/edu/ - Education

This video is titled The Gay Body Image Crisis by James Somerton, seemingly its a video essay about gay people's body image issues, but in actuality its just bizarre venting against fit people through ahistorical revisionism.

The main narrative presented throughout this essay is that recreational exercise. physical fitness, and bodybuilding were invented by the Nazis, based on antique statues and these were then bought to the US by gay soldiers, where it shaped first the gay sub culture and later became the mainstream image among the heteros. There are a few obvious problems with these statements.
So modern fitness training in the US started about a hundred years before the Nazi party, In addition, the bronze era of bodybuilding, began with Sandow before the turn of the century: predating WW1, So Americans, gay or straight, didn't inspiration from the SS in regard to body image and exercise.
He also makes a claim that the BMI formula was specifically invited by white supremacist and used by Nazis to find an ideal solider bodytype, so again the BMI also predates the Nazis and while the tables were developed after WW2, and they were based on mortality studies, so the normal weight category was the one with the lowestmortality rate, not the one closest to a SS-Supersoldier
The absolute most ridiculous claim he makes is that he states Ernst Röhm was killed because he was fat and hence didn't fit the image of the ideal man, while the party politics surrounding the so called Röhm coup are not even mentioned. Somerton leaves out the fact that one of Röhms greatest rivals, one who talked Hitler into killing him, was Hermann Göring – a man just as fat as Röhm. Seriously, of course this was about power and politics, not body image.

So at the end of the video Somerton, based on these misleading historical narratives, try's to shame people for being into fit people because that's what "Hitler thought was perfect." like the bodies in the clips he uses are not that uncommon in many young men, that's the bodytype of most fit healthy young men and that can be found in any race of men, I mean the whole bodypositivity, HEAS and fat acceptance movement was always ripe with body-shaming and open scorne of thinner people, that is nothing new. But the politicization of a certain body type, its identification with a political ideology, is. concerning to say the least
like guess who also heavily idealized the muscular body in their propaganda,: The Soviets and pretty much every other communist movement in the world