The Myth of the Gymcel

I’ve written articles on how to build a more aesthetic physique and which body type women prefer. I’ve made videos about it, too. Some of the articles have had millions of readers, and some of the videos have gotten hundreds of thousands of views. Most of them are based on my surveys of thousands of women, but I’ve also spoken with some of the top researchers.

Recently, those videos have pulled in some of the blackpill/looksmaxxing crowd, who have very different ideas about what women prefer. And that’s great. One of their ideas is that getting bigger and stronger doesn’t actually help that much, arguing that a man’s face and height matter far more than his body. FaceIQ is known for this, but it’s a common idea.

Most research shows that women care far more about how physically capable a man is than about how tall he is. Height is helpful, but mostly because taller guys are often bigger, stronger, and healthier. If a shorter guy can get stronger than the taller guy, women will usually prefer his physique. I have a full article about that here.

Enter the gymcel. Whenever I mention how powerful being powerful is, the blackpillers bring up the gymcel meme, arguing that being muscular only helps if you’re already attractive in other ways. There’s a hint of truth there, actually. But it’s not quite what most men think.

What’s a Gymcel?

A gymcel is an incel who’s obsessed with the gym. An incel is an involuntary celibate—someone who can’t lose their virginity. It doesn’t always have to do with virginity, though. It’s usually more about struggling with romance in general.

It’s an idea that comes from the blackpill community. What makes the blackpill community so different from other male communities is that it’s intentionally disempowering. Guys who blame immutable genetic traits are considered more honest and “based.” In most male communities, guys are rewarded for trying to overcome hardship. Here, that’s considered a bluepill or redpill delusion. Better to be honest about your situation.

The idea is that even if an incel succeeds at building muscle, it won’t work because his face and height are the real problems. Strength, health, and athleticism don’t matter enough to make a difference. All of the gymcel’s hard work is doomed to fail. It’s nothing more than a self-soothing distraction—a “cope.” The correct solution, apparently, is to get plastic surgery. But most looksmaxxers are teenagers who can’t afford plastic surgery, and plastic surgery probably wouldn’t work anyway, especially if you’re short. So, better to give up.

These communities aren’t entirely serious. Sarcasm and irony are big parts of the culture. But a lot of young guys really do take this stuff seriously. There’s often the sense that there’s truth hidden in the memes. And often there is.

Do Women Like Guys Who Exercise?

Most men have the bluepill and redpill beliefs that women are looking for disciplined, hardworking, resourceful guys who will make good partners and fathers. If this is the case, women aren’t necessarily looking for visual signs of great genetics, but rather for men who demonstrate that they work out, eat well, and lead healthy lifestyles.

The blackpill ideology is rooted in the idea that women are subconsciously searching for men with good genetics so that they can pass those genetics onto their children. If that’s the case, they aren’t necessarily looking for guys who exercise, but rather for guys who are naturally robust.

I realize we can’t take survey responses at face value. I’ll go deeper in a moment. But let’s start at the beginning, with what women say they prefer. I asked 105 women whether they would rather date a man who was naturally in good shape or one who worked hard to get into good shape. 67% of women said they would rather date a man who worked hard:

But there’s a false dichotomy here. Most research suggests that women are attracted to men who are both able and willing to protect and provide for their families and communities. They don’t necessarily care whether it’s genetic or earned; they just care whether you’re able and willing.

What Do Women Actually Care About?

Dr. David Buss is the most respected attractiveness researcher. According to him, when women consider your physical appearance, they’re subconsciously asking themselves (study):

• Do you look strong, resourceful, competent, and capable?
• Do you look loyal, trustworthy, and monogamous?
• Do you want to start a family with me?
• Would we make a good team?
• Would you be a good father?

Men were formed in the same primeval crucible, and our conscious thoughts are subtly influenced by similar subconscious drives. Our wiring is slightly different, and we look for slightly different things, but we’re more similar than we are different. This is just part of being human.

Here’s where most regular people get confused. There are modern women, living in the modern world, and they might even be looking at your photo on a dating app… but their minds are still running primeval programming.

Women aren’t subconsciously gauging which man looks the most like a billionaire computer programmer. Instead, they’re looking to see whether you can run down a boar, thrust a spear into it, carry it home, and then fend off an attack from a neighbouring tribe. There’s an enormous emphasis on physical competence—formidability.

