‘I am forever fallen in sin of not having the perfect bod’ – A Q&A with Alex Dobrenko
His thoughts on body image, raising a son, and the body stuff men struggle with.
I sincerely appreciate how Alex responded to my questions with incredible honesty and vulnerability, and didn’t try to sugarcoat anything or offer a bunch of alleged solutions. He just talked about his difficulties with his body image in a no-holds-barred way. That can make part of it a tough read (because I hate that anyone feels this way about themselves, and I know exactly what it’s like to feel this way about myself), but it’s also a real one. I think feeling seen in one’s body image experience — because someone else shares it, for better or worse — is more helpful than an army of influencers yelling at us to love ourselves all the time, like that’s so damn easy.
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And here’s Alex:
MJ: Alex! Hello. We once had a little exchange on this piece of mine, “10 things I know after 10 years of weight loss and strength training.” You said it helped you “understand why I can never stick to lifting plans more than a few weeks. I get super bored and angry that I’m not Really Good and Swole by then lol.” I get it! That comment made me want to ask you more about your relationship with your body.
Also: Most of my readers are women. The other people I’ve interviewed for Body Type are women.1 You are a guy. I want to hear more from guys about their body image experience. So, what is your body image experience, however you choose to interpret that?
AD: Woof what a question! I mean … What isn’t my body image experience? How I feel about my body is sort of always around, like a low-level static that sometimes gets SUPER LOUD with self-hate but mostly stays quiet so that I don’t even recognize that it’s happening. But it IS definitely happening. So what is “it” exactly? I think it’s a baseline dissatisfaction/wrongness with how I look — with my weight and my body and my height too.
Growing up, I was definitely overweight, a pretty typical chubby kid, I was short, and I really wanted a girlfriend. But no girls really seemed to like me and I decided that was because of my weight and height. That was probably when I was like 14 or 15? Ever since then, I’ve had this default script in my mind that I’m an ugly fat shithead and need to get super swole and lean and cut in order to be a Good Person of this world2. It’s funny, I actually am now remembering that the first time I ever started lifting seriously was when I was like 15 years old. I remember doing it most days after school at this gym where I’d focus on the bench press cuz that was what I was best at. I eve — whoa, memories are coming on back — convinced my parents to buy me a cheap bench press and weights thing from Costco which I had in our basement next to the ping pong table.
I distinctly remember when I was 17 there was this girl I really liked and I thought she liked me too. She was mega cool and hung out with the mega cools and one day we were texting on our flip phones and she invited me to come meet up with them at McDonald’s which was where they always hung out and I was like OOOH SHIT HERE WE GO and I got dressed up which back then just meant putting on a button down shirt — a huge fucking deal for me — I’m pretty sure I even tucked it into my jeans or something and I drove over to the McDonald’s and … it was weird as hell. I’d built it up so much in my mind but in reality she was inviting me to hang as a friend and that fucked me up because I was a teenage boy. The whole point of this is that I remember crying driving home and going into the basement and lifting weights at like 11 p.m., just crying and lifting lol3 I was so angry and sad and I just wanted to be anyone but myself because clearly no girls liked me and yeah, I think that high school pain is where a lot of this comes from.
Ever since then, I’ve been on and off the weightlifting wagon. A year on, a year off, six months on, two years off, etc. Right now, I’m back on but trying to do so in a healthy way. The thing is, I feel so much better mentally when I’m working out regularly. It helps me sleep better, it gives me something to do when I’m getting super anxious, and I enjoy the activity itself, buuut there’s still so much of the negative beliefs about myself and my body that underlie all of that.
Where does the desire to become Really Good and Swole come from, for you? Why do you think you care about this?
Besides everything in the above, I’ll take this opportunity to just tell you how much I fucking loved your piece about small dick jokes. I’d not put together just how big of a fear of mine that was growing up as a short kid with small feet who up until a couple years ago wore shoes that were way too big for him so people would think that he had big feet and thus a big dick. It’s so weird to even write out, like it seems insane and pathetic and just so trivial of a thing4, but it really was what drove much of my insecurity, I think, along with everything else. So much of this stuff, I am realizing, is wrapped up in a false ideal of masculinity that I’m afraid of getting further and further from, and so I lift and diet and worry and hate myself all the while.
