On Zoom, Swoll fills the screen with mostly bicep and seems generally fed up with what’s happening in gyms and on social media. “I grew up in the gym,” he says. “Late 90s, early 2000s, when I started as a teenager, I just had such great experiences with so many men and women in the community. The best part about the gym is the bonds that you create. It’s the head nods from the people who see you working,” he says. (I can confirm there is nothing quite like the buzz you get from a head nod off a bodybuilder who has noticed you’re a regular). “This atmosphere that social media has created – ‘don’t talk to me, I’m better than you are, you can’t do that’ –it takes away from the whole gym experience.”
Swoll’s followers consider him a hero. Under gym videos that feel unfair or mean-spirited, they tag Swoll as a kind of bat signal, hoping he will swoop in and add his perspective to the footage. Twenty years in a gym has taught him a lot about why people do the things they do: a man sleeping on a yoga mat could be homeless, the nervous woman carrying everything she owns around with her from machine to machine might have had her stuff stolen from a locker before. And the old man, like the one in Nora Love’s video, may be waiting for someone, or just be lonely, rather than staring at the butt of a blonde woman who, in Swoll’s view, is slightly too far away for the call-out video to ring true.
Swoll stresses to me that thereare creeps in the gym – “There are a lot of women out there that can say they've had horrible experiences and they're legit and true and valid” – but that not everyone who is accused of being one on TikTok deserves the label. Some men are genuinely just checking if you’re done with the equipment yet, or maybe wondering why you’re talking to yourself, not realising that their glance is being narrated for a TikTok video to shame them. “Unfortunately, the internet is a very cruel place,” Swoll says. “Somebody has to put their foot down. I’ve had people reach out over the past year saying that they’ve had anxiety about going to the gym because of exactly that happening to them.”
Swoll speaks like one of his TikTok videos –“I've been able to give people the courage and strength to start their fitness journey” – as if he’s found a character that works, and he’s sticking with it. Or maybe he was always this way. But while he does sell vests with his own face on them, he insists his basic message isn’t actually about himself: “I just wish people would take a step back and think to themselves: how would I feel if it was me being made fun of in that video? Or somebody I love? Would your perspective still be the same?”
But even good intentions get distorted in the funhouse mirror of the internet. We lose our grip on things that can never be clawed back, and it is naive to believe otherwise. The comments on Swoll’s posts range from sane and supportive to the ravings of incels; the kind of men who use “females” in the plural, “feminists” as a derogatory term and call for gym segregation because women cannot be trusted. Women whose videos of alleged gym creepers have been reposted by Swoll have reported that they’ve received hate messages and death threats, that people have found their contact details on the internet and harassed them until they changed their phone number and deleted their accounts. Swoll has been accused of misogyny for not only posting the videos, but for creating a space where anaberrant subsect of his followers can be released like hounds and feel that their pursuit of the original poster is justified.
Swoll’s assertion that he posts just as many videos criticising men as he does women is approximately correct. A rough count of his #MYOB videos has them weighted 60:40 towards women, but not all of his videos about women’s videos are criticising them: there are others, the ones he calls his positive videos, where he has bought gym memberships for women in new locations where they will feel safer, and called head offices on behalf of women who’ve been harassed by men, or even other women (the gym etiquette war goes far beyond #gymcreep videos, and it’s not only men perpetrating the accused crimes). To say he is personally a misogynist is an accusation not backed up by data. But whether Swoll posts an equal number of videos by gender is almost a moot point: balancing both sides of the ledger does not create an equal result. The reaction that comes down on the women from some of his followers is far greater. While there have been multiple instances of women doing so, there have been no reported cases of men deleting their accounts due to harassment after a Joey Swoll video.
