Adonis Belt

We have seen it, adored it, and didn’t know what to call it: the curved grooves at a man’s hips in his lower abdomen that lead down to the pubis. Some call it the Adonis Belt or the Apollo’s Belt. Others refer to it as “sexy hip muscles” or the “v-shape” of the “man gutters.” The grooves are pronounced on male runway and fitness models, which is why they are desired.

Models and athletes have been sporting the grooves since the Greeks, but by chance not as a conscience design. However, gay society and other obsessive hunk-watchers are referring specifically to these grooves, and gay websites play close attention to this peculiar male stomach trait. Six-pack abs were once the unobtainable gay body icon. Now, the Adonis Belt has come to frustrate gay men everywhere.

The euphemism perpetuates the idolization. Technically, the exterior groove of the male hip muscle is the iliac furrow, part of the underlying iliac muscle. Shirtless models and their image makers know the lines draw the eye in towards the belly button and then down to the pubic line. Low rise jeans and short crop T-shirts were invented to expose these beauty lines well. There’s a cottage industry in how to show off your Adonis belt and online discussions devoted to building them.

The concentration over such a precise musculature is a no-win game, and this is the point. No one will find love and liberty with a random assortment of fibers. But gay men seem to gravitate to rarified standards that perpetuate self-denial and embrace metaphors of abstract pleasure. What a better way to avoid the ugly business of real sex and evade the messiness of human relationships.

A Sisyphus-like strive for physical perfection entraps gay male society in a double bind. Sculpting a hip muscle may be no more irrational than piercing ears or shaving hair, but a culture scribes the body with its influences. What does it say about a culture, then, where stomach muscles are the ultimate measure of a man?