Week 13

I entered the “Truly Huge” chat room as gym_babe0711.  Instantly, I had fifteen men wanting to chat with me with names like XLBodyBuilder, and BulgingBiceps224.  Soon enough my screen was filled with people wanting to talk about my height, weight, age, and eye color, and of course, how much I could bench press.  “Wanna hot chat?” “You an FBB?”  “How old are you?” I began to tell these people why I was in the chat room, for research.  This turned many people away; some were suspicious and wanted me to prove that I was a student doing research, while others tried to change the subject back to what I looked like and if I had a boyfriend or not.  One particularly hormone-driven twenty-four year old man boasted, “I pick up girls at the gym all the time, that’s one of the reasons I go there.”  My research indicates that certain chemicals released during exercise, like endorphins, are also a part of sexual arousal, so his comments came as no surprise; there was certainly some connection between the two, and as I continued to talk with other’s in the chat room, I found the same things as I had with the aforementioned man.  As I continued to chat for several hours, I could picture myself a part of this subculture that my informants described, and I wanted it.  I decided to make my project one of immersement.