It’s interesting to think about when all this happened, like the “small dick is the worst thing you can have” fears, specifically. I truly do not know, but I bet movies and TV had a lot to do with it. Lol I just did a deep dive into the 2008 forum measurection’s discussion on small dick jokes in movies and yeah, there’s tons of examples. Also this forum is dedicated to men with small penises. The internet is a crazy place.
“Seinfeld” even had one: “I’m a grower, not a shower,” etc. It really was everywhere, and just accepted as true because what boy would ever think to challenge it? Meanwhile you’re going through all of your own “not enough” anxiety and bam, recipe for the forever disaster.
MJ: What, if anything, has changed for you over the years as a guy who is privy to how men are represented in movies/TV/media? I think of this piece I wrote, where I linked to Raquel S. Benedict’s essay, “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One is Horny.” Raquel said:
“Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs.”
You’re an actor — are you seeing this? Does it make you feel any kind of way?
Hahahaha, honestly I WISH I was cast or even allowed to audition for roles like these, but nay. I’m cast way more as the quirky comedy guy or Russian computer guy but not so much the super stud. Like, the auditions I go out for are usually looking for someone who is — and this is what’s in the role description — one or more of the following:
Unique-looking
Attractive but not in a typical way
Jonah Hill type
Seth Rogen type
A liiiittle Jeremy Allen White type sometimes
I think I’ve often wanted to be seen as more of a “leading man” in the Dustin Hoffman sort of way, but also it doesn’t occupy me too much.
Wait I DO have something funny to share. So the other day, I was trying to find an old photo of myself for a post and came across this:
Yep, I guess my being shirtless in the movie “Lumberjack Man” means I’ve earned a spot on the AZnude website where, hey, whaddya know, I got 3.5 stars out of 5 from three reviews! Not bad! But also WTF.
ALSO: I remember thinking sooooo much about how my body was going to look on screen and how hard I tried to lose weight before this movie. Obviously I feel like this is 1/100th of what female actors I’ve spoken to about this stuff go through, but to the point you made in your piece — even if it’s less, it definitely made me feel like shit.
You write “vulnerable personal essays.” What is something vulnerable you’re willing to share with me about your body image/self esteem, in particular?
Literally since starting writing this I’ve already had such insane swings of how I feel about my body — earlier today I saw myself in the bathroom and was like, “Damn I think I have abs,” and then four hours later I see myself and am like, “God I am a piece of shit and I look like ass why do I look so round like a bowling ball ugh.”
One thing that definitely amplifies all of this for me is my OCD, which can fixate on an idea of how I am looking and then loop on that all day, just sort of ambiently thinking about how things are so bad and what I can do to fix it (work out more, diet, etc.) — it just sorta plays in a big loop in my head and the fact that it keeps playing makes me think there’s more and more truth to it, so it’s a bummer of a cycle.
Lauren got me some T-shirts for my birthday from Uniqlo and they’re all medium, which to me already means I’m fat because there are times in my life where I’ve worn a small. I put on the medium to try it on and it fit pretty nice but as soon as I looked in the mirror all I saw was how shitty it all looked and felt and I really think that my read of that situation is very far from the truth, like there’s just a distortion of who I am and who I see myself as, and it has very little to do with what's actually on the scale or how I’m feeling.5
Why is vulnerability — about anything, not just body image — so important to you that you made it one of the key features of your newsletter?
I subscribe to the idea that trying to be honest is a key part of good writing. The word “trying” there is important — I have fuckall idea whether or not anything IS the truth, if such a thing even exists, more so it is the attempt at achieving such a thing that feels important. Letting people see that is, I guess, vulnerability.
TBH, it’s a loaded word and one I’m wary of because it’s so overused now. It feels like we’re in the throes of capitalism taking that word and turning it into yet another packaged product to be bought and sold, a feel-good Brene Brown-ism we toss around so much that it loses most of its meaning. But I guess being vulnerable is key for my newsletter because it means never having to say you know anything, never having to be an authority and say, “This is how things are.” That sort of writing always repels me — it feels a hop skip and a jump away from trying to sell me something.
You have a son. How do you think about talking to him (now, or in the future) about his body/self-esteem, food/weight/exercise, all the “body stuff” I write about? What kind of “parent worries” do you have here?
