to the scene above in the 2019 film Jade Dynasty 诛仙, where his character picks up Meng Meiqi’s character and carries her away to safety. (Carrying a woman bridal style seems to be a fixture in the romantic currency demanded from idols; Xiao Zhan’s been asked in other interviews what he thinks is the maximum weight he could carry a girl in his arms, and chastised for his answer.) But anyway, the net effect was Xiao Zhan being shamed into hitting the gym so he could fulfill other people’s fantasies of carrying/marrying them. He shared a few gym selfies along the way.
Not everyone took the development in Xiao Zhan’s fitness routine in stride. A lot of fans freaked the fuck out over it, actually — especially the woman in this video, who follows him to the airport so she can shout “Xiao Zhan, stop weightlifting!” at him. In the video, you see him look up, smiling, at the sound of his name being called. Then he looks down, processing what she’s said, and his smile goes sad and wistful. Poor bb—people tell him he doesn’t look strong so he starts working out, and then people yell at him for trying to get stronger. What’s China’s best boy to do?
I started googling “肖战 + 举铁” (Xiao Zhan + weightlifting) to try to understand this better. (This is totally normal quarantine behavior don’t @ me.) If you too search these words, you’ll find no shortage of articles lamenting the glut of young male celebrities who have succumbed to the siren song of weightlifting. Take this article, titled “Does weightlifting ruin the looks 毁容 of male celebrities?” The article is worth quoting at length, as the author explains exactly how weightlifting just absolutely trashes anything that was once attractive about young male bodies:
Following the rise of the fitness craze, celebrities are increasingly attentive to managing their bodies, especially male idols 偶像男星. One after another, they are starting to pump iron in the hopes of looking thin in clothes and cut when the clothes come off.
But some online commenters have noticed that once a male celebrity starts lifting weight, their attractiveness index 颜值 suddenly starts dropping. Their necks start looking thick, their lower jaws become set, and their shoulders become wide as their trapezius muscles develop.
In this narrative, for inexplicable reasons a male idol becomes “addicted” to weightlifting. He becomes a gym rat, sharing thirsty workout selfies and body transformation photos on social media — photos that are a source of shock and revulsion to fans, who mourn the loss of his fresh face and slender figure, now overtaken by what are, in the author’s eyes, aggressively unsightly muscle groups.
The article goes through a litany of young stars who have been lost to the gym: witness Lay Zhang (Zhang Yixing) of EXO, whose clothes now “fit him as tightly as packaging;” actor Bai Jingting, whose neck has become stocky and revolting; and Leo Wu (Wu Lei), an ogre whose “neck and face are [now] equally wide” with “pecs barely contained in his shirt.” None of these changes are welcome: Lay Zhang’s “attractiveness index can’t compare to how slim he looked while he was younger,” while Bai Jingting’s entire look has become “dull 憨,” a ghost of the glowing, youthful appearance that first got him noticed.
Given the rash of male celebrities making gainz, fans are now on high alert over Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, idols at the top of the industry who are currently extremely vulnerable to weightlifting: “Fans send message after message to Xiao Zhan, begging him to stop. One fan warned him that he would end up like Bai [Jingting] if he got too into it.” Meanwhile Wang Yibo, at high risk due to his pre-existing condition of natural athleticism, is being monitored vigilantly for any signs of pumping iron. A fan posted a hilarious “joke” that “she’d ‘assassinate’ anyone who encourages [Wang Yibo] to lift weights.” Another article speculates that because Wang Yibo has said he prefers anaerobic exercise, he is already lifting weights but “it seems to be ineffective, as his physique still looks weak.” This is great news, as it suggests Yibo is essentially inoculated against any further muscle development.
We have to take a step back here and talk about the greater pop culture ecosystem in which Xiao Zhan, Wang Yibo, Lay Zhang, and all the other stars mentioned above exist. Most of these stars could accurately be described as fitting into the 小鲜肉 celebrity model, usually translated idiomatically as “little fresh meat,” with an emphasis on the consumption. Little fresh meat idols are fresh-faced and ambitious ingédudes often described as equally beautiful to women, and they appeal to a predominantly female audience, who just want to gobble them up like succulent little pieces of meat. To some, “little fresh meat” means androgynous or effeminate, but I personally don’t like these as descriptions because these adjectives assume a limited permissible range of masculine gender expressions, nor do I think anyone is actually confused over their gender identity.
