Ice baths, rare steak and no masturbation: Was Walt Whitman the first wellness influencer? | Walt Whitman

Men! Do you aspire to be healthy, virile and handsome? To become Herculean and live long while retaining the vigor and energy of youth?

You might consider taking the following steps: Taking a daily dip in cold water. Giving up caffeine and alcohol. Eliminating carbohydrates from your diet. Controlling your sexual appetites. Getting outside. And hitting the gym to lift, lift, lift. Do all of this and you will be well on your way to achieving the highest powers reserved for the robust and perfect man.

That’s the advice offered by an unlikely wellness influencer: the long-deceased American poet and self-proclaimed Bard of Democracy Walt Whitman, whose magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, made him one of the country’s most influential artists.

Whitman spent his twenties and thirties working as an editor, typographer, typesetter, and freelance journalist. Among the hundreds of newspaper articles he wrote, one in particular sheds fascinating light on the poet: a 13-part series of essays from 1858 titled Men's Health and Trainingwhich was published in the old Manhattan newspaper, the New York Atlas under the pen name Mose Velsor (Velsor was Whitman's mother's maiden name). Whitman was named an author in 2016.

Manly Health is a self-help guide for men that transcends genre. Published in the first person plural in hastily written, sometimes plagiarized prose, it digressively covers everything from diet and exercise to education and proper winter fashion, oscillating between the serious and the absurd (we spoke out against the use of the potato). Its stated purpose is to guide the male reader along the great highway of manly health that all men must travel. A necessity, given that the men of the country, Whitman believes, are infirm, prone to depression, and eager for improvement.

With its promotion of ice baths and rejuvenating gymnastics, it is remarkable how similar Manly Health’s advice is to that offered by many of today’s manhood gurus in the burgeoning men’s wellness industry. Whitman blames the decaying state of masculinity on the artificial lives led in modern society, sedentary indoor jobs, and disconnection from nature, and suggests that the solutions may lie in earlier ways of life. Similarly, in the world of contemporary men’s wellness, the imagined figure of the ancient man and simpler ways of life are repeatedly presented as totemic solutions to today’s male malaise.

The cold-water baths and swimming Whitman recommends in Manly Health are actually one of the three pillars of the Wim Hof ​​Method, a leading wellness trend with seemingly ancient origins that counts Chris Hemsworth and Tom Cruise among its many celebrity advocates. Devised by Dutch motivational speaker Wim Hof, aka Iceman, the method involves exposing yourself to extreme cold to trigger ancient survival mechanisms that will return our bodies and minds, exhausted by modern ailments like cell phones and rigid chairs, to their natural state.

Whitman also praises ancient eating habits, and extols at length a simple diet of rare beef. Among other health benefits, he claims that such a diet is good for the complexion; it even prevents pimples. Today, this same diet has been rebranded with an algorithm-friendly name. The restrictive carnivore diet bans carbohydrates, fruits, and vegetables and encourages the exclusive consumption of meat, based on the mistaken belief that our ancestors ate only fatty, protein-rich meat and fish.

Among the many contemporary advocates of the carnivore diet is Jordan Peterson, a former human rights activist who recently tried to sell Elon Musk on the miraculous powers of a lifestyle based entirely on beef as well as self-confessed misogynist Andrew Tate. Tate, who has grown his fame and (mostly) male audience exponentially by exploiting mainstream commentators' insatiable appetite for provocative statements, is unequivocal in his praise of the diet, claiming that it aids weight loss, sharpens the mind and combats depression.

That's not the only thing Whitman's wellness recommendations have in common with the odious world of the manosphere, that hodgepodge of aggressive heterosexuals, red pill Podcasts, websites, and discussion forums in which masculinist ideas merge with misogyny, conspiratorial thinking, and anti-establishment sentiment. Whitman’s advocacy of chastity and self-denial as methods of improving men’s personal health and vitality has an affinity with the NoFap and semen retention movements, whose baseless claims include that abstinence from ejaculation increases testosterone levels, increases muscle growth, and improves sperm quality. In these movements, as in Manly Health, women are often portrayed as corrupting influences: petty, pestilential gratifications, in Whitman’s words.

Likewise, Whitman's endless veneration of the colossal athletes of ancient Greece and his spiteful (embarrassed?) critiques of the puny, elegant tribes of men of letters seem rather alpha male/cuckold beta A discourse that structures much of the manosphere. In its simplest terms, this reductive worldview asserts that women practice hypergamy (partnering with men with greater social and sexual capital) and are thus responsible for reinforcing a social hierarchy in which supposedly high-testosterone (alpha) men are ranked above low-testosterone (beta) men: a circular assumption that nonetheless fuels the righteous indignation of so-called betas and incels, who pejoratively describe themselves as such to contextualize and legitimize their feelings of isolation and perceived sexual deprivation.

The veneration of the hyper-masculine alpha male is at the heart of Whitman’s treatise on well-being. The perfect man, for Whitman, is necessarily able-bodied, robust, muscular, and powerful; this perfect masculine body is attainable; and it is incumbent upon all men to attain it. Why? Aside from personal happiness and well-being, a surprising motive is advanced: the stated goal of Manly Health is to perfect America’s physique by helping to create an entire nation of fighting men. Individual male health equals national health, and a muscular man makes for a muscular nation-state. Getting shredded thus becomes a national imperative. If one reads alongside the libertarian and anti-intellectual strain that runs through the entire series of essays, Whitman's suspicion of doctors, metaphysicians, and moralists whom he accuses of deplorable ignorance, his pairing of masculinity and patriotism reflects another unpleasant voice of male well-being: the anti-government patriot and Second Amendment fanatic Alex Jones.

Jones was first launched into the collective consciousness of millennials after his memefied gay frogs exposed a depopulation agenda conspiracy theory that posits that the government has spiked the water supply with endocrine-disrupting chemicals in order to feminize men (and amphibians). He’s the business mastermind behind the far-right news site Infowars, which generates the majority of its considerable revenue by selling its own brand of dietary supplements to the site’s millions of monthly visitors. A tincture called Survival Shield Iodine Spray promises to help paranoid customers fight back against globalists who are bent on making Americans exhausted and unhealthy, while the Testosterone Boost for Men supplement offers a powerful formula that will improve strength and physical performance. You can even get it at a discount as part of the Spirit of 1776 super sale. Every freedom-loving American male should try it. As one satisfied customer said: Patriots love protein!

What should we make of all this? Should Whitman be seen as a chauvinistic patriot or a conman looking to make a quick buck by spouting welfare nonsense? While Velsor was writing Manly Health, Whitman was busy writing a plethora of new poems to greatly enrich the third edition of Leaves of Grass, transforming the critically unloved collection into a vast catalogue of dreams about America that would gradually become a canon. In these poems, Whitman offers a prismatic conception of masculinity in which body worship, the perfect man, and pseudoscientific influences figure prominently.

But one can also find in the poems a remedy for the expressly steroidal strain of toxic masculinity that Whitman seems to endorse and presage as Velsor: pervasive calls for intimacy, kindness, and tenderness between men, and the belief that such affirming male physical and emotional bonds can transform society for the better.

As for the strange overlaps between ideas of male self-help in the 19th century and those of today, they perhaps speak to how little the prevailing ideas about manhood and male beauty have changed. More importantly, they speak to the particular vulnerability of our notion of masculinity and how easily men allow that notion to be hijacked by nefarious actors and forces. If there is a desire to guard against this, surely men must first acknowledge and acknowledge this vulnerability. And that would require us to give up something inherent in what we think of as men: our pride, our unassailability, our power. In doing so, we would be engaging in a real act of self-improvement.