Gabrielle #38 – Backshots with... Olly Murs' 'Before' Photo

Today in Sentences Nobody Has Ever Used Before, it is time to contemplate the sexual magnetism of Olly Murs.

When I first launched this newsletter I ran a series called Backshots, which takes a sex symbol – definition: notably thirsted after celebrity or fictional character – and explains why they are hot. I dropped the ball on it for almost a year, but I have heard your calls regarding the Olly Murs ‘Before and After’ drama, and I figured what better reason to revive a format designed to interrogate our ever-loosening grip on sex appeal as our brains disintegrate in an acid vat of Turkey teeth and glute workout videos.

We are veering off course slightly as Olly Murs, with all due respect and to my best knowledge, is not known for his erotic largesse. That has less to do with how he looks and more to do with the fact that he is Olly Murs. For the first few years of his career his sole ‘trademark’ was wearing a trilby hat, and he was introduced to the British public as a sort of neutered, Disnified lad – a strange mix of ‘what if Preston from the Ordinary Boys was a member of JLS’ and ‘what if Patrick Stump worked at Butlins.’ I, personally, haven’t thought about Olly Murs since he caused a terror scare inside Oxford Street Selfridges on Black Friday 2017, when he tweeted “Fuck everyone get out of @Selfridges now gun shots!! I’m inside” from the changing rooms in an incident now immortalised on Wikipedia as the “Oxford Circus panic.”

So, not a sex symbol as such, but close enough. Welcome back, Backshots!

Backshots with… Olly Murs’ ‘Before’ Photo

Main Card: Olly Murs Before vs Olly Murs After

Before we start, I would like to state for the record that the drama in question is fabricated. To recap: there’s a side-by-side of Olly Murs going around social media showing him before and after a “12 week gym transformation,” accompanied by an X poll showing that most women think he looks better before while most men think he looks better after. The original post came from William Costello, a PhD student at the University of Texas with a background researching the psychological profile of incels. He basically only posts polls asking divisive questions about sex and relationships (another recent example: “If you found out (or know) that your partner watches porn without you, do you feel closer to fine or bothered about it?”), news reports on the radicalisation of young men, and the occasional Anchorman gif.

At this point I do think that if you’re uncritically digesting posts from blue tick accounts on Elon Musk’s Twitter that exclusively post about the gender wars from inside academia, you might want to catch yourself on. Regardless of his personal political leanings, Costello posts a lot of content directly engaging in the manosphere and it’s important to acknowledge that that is the context in which the discussion around this poll is unfolding. Also, it didn’t really piss anyone off until it was quoted by another account accusing women of duplicity. “Why are women lying about this?” asked a blue tick engagement farmer whose profile picture is a cartoon sloth. “Like what’s the actual cause?”

So, all in all, we have the “results” of an uncontrolled X poll from a manosphere academic, the “opinion” of an anonymous grifter, and a lot of feedback from the most insane people alive (terminally online commentators and steroid abusers with account names like “Viking XD”). A reliable temperature check on society that does not make. Honestly, half the reason we’re in the trouble we are now vis-à-vis sex is because people keep reacting to posts like this as if they’re sincerely saying anything other than “Elon Musk please pay me for my services to posting.”

Still, it is broadly true that “the shredded man” is more of a male physical ideal that women don’t respond to as enthusiastically, and there is a growing pool of male minds who find that baffling because they’ve put so much ego stock into getting jacked and paying Andrew Tate $5K to tell them to start a pyramid scheme with their 14-year-old cousin. So let’s get into it.

Psychology vs Aesthetics

Broadly speaking, men are sexual aesthetes. If a man likes fat arses and you show him an image of a fat arse, he’ll more than likely think: wow, nice fat arse. It doesn’t need to be attached to the most beautiful person in the world. It barely even needs to be attached to a human. Whatever’s going on around it is basically irrelevant – I genuinely dread to think how many men I know personally who have jacked it to Hillary Clinton’s dumper. They’re wonderfully simple in that way. Money see, monkey cum.

This is not the case for women, who are stimulated more by context and imagination. That’s why a photo of a big hard dick on its own does very little (unless it is a truly exceptional dick), but a photo of a hard dick in a pair of grey joggers will be rapturously received regardless of what you’ve got going on down there. I hope everyone is taking notes.