For example, in my latest survey, I asked women which hobbies they found most attractive. Most of them said that playing sports was the most attractive hobby. They’re dreaming about the bodies of football players, not of tech CEOs with bunkers and rifles, even though that tech CEO may make a better protector and provider.

I’m not trying to hate on tech guys. I’m a blogger. I have the same sedentary lifestyle as a computer programmer, just with much less money. What I’m trying to say is that a computer programmer who lifts weights will be more physically attractive than a frail guy with a rifle who can actually hunt. Our brains have outdated wiring. We still lust like barbarians do, drawn to raw physical prowess.

So let’s consider the gymcel now:

• Is he strong? Yes. He gets ten points. Strength increases capability, and capability is the root of all virtue. If you aren’t capable, you aren’t able to achieve your goals, so your goals don’t matter. Nowadays, strength is only a small part of our capability, but it played a much larger role in our primeval past, when our subconscious preferences formed.
• Did he take steroids to get strong? Maybe, and drug abuse hints at poor judgment. Also, steroids impair fertility, health, and longevity. And even if the steroid abuse isn’t obvious, enhancing masculinity beyond the natural level doesn’t tend to be a good thing. It hints that you might be too aggressive, with eyes that are too lustful, and loins that are too likely to stray. You’re plenty capable, but women begin to fear you might not make a great partner or father. And this is a subconscious fear. Even on a gut level, exaggerated masculinity is less attractive.
• Will he use that strength to protect his partner? Does he look like an aggressive, violent, dangerous man? If yes, that isn’t necessarily a problem. Dangerous men can be attractive. But will he use that aggression to protect his partner or to harm her? Is he the rapist, or is he the man the rapist is afraid of? Or both.
• Is he looking to fool around or have a true partner? None of this really matters if he isn’t willing to commit. What you can bring to a partnership doesn’t matter if there’s no partnership. (Around 10–20% of women are promiscuous, though, and they tend to like muscular guys. Muscle helps either way.)
• Will he be a loyal partner and a good father? This is a tricky one. Being strong is great. So is having the discipline to keep strong, fit, and healthy. But more masculine men tend to have a greater desire for sexual variety. Some of them keep those desires under control, but some don’t. Some cheat. The classic example is Arnold Schwarzenegger getting his maid pregnant, eventually leading to his divorce.

It’s easy to imagine how the wrong combination of those traits could create a gymcel. The gymcel is strong and muscular, which helps him, but something else is off, ruining it. Maybe he’s so obsessed with muscle that he looks steroidy, promiscuous, vain, or untrustworthy.

But that isn’t usually the case. Almost all research very clearly shows that stronger guys are rated as more attractive by women, have better dating success, have more sexual partners, are more likely to be in relationships, and have more children (study, study, study, study). It’s one of the strongest and most consistent findings in all of attractiveness research. Getting stronger appears to be the single best thing you can do to improve your physical appearance.

Most men underestimate the importance of strength, but they overestimate the amount of strength they need. Becoming strong and capable is incredibly attractive, but you don’t need to look like a bodybuilder. By the time you look as athletic as a soccer player, you’re already getting most of the attractiveness benefits:

Women are fairly evenly split between a more athletic physique and a stronger physique. Very few women find men with exaggerated muscularity or masculinity attractive. Almost zero find weakness or frailty attractive.

Here’s an article about how big you should get overall, and here’s a calculator that will predict your ideal muscle measurements based on your bone structure.

But Doesn’t Face Beat Physique?

The common pushback from blackpillers at this point is that the face is more important than the body. That’s true, but it’s true in a way that confirms what I’m saying. The best database of facial attractiveness ratings is the Chicago Face Database. Here are the most attractive faces in each racial category, male and female:

All of the attractive faces show clear signs of being in good shape. The guy on the left had the highest rating in the database. You can see from his neck and traps that he’s quite strong. He looks like a college football player. And you can tell just from looking at his face.

Note that the sample size was “only” a few hundred people, which means these people have one-in-a-hundred levels of good looks. They might be the most attractive in their grade at high school, or in a university lecture, or in an office. They aren’t professional models, beauty influencers, or Hollywood sex icons.

Here are the least attractive faces:

All of the least attractive faces show clear signs of being in bad shape. They’re all overweight; their skin isn’t as clear, their facial muscles and necks aren’t as muscular, and their skin tones aren’t as healthy. All of these signals point to poor nutrition, strength, and cardiovascular fitness.

