Ice baths, rare steak and no masturbation: was Walt Whitman the first wellness influencer?
Men! Do you desire to be healthy, manly and handsome? To attain a Herculean stature and live a long life while retaining the vitality and strength of youth?
You might consider taking the following steps: Take a daily dip in cold water. Cut out caffeine and booze. Eliminate carbohydrates from your diet. Control your sexual urges. Get outside. And hit the gym to lift, lift, lift. Do all of these things and you will be on your way to achieving the “highest powers” reserved for the “robust and perfect man.”
This is the advice of an unlikely wellness influencer: the long-deceased American poet and self-proclaimed poet 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 as a freelance editor, typesetter, compositor, and journalist. Of the hundreds of newspaper articles he wrote, there is one that casts the poet in a fascinating light: a 13-part essay series from 1858 entitled Male Health and Exercisewhich was published in the former Manhattan broadsheet New York Atlas under the pseudonym Mose Velsor (Velsor was Whitman’s mother’s maiden name). Whitman was recognized as an author in 2016.
Manly Health is a genre-bending self-help guide for men. Written in the first person plural in hastily written, sometimes 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 purpose is to guide the male reader “along the great highway of manly health” upon which all men “must travel.” A necessity, since the men of the country, Whitman believes, are weak, prone to depression, and crying out for betterment.
With its promotion of ice baths and youth-restoring callisthenics, it’s remarkable how similar Manly Health’s guidance is to that of many of the current masculinity gurus in the booming male wellness industry. Whitman blames the troubled state of masculinity on the “artificial” lives led in modern society—sedentary “indoor work,” disconnection from nature—and suggests that solutions may lie in earlier ways of life. Likewise, in the world of contemporary male wellness, the imaginary figure of the caveman and simpler ways of life are repeatedly invoked as totemic solutions to the current male malaise.
The cold-water soaks and swimming that Whitman advocates at Manly Health are, in fact, 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 proponents. The method, coined by Dutch motivational speaker Wim Hof – aka the Iceman – revolves around exposing yourself to extreme cold in order to activate “age-old survival mechanisms” that return our “bodies and minds” – exhausted by modern ailments like cell phones and “stiff chairs” – to their “natural state.”
Whitman also praises the eating habits of the ancients, extolling at length a “simple diet of raw, cooked beef.” Among other health benefits, he claims such a regimen is good for the complexion; it even prevents “pimples.” Today, the same diet has been repackaged with an algorithm-friendly name. The restrictive “carnivore diet” bans carbohydrates, fruits, and vegetables and promotes the exclusive consumption of meat, based on the mistaken belief that our ancestors thrived on little else than fatty, protein-rich meat and fish.
The many modern-day advocates of the carnivore diet include former men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson, who recently tried to sell Elon Musk the miraculous powers of an all-beef lifestyle – and the openly misogynist Andrew Tate. Tate, who has grown his profile and (mostly) male audience exponentially by exploiting mainstream commentators’ insatiable appetite for provocative opinions, is unequivocal in his praise of the diet, claiming it helps with weight loss, sharpens the mind and beats depression.
This is not the only overlap between Whitman’s welfare recommendations and the repugnant world of the “manosphere,” that hodgepodge of aggressively heterosexual, red pilled Podcasts, websites, and message boards that merge masculine ideas with misogyny, conspiracy 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 both the “NoFap” and sperm-retention movements, whose unsubstantiated claims include that abstinence from ejaculation increases testosterone levels, increases muscle growth, and improves sperm quality. In these movements, such as Manly Health, women are often portrayed as corrupting influences: “pestiferous little gratifications,” in Whitman’s words.
Likewise, Whitman’s endless veneration of the “colossal” ancient Greek athletes and his catty (self-conscious?) disparaging remarks about “puny and dandy tribes of literary men” sound rather alpha-male/beta cuckoo discourse that structures much of the manosphere. In the simplest terms, this reductionist worldview claims that women practice hypergamy (partnering with men of higher social and sexual capital) and are thus responsible for reinforcing a social hierarchy in which supposedly high-testosterone (“alpha”) men are above low-testosterone (“beta”) men: a circular hypothesis that nonetheless fuels the righteous indignation of self-identified betas and “incels” who pejoratively describe themselves as such in order to contextualize and legitimize their feelings of isolation and perceived sexual disenfranchisement.
The worship of the hyper-masculine alpha male is central to Whitman’s wellness treatise. The perfect man, for Whitman, is necessarily physically strong, robust, muscular, and powerful; this perfected male body is attainable; and it is the duty of all men to achieve it. Why? In addition to personal happiness and well-being, an eyebrow-raising motive is offered: the stated goal of Manly Health is to perfect the “body of America” by helping to create “a whole nation of fighting men.” Individual male health equals national health, and a muscular man makes for a muscular nation-state. Getting ripped thus becomes a national necessity. When read in conjunction with the libertarian, anti-intellectual slant that runs through the entire essay series—Whitman’s distrust of “physicians, metaphysicians, and moralists” whom he accuses of “despicable ignorance”—his conflation of masculinity and patriotism reflects another unpleasant voice in male welfare: anti-government patriot and Second Amendment advocate Alex Jones.
Jones first rocketed into the mass millennial consciousness after his memeified “gay frogs” tirade—a conspiracy theory about a depopulation agenda that posits the government has spiked the water supply with hormone-disrupting chemicals in order to “feminize” men (and amphibians). He’s the business-savvy mastermind behind the far-right fake news website Infowars, which generates the bulk of its considerable revenue by selling its own brand of nutritional supplements to the site’s millions of monthly visitors. A tincture called Survival Shield Iodine Spray promises to help paranoid customers “fight back” against the “globalists” who aim to make Americans “neglected and unhealthy,” while the Men’s Testosterone Boost supplement offers a “powerful formula” that will improve strength and physical performance. You can even get it discounted in the Spirit of 1776 Super Sale. All freedom-loving American men should give it a try. As one satisfied customer notes, “Patriots love protein!”
What are we to make of this? Should we view Whitman as a patriotic chauvinist, or as a bungler looking to make a quick buck with a bunch of welfare nonsense? While Velsor was writing Manly Health , Whitman was busy writing a flood of new poems to greatly expand the third edition of Leaves of Grass , transforming the critically unloved collection into an extended dream catalogue of America that would eventually become canon. In these poems, Whitman offers a prismatic concept of masculinity in which bodily worship, the perfect man, and pseudoscientific influences play a major role.
But there is also in the poems a remedy to the explicitly steroidal tension of toxic masculinity that Whitman as Velsor seems to endorse and herald: a pervasive call for intimacy, kindness, and tenderness between men, and a belief that such positive physical and emotional male bonds can transform society for the better.
As for the uncanny overlaps between 19th-century and contemporary men’s self-help, it perhaps speaks to how little has changed in culturally dominant ideas about masculinity and male beauty. More importantly, it speaks to how uniquely fragile our idea of “manliness” is, and how easily men allow it to be hijacked by bad actors and dark forces. If there is a desire to protect ourselves from this, then surely it requires that men first acknowledge and admit that vulnerability. And this would require us to give up something inherent to what we think it means to be a man—our pride, our inviolability, our power. In doing so, we would be undertaking a real act of improvement.