It’s often said that women’s bodies are more beautiful or inherently erotic than men’s, but I don’t buy that. It’s 23 degrees in London right now and it’s difficult for me to be outside because they’re all there, the lads, chugging Prime with their forearms out. There’s something to be said for the female body being more easily compartmentalised – how else to explain the existence of Hooters, “arse, tits, or legs,” and those sex toys where you fuck a severed torso? There simply cannot be that many people in the world with an amputee fetish. However, if you give those things a bit more context you simply end up with Magic Mike Live, “tall, dark, and handsome,” and the multi-million dollar erotic publishing industry / incredibly high rate of porn searches along the lines of “male solo wank moaning LOUD.” We’re all sick, in the end, just in different ways.

Anyway, Olly Murs Before appeals more to things that most women actually like to fantasise about, which I will now explain.

Functional Body vs Vanity Body

Firstly, Olly Murs looks objectively good in both photos. If Olly Murs After tried chatting you up in the pub, you would almost certainly respond to him the same way you would respond to Olly Murs Before – not only because the body is nice in both instances, but because he will be the same guy, and who that guy is matters one thousand times more than how many abs that guy has. No sane woman in real life would look at Olly Murs After and go ‘no thanks mate, you’re a nice guy and everything but your back has simply too much definition.’

On account of the preference for context outlined above, women don’t just respond to someone’s appearance, they respond to the implications of someone’s appearance. Olly Murs Before has obviously, clearly, plainly been in the gym. He’s literally in the gym in the photo. Look at his stomach. Look at his legs. This is a man who does weights and has a nice amount of muscle covered by a nice layer of fat. However – and I’m going to demonstrate some classic female projection, here, strap in – Olly Murs Before looks strong in a homely way. A body like that makes me think things like ‘bet he does a cracking drunk cheese toastie,’ ‘bet he could use a paper map to navigate to the beach in a foreign country and then throw me about in the sea,’ ‘bet he knows his way around a B&Q.’

Olly Murs After makes me think things like ‘he looks hungry,’ ‘he’s going to set an alarm for 5AM on a Sunday and actually get up,’ ‘bet he has listened to at least two audiobooks about biohacking.’

Again: they both look good, they both look happy and healthy. This is just a guy doing a bulk and cut at the end of the day, but the implications of the body are vastly different. Olly Murs After is a male fitness goal, not a female fantasy. The amount of time and discipline that goes into achieving a physique like that is commendable but, in the sexual marketplace and with no context, ends up doing the opposite of what’s intended. It reads feminine to women partly because the concern you have to have for your own appearance, and the amount of attention you have to pay to it in order to look like that, reminds us of ourselves.

There’s also something off-putting about the quest for physical perfection generally, and that cuts both ways. It’s the same thing when men say they prefer a photo of a woman wearing ‘no make-up’ (although she is usually wearing loads of make-up, just in muted tones) vs a photo of the same woman with a heavy beat. One looks easy-going, the other looks high maintenance. The reality of the individual doesn’t matter when we’re talking strictly about images – projection takes precedent. Olly Murs Before projects the body of a man who lets himself enjoy things. Olly Murs After projects the body of a man who weighs his rice. That’s not a bad way to live, but is it intriguing to women? No, it is not.

Man vs Bear

A lot of this circles back to a question that went viral a while ago that also sent a certain sphere of men loopy: who would you, as a woman, rather encounter in the woods – a man or a bear?

Women overwhelmingly choose the bear, reasoning that a bear’s behaviour is more predictable and less likely to involve harm or danger compared to an unknown man. There is a similar logic at play here. At face value Olly Murs Before is the bear – red-blooded, instinct-driven, has functional knowledge of trees. Olly Murs After is the man – cold, calculated, has strong feelings about his Airpods.

I’m not saying any of that is good, correct, or even fair. That’s just the particular perversion of the female brain, and honestly you’d think it would be welcomed with less hostility because it actually requires men doing much less than they currently are... in the gym, anyway. And, more to the point, WE LIKE THEM BOTH, we just don’t need them the way self-designated Alpha e-celebs lead their followers to believe. All you have to do to be attractive to women is not be a psycho and seem like you can eat a rectangle of Galaxy without logging it in an app. In the time it’s taken me to write this post I’ve come to accept that I would smash Olly Murs, and all he did was take his trilby off and get me to see him in a pair of sports shorts. The bar is never where you think it is.

To read more about how sick women are, read my previous Backshots with… Tony Soprano and Larry David.