"If you squint, Egon Schiele’s Seated Male Nude (Self Portrait) (1910) looks a bit like Matthew Perry. The shock of brown hair, the skinny build, a sarcastic eyebrow raised. A week after Perry’s death, I had noticed this on Instagram, when one reel after another conflated the two images: a clip of Chandler Bing on Friends followed by an extract from a video on Schiele from the channel The Art Hole. I had a framed poster of Seated Male Nude in my university bedroom, next to a Friends boxset I would watch compulsively as I was overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts from undiagnosed OCD. When I look at these two bodies almost a century apart, I see two manifestations of hegemonic masculinity, what Toby Miller in his 2002 book Sportsex defines as ‘Western European and North American white male sexuality [which is] isomorphic with power’. This patriarchal philosophy has presented me with an incredibly narrow view of what the ideal male form ‘should’ look like: a broad chest, well-defined abdominal muscles and visible biceps – for a start. Looking back, everything from an incoming apocalypse that would leave me destitute and running for my life, to my ongoing attempts to get a six pack seems epitomised by these two figures, Chandler and the seated male. Schiele’sshaky lines remind me of quivering, worried hands after panic attacks, and I see my flurries of intense exercise followed by collapse mirrored in the way Perry’s weight shifts across ten years onscreen. Perry’s recent death and the Instagram algorithm resurfacing Schiele’s work to my consciousness returned me to grappling with male anxiety – over body, power, control and why, as a society, we look at men this way."