When Poldark returned for its second series on BBC1, it was clear who the real breakout star of the show was: Aidan Turner’s chest. In newspaper and magazine coverage, Turner was questioned about on-screen nudity in the style of a Hollywood starlet opening up about topless scenes. A month earlier, Justin Bieber and Orlando Bloom had appeared fully naked in competitive photo opportunities, a sort of Gladiatorial battle for the Pokémon Go generation. The celebrity male body was not only being more objectified than ever before, it was becoming prime real estate.

Could a knock-on effect be a rise in male body issues? A study from the University of Lincoln, links exposure to images of musclebound men with fuelling gym attendance. The study’s co-author Dr David Keatley said: “Anyone can be affected by what they see online, the social cues images can give and the popular conceptions of an ‘ideal body image’.”

The study goes further, linking gym attendance with feelings of inadequacy, rather than a desire to build muscle. “With the recent growth of selfies ... there’s a real risk that males may be more influenced to attend the gym more regularly and work out to a point where it becomes dangerous or detracts from their wellbeing,” Keatley continued.

But are selfies, celebs and Instagram wholly to blame for these masculinity transitions? In August, Dr Jamie Hakim theorised that this “spornosexuals” era (Mark Simpson’s portmanteau of “sports star” and “porn star” where men attend the gym to look “hench” rather than healthy) was tied to the recession. He argued that, after the 2008 recession, men were no longer able to be defined by the traditional signifiers of status (good job, home ownership) and instead had to rely on proving their masculine worth via their bodies.

“The joys of accumulating spornosexual capital are one of the few remaining for young men in Britain’s post-crisis, austerity economy,” wrote Hakim, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA). It echoed something that Simpson said locating the trend to the north-east of England.

“The north-east was carpet-bombed by Thatcherism in the 80s,” he told Esquire “Coal and shipbuilding disappeared and were replaced by shopping, service industries, gyms and tanning salons.”

In February, when singer Sam Smith debuted his new, svelte figure on Instagram the comments were full of opinions about how he should look (“He got wayyy too thin”; ”He was hotter when he was fat”). Such ