ABSTRACT
The body-builders A cult, certainly, rather than one of the enterprises-that of mens sana in corpore sanowhich culture can know and integrate. A cult which has its clandestine repairs, its passwords, its initiations, its legends, its rituals, its undeciphered codes. The alerted eye can spot them in the crowds, not, like punks, by the tribal garb and arcane jewelry, but rather by the way neither work nor leisure garb fit their bodies, by the strained fabrics, the pulled seams. If they wear jewelry, they most often do not wear them as embellishments or citations, but as amulets. Sportswear and beachwear, designer-conceived for voyeurist eroticism, pulled tight over their loins like chastity belts. In the bus-stations and sidewalks, in the midst of the streams of the busy and the preoccupied, space warps and strains about them, as though lacking the gravity these sprung arms and ploughshare thighs are made to furrow. The civilized head that looks at them is deviated; it wonders not where they are going, but where you can get with them. The erotic eye, that which scouts the erotogenic terrain in the body of another-not the rolling surfaces of taut cutaneous membrane, but the spongy zone of susceptibility just beneath and the mucous membrane of orifices-is disconcerted to run into packed thongs of drawn muscle. Not muscle that answers to the ungendered resistance of tools and implements, but specifically male and specifically female muscle alignments. One cannot resist feeling the very hardness of these muscles to be the badgering of the glands of lust. Whole anatomies pumped like priapic erections, contracting poses and shifting with held violence from one pose to the next with the vaginal
contractions of labor pains. Flaunting in the nose of an antiseptic consumer public leathery rutting odors, gleaming with oils that deviate the hold the inspecting eye fixes on these bodies into the sliding suctions of octopus eros.