Their styling owes a lot to Korean pop culture: the lewk is fresh, pearly white skin, high cheekbones with a bit of contour, noticeable drama around the eyes, and a pop of lipstain. They commit to high levels of hair styling and coloring, accessorize with a few pieces of bling, often earrings and necklaces, and have a streetwear meets high fashion wardrobe. All this makes little fresh meat stars amazing hawkers of skincare and make-up in a booming cosmetics consumer market: Wang Yibo fronts for Shu Uemura, Xiao Zhan for Estée Lauder, Jackson Wang for Armani, Kris Wu for Lancôme, Fan Bingbing’s brother Fan Chengcheng for Fenty, Lu Han for L’Occitane, etc. etc.
While little fresh meat idols have been framed as a crisis of Chinese masculinity (notably that 2018 Xinhua editorial calling them sissies 娘炮), their prominence speaks to the extent to which mainstream consumer culture in China is structured around catering to young women as a demographic (see Xiaoming Li on 男色消费.) Women describe feeling more comfortable with men advertising make-up than women because they don’t believe they could ever look like the women in ads, while a male celebrity’s endorsement reassures them that men find the use of that product desirable. This lends irony to a consumer culture in which women rely on indicators of male desire to make purchasing decisions, and a celebrity culture in which men are held to many of the same beauty standards as those women internalize around their own bodies. Women want male idols to be as thin, young, and beautiful as they aspire to being. Thus, to his discomfort people fixate on the size of Xiao Zhan’s waist, and his fans call themselves Peter Pans 小飞侠 in an unironic embrace of the fetishization of eternal youth.
Bodies that lift ruin the illusion of youth by asserting their sexual maturity, something many fans would rather ignore. In Zhihu posts, the most common answer for why fans oppose celebrities weightlifting is that it ruins the appearance of youth 少年感. Fans and media speak with disapproval of “that sort 那种” of celebrity who likes taking off their clothes and revealing their bodies, something that sounds very close to slut-shaming, and built bodies are described pejoratively as having “很man,” “man of steel 硬汉” and “King Kong 金刚” physiques (the racial undertones of the latter descriptor are clear and uncomfortable.) Male bodies in the celebrity space are a cipher for the projection of the female gaze, but also its refraction: the hypocrisy of demanding that male idols conform to the restrictive beauty standards women have internalized illustrates the immediate limits of any emancipatory project based around the assertion of women’s consumer power.
But the discourse around masculinity is starting to shift, and that’s reflected in views on weightlifting, too. There are signs that the little fresh meat phenomenon might have reached its peak on the cusp of 2019, and industry observers note that advertisers are starting to move away from ad campaigns with a strong k-pop-influenced aesthetic, and more toward a simpler, pared-down styling of male spokesmen — like Li Xian’s recent desert ad campaign for Estée Lauder, which gets its mileage largely from khaki tones and Li Xian’s piercing gaze into the horizon/your soul.
Anxiety over whether or not one’s favorite celebrity is weightlifting is symptomatic of a popular discourse around masculinity that is caught between the little fresh meat phenomenon and an upswing in linking fitness culture to national strength. Don’t get me wrong, weightlifting is still plenty stigmatized in idol culture — see this article, which speculates over which celebrities are secretly weightlifting, with the subhead, “Yang Yang, Li Yifeng’s arms are bigger than their heads, I was aghast when I saw it.”
But there’s also some concession that weightlifting can be good for you if it is done in extreme moderation. A recent Xiao Zhan video for Vogue China offers tips on how to be a good boyfriend, and tip #1 is cultivate your own strength. Xiao Zhan illustrates with a few bicep curls and overhead presses. He’s selected a dumbbell in a very reasonable weight range, and he seems to prefer the Tracey Anderson low weight, high rep method for building tone but avoiding bulk at all cost.
Personally, I think conditions are ripe for seeing some of the more Americanized transformation rituals that male celebrities use here to strategically advance their careers. I’m thinking in particular of the Calvin Klein coming-of-age underwear photo shoot, which everyone from Marky Mark to Justin Bieber has used to signal that they are now a BIG BOY, not your baby or your funky bunch, and they are ready for BIG BOY CAREER things. Lay Zhang, in fact, has already done the Calvin Klein photoshoot, a muy controversial move that may yet prove to be trendsetting. Rest assured, I will keep googling & monitoring this space, and will report any important developments.