Facial attractiveness is important, and your genetics absolutely contribute to your facial attractiveness. But the three greatest factors are strength, fitness, and health. If these people got into great shape, they’d bump up out of the bottom half, and their facial attractiveness wouldn’t be an issue.

The reverse is true with the most attractive faces. If you took away their strength, fitness, and health, they’d fall into the bottom half.

For another example, here’s a before-and-after photo of a Bony to Beastly program member:

He’s bigger, stronger, and leaner, and you can see it in both his body and his face.

Your face also hints at your personality. It’s harder to see here because all of the study participants are in the same grey shirt and have been cued to post with a neutral facial expression. In real life, people are factoring in your grooming and facial expression.

So let’s go back to the gymcel:

• Does his face suggest that he’s strong, capable, and healthy? Yes, so he gets 10 points—the same 10 points he got for having a physically capable body. It’s a benefit he gets in every situation, whether you see only his body or only his face, clothed or unclothed, in real life or in a photo. You can tell from someone’s posture and energy levels, too. We’re incredibly good at recognizing genuine signs of fitness.
• Is his face ugly in other ways? Maybe his ears stick out, his nose is crooked, and his eyes aren’t very hunterly. That can happen, and they can suggest poorer genetics or upbringing. The blackpill isn’t wrong. But those genetics traits almost certainly won’t be enough to drop him into the bottom half of facial attractiveness. And even if it does, he has his body enhancing his overall attractiveness. He’ll probably still be attractive overall.
• Does he seem like a good guy? Good grooming and hygiene suggest that someone cares enough about others to present themselves properly. It’s a pro-social cue. A positive demeanour and a warm facial expression can go a long way, too.

Women will forgive a guy for being ugly if he’s capable, hardworking, and loyal. If you have a great physique, you’ve proven that you’re capable and hard-working. That’s a powerful signal to send.

But if you’re a capable and hardworking guy who won’t be a loyal partner, then it doesn’t mean very much to a woman. And if you come across as an aggressor or predator, then they’ll be especially careful to keep their distance. That can create a gymcel.

Let’s go deeper into the personality side of getting into great shape.

Strength Training Versus Bodybuilding

I asked 110 women whether they would rather date a guy who did strength training or bodybuilding. 95% of the women said they would rather date the guy who did strength training:

I think what’s happening here is that women value strength, not muscle size. And this sounds confusing because they’re kind of the same thing. Muscularity is what strength looks like. Women love guys with big muscles.

When I let those same women choose which physique they preferred, they preferred the more muscular man over the taller man:

Women love it when guys look like (natural) bodybuilders. I think what’s happening is that women prefer guys who train for strength and look more attractive as a byproduct, versus guys who train to be more attractive and get stronger as a byproduct. Women care about our intentions.

Women prefer when we focus on what we can do, not on what we look like. They like it when we train to run faster and lift heavier weights. They don’t like it when we train for aesthetics… even if they love how it looks.

I realize that most guys care about their appearance, and that’s totally normal. Women won’t fault you for that. They know it’s normal. It’s just that it isn’t supposed to be the main thing we care about. So, when they learn that we’re exercising for aesthetic reasons instead of performance reasons, they don’t think it’s as sexy.

I realize there’s a double standard here. Women very openly care about their own beauty. They have elaborate makeup routines and do glute-focused workouts, even though arm strength tends to limit them the most in real life. They carry around little clutch purses, even though it’s inconvenient (they lose access to a hand), and even though those clutch purses barely hold anything. Imagine having to carry around your wallet in your hand all day long.

But most women enjoy the differences between men and women. They want to be feminine, and they want you to be masculine (to a point). Focusing on anti-aging and beauty is more feminine. Focusing on strength and capability is often seen as more masculine. If you adopt the attitude that women are looksmaxxers, so you should be a looksmaxxer, too, I get it—that would be fair—but that isn’t how most people think. Most people like gender differences (to a point).

You can still train for aesthetics, but I would fold in other goals, like strength, stamina, and health. A more holistic routine will be better for you overall, give off a more masculine vibe, hint at a more attractive personality, and make you look more aesthetic (because you’ll develop truer signals of strength, health, and fitness).

That’s the idea behind our Health and Aesthetics Program: optimal aesthetics while meeting all benchmarks for general health and fitness.

