Mark Simpson on the shameless pumped progeny of David Beckham & Take That
Good things come in pairs. Buttocks, breasts, balls, pecs, Twix – and the Harrison twins.
Owen and Lewis Harrison, originally from England’s beautiful Lake District, an hour’ or so’s drive north of Manchester, are quite the attraction themselves – international fitness models, personal trainers, Instagram stars and ‘ambassadors’ for the giant online supplements company MyProtein. So they’re probably not eating many Twix.
They’re also stunning spornosexuals. So stunning, you see double.
Through hard, sweaty labour at the gym, carefully planned diets, plenty of supplements – and liberal application of designer ink, styling fudge and fake tan – these 25-year-olds have fashioned themselves into highly desirable, highly saleable commodities. Male glamour models.
Fitness models and aesthetic or ‘physique’ bodybuilders (e.g. Steve Cook, whom I blogged about recently here) are the online high priests of spornosexuality – that is, second generation, ‘hardcore’, sexed-up, body-centred metrosexuality.
Bodybuilding for most younger guys is no longer about being as big and Austrian – and straight – as possible, as it was in the Arnie 80s & 90s. Instead, it’s about being as hot as possible – and maintaining a cover-model body all year round, instead of having ‘on’ and ‘off’ seasons centred around contests.
The Harrisons, like many other fitness models, star in a host of YouTube ‘motivational’ workout videos – usually topless and in tight compression pants, lit by romantic lighting. Motivating thousands of young men to get a hench, hot bod like theirs. On their website, again, like other fitness gurus/idols, they offer personalised diet plans to help make the V-shaped dream come true, as well as, for the lucky few, ‘one 2 one‘ meetings. (Disappointingly, you only have the option to choose to train with Owen or Lewis – not both.)
Former Royal Marines, the Harrisons, like their ex-Marine buddy David McIntosh (below), seem completely at ease with sexualising themselves and behaving in a fashion that a previous generation would have thought ‘well gay’.
As Owen explains in the ‘How it All Began’ vid (below – featuring a motivational workout ‘threesome’ with fitness model Simeon Panda): “I LOVE coming in the gym, working out an’ – sounds a bit poncey – looking in the mirror and thinking ‘I built that!‘”
In a profile in the Daily Mail, Lewis said: ‘It’s good fun getting in front of the camera and showing off our physiques which we have worked so hard for.’
Personally, I think they both have a lot to be proud of, and I don’t blame them for liking what they see in the mirror.
‘Objectifying’ themselves, far from rendering them powerless and despised as the word would suggest, has given them a fame and lifestyle that wasn’t supposed to be an aspiration for working class lads in rural NW England being told to get real and get a trade – and work on someone else’s property instead of their own bodies.
They originally dreamed of becoming professional footballers: ‘Growing up in the era of David Beckham… that was the dream’, explains Owen. Despite being talented scouted by Bolton Wanderers it didn’t work out for them. Rather than knuckle down get a trade, they opted for the glamour and excitement of the Royal Marines instead. It’s rather touching when Owen gets all teary-eyed reminiscing about his time in the Marines as being ‘a brotherhood’ – when of course having a twin brother is more ‘brotherhood’ than most people ever have.
After they left the Royal Marines and suffered a series of ‘depressing’ manual jobs the Harrisons finally achieved their Beckham dreams by hitting the gym harder – even after a long day labouring – and putting into action a plan to become fitness models like the ones they admired on the cover of the glossy mags they loved to read. Eventually a physique photographer discovered them, they became online celebs – and then professional spornosexuals. A more modern, more digital type of hero than a Marine, or even a footballer or pop star.
In a sense the Harrisons are Beckham’s offspring – with some mesomorphic Take That DNA thrown in. And more interesting and significant for that reason than Beckham is now, frowning in his H&M dad pants. (But it seems especially fitting that the gym the Harrisons work out at with Panda at the ‘climax’ of the clip is called ‘Metro-Flex’.)
Their identical, stereoscopic physiques – albeit with slightly different body art – are part of their marketing shtick: cleverly, but also sweetly, they began their transformation into fitness models by making sure that they ate exactly the same meals and trained exactly the same way with exactly the same weights, so that they would have exactly the same weight, chest and arm size. (Their shared genes had already given them the same height of 5′ 10″.)
‘We lived together, trained together and ate all the same things at the same time. It was full on’, Lewis has said. Even their ‘cheat’ days were spent scoffing the same Domino’s pizza and chocolate bars.
In a sense, they had the kind of dream ‘gym buddy’ shared lifestyle that many guys today, gay, straight or bi fantasise about. Nothing lasts forever though – the twins no longer live together as Lewis has moved in with his girlfriend.
There is also something about twindom that resonates with modern selfie-regarding masculinity (e.g. Tom Hardy in ‘Legend’ and those preternaturally prescient D&G twin ads from a few years back), which compliments the gym-mirrors and camera-lenses of spornosexuality. The Hodge twins (below) in the US are another impressive manifestation of this twinsome tendency.
The Harrisons however take it to another level. Look at the way they pout and preen in front of the mirrors – much like the lads in my gym who have no qualms about taking their tops off and flexing and snapping selfies while I pretend not to gawp. Look at the way they run their hands over themselves, feeling their own pump, gazing into the camera lens, sharing that special moment with us. Bless ’em.
And as twins they are of course mirrors to one another anyway.
No wonder other fitness models are sometimes photographed as if they had a twin.
And some people even use the twin illusion to sell books.
I know that you’re gagging to for the lads to give you their hot tips, so will leave you with some more motivational videos starring our twinsome devils – including a ‘group’ sesh (bottom) with the American physique model Jeff Seid and his big hair and even bigger tongue.
I don’t know about you, but I’m already feeling totally motivated. So much so I may have to adjust my compression pants….