GOD MIKAELA THE HARD QUESTIONS JUST KEEP COMING!!! 6
I can already feel how strong my judgments are of what Wilder is eating. Like there’s a very black and white “Oh, he’s eating Cheeze-Its, well we’re fucked he’s eating only processed junk and its so bad this is so so bad,” lol. Like, it becomes very binary AND very catastrophic very quickly (this is mental health!!). I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that I also do sometimes fear that he’ll be fat. I’ve learned that we project our own worst fears onto our kids, like if we are worried about it happening to us, it’s a lot easier to worry about it happening to them (‘cuz then we don't have to be on the receiving end of that worry, which is really painful).
Growing up I definitely remember always anxiously awaiting the verdict from my grandmothers of whether I gained or lost weight since they’d seen me last7. It was ALWAYS mentioned, and I remember loving so much when they said I’d lost weight, even if they didn’t seem too happy with that — “He’s so thin, look at his skeleton face,” etc. Kids pick up on everything, like someone told us recently that it can be not great to always say that your toddler is “being shy” when they don’t wanna talk to strangers or people they don’t see regularly, because it makes them think that they are shy. They internalize the label and then build an identity around it, against it, or usually both.8
So, I think my work is to do a good job of trying to stay really neutral about weight stuff and model for him what a good relationship with food is. First, I’ll have to figure out how to do that, lol. But I guess I’ll also just try to be really honest with him about my own struggles with food and weight and make sure he knows he can talk to me about that stuff whenever. Just as I hope we can do with mental health stuff, being sad, etc. — normalizing it will hopefully make him not feel like it's that big of a deal. But ultimately we can’t protect him from the world that is full of so much bullshit around masculinity and weight and size and height and all of it. He’ll go on his own journey, as with the rest of life, though there’s a lot we can do to help him on the way and make it easier, rather than harder for him.
Anything else you want to talk about/have me ask you about?
Maybe there is just a distortion of how I see myself? I just took “progress pictures” ‘cuz that's part of this workout plan and holy balls do I hate them, or rather I hate what I see. Lauren took them and was like, “You look good.” And so I took the phone from her expecting me to look like some sort of hunk but then I see myself and it's just me and I suck and do not look good at all, I look bad actually. I know all of this is crazy, I really do, and yet also it feels so real and undeniable — it’s what I’m seeing! The eyes do not deceive us, right?
[Editorial note: Since I emailed Alex these questions, I couldn’t respond to this directly but I will here. Yes, the eyes do deceive us, of course. As I wrote in my piece, A body image mantra: ‘I don’t like it, but there it is’:
“This is how body hang-ups can work: In our rational minds, we know these aren’t things anyone else cares about or even notices, let alone real problems. They are glaring neon signs to us because we’re intimately familiar with our bodies and when something changes or bugs us, our feelings are so potent because we’re the ones living in these fickle vessels all day.”]
I am honestly amazed how much of my day is spent in conversation with the hatred of/desire to change my body. Like…most of the day! It’s a religion, and I am forever fallen in sin of not having the perfect bod9. Not great.
Most recently, Amanda Mull. Also: Elise Hu, Jessica DeFino, Rabia Chaudry, Jayne Mattingly, Julie Gallagher, Alicia Kennedy.
FWIW, I have done this too!!!! I have slammed a heavy deadlift to the floor and burst into tears! There are dozens of us!!!!
It is in fact NOT insane/pathetic/trivial to feel this way, in a culture that makes men feel this way, which is precisely what I am critical of in my piece.
I can't help but think of the kerfuffle around Taylor Swift's “Anti-Hero” music video (I wrote about it here) in which she (a not-fat woman) steps on a scale that says “FAT,” because various forces conspire to make us feel our bodies are different than they are. People got mad at Taylor for not expressing her valid and inevitable body image issues in the “correct” way, she changed the video, and I fucking hate that because it felt like policing how someone else feels about their body, and body feelings don't have to be “good” and “perfect” all the time because that's not how humans work.
Hardball journalism ONLY here at Body Type Enterprises, LLC.
Bro. My grandmother used to tell me she was praying for me to lose weight every time she saw me. She took this concern all the way to the damn TOP BOSS.
As someone trying to becoming a parent: taking notes, taking notes ...
Jesus Christ, this line. Pulitzer, Hugo, National Book Award, etc.
thank you for giving me an inroad to explore this stuff more Mikala it's very hard to write about!!
Fantastic interview Mikala and Alex. I’m going to show this to my husband as he has expressed similar sentiments about labeling and the idea of feelings about his body are like low-level static. Thanks again for sharing.