The Gymcel is Real

Women greatly prefer men who are muscular and strong. Strength is arguably the most attractive physical trait a man can have. And there’s nothing wrong with going to the gym, building muscle, or caring about your appearance.

However, women are turned off by guys who seem obsessed with their appearance. So it’s easy to imagine a bodybuilder who posts a photo of himself at the beach, playing soccer with his shirt off, and getting flooded with attention from women who love his physique. But then, if that same guy takes a shirtless selfie scowling with hunter eyes in his bathroom mirror, trying to show off how muscular and masculine he is, women might find it cringey. It isn’t the muscle that’s turning women off, though. It’s the vain narcissism.

So a gymcel, then, is a vain or obsessive bodybuilder who can’t bring enough extra things to the table to make up for signs that he’d make a poor partner.

It gets worse.

The Gymcel on Steroids

Steroids are gaining popularity in the blackpill community, especially with the rise of looksmaxxing influencers like Clavicular and Road to 1%. The idea is that steroids make you more masculine, more dominant, and more attractive. The argument is that even if women say they don’t like guys who take steroids, they still choose guys on steroids.

However, when I surveyed 500 men, the guys who took steroids were doing significantly worse with women than the natural lifters:

1. Natural lifters: 30% said they were better than average at dating, and 66% said they were happy with their love lives.
2. Steroid lifters: 8% said they were better than average at dating, and 46% said they were happy with their love lives.

So it’s possible to become so muscular that it hurts your love life, but that’s because most women are turned off by drug abuse. That’s true for both short and tall guys.

The vast majority of women consider steroids an enormous red flag. In a survey I conducted a little while ago, I asked 400 women whether they would date a guy who took steroids.

• 79% said they wouldn’t date a guy who took steroids.
• 20% said it was a red flag, but they would give him a chance.
• 0.5%—2 out of the 400 women—said they preferred guys who took steroids.

Steroids signal a few different problems. Guys who take steroids aren’t always doing it for vain reasons. Some of them want to get stronger. Or they feel insecure about the size of their muscles. But it tends to come off poorly when a guy abuses drugs in the pursuit of muscle, sacrificing his health in the process. That isn’t the kind of choice the average woman respects.

Also, women are looking at your body more holistically. They aren’t as hyper-focused on muscle as strength as some men are. They care about strength, but they also care about health and fitness. Steroids enlarge the wrong part of your heart, thicken your blood, age your skin, and often cause other unsightly, unhealthy side effects. And so, steroids tend to make men look less attractive overall. More on that here.

Conclusion

A gymcel is a man who’s so obsessed with muscularity and leanness that it sends the wrong signals. Being strong and lean in a natural, healthy and athletic way is incredibly attractive. Women love guys who can lift heavy weights, run ten kilometres, carry them around without breaking a sweat, and make them feel safe around other men. But some men take it too far. Women don’t love the idea of training for aesthetics, steroids, or dysmorphic insecurities.

However tall you are, and whatever your face looks like, getting into better shape will make you dramatically more attractive to your “team.” If you’re a capable person who works hard, and you work hard in support of other people, then those other people will forgive almost everything else. That’s true with romance, friendships, and in your career.

You see this fairly often in politics. If someone’s a total asshole, but they’re fighting for your cause, and they’re winning, then people will often forgive the fact that they’re an asshole. They’ll like the person anyway. But then on the other political side, they see an asshole who’s harming their cause. He’s an enemy, and he’s winning, so they hate him.

The same thing is true with physical attraction. If you’re ugly/short/bald, but you look physically capable, and women know that you’re willing to use that physical capability to be an effective and loyal partner, then some women will find you physically attractive, and they’ll want to partner up with you. If you look like a bad person, being more physically capable means you’re more capable of doing bad things, which is bad.

I’m not trying to judge your intentions. I’m just talking about whether your intentions are aligned with the woman you’re trying to woo. If you’re a promiscuous guy trying to attract a promiscuous woman, and both of you want the same experience with each other, then your intentions are aligned. You’re on the same team, however briefly. Most people are more heavily wired for long-term relationships, though, and women much more so than men.

When someone is a gymcel, it has less to do with muscle and strength and more to do with signalling poor character and intent. Or perhaps poor balance. Perhaps it seems that building muscle has become so great an obsession that it’s overshadowed every other aspect of life. Some of the more obsessed gym girls might love that, though… and obsessed lifters often love obsessed gym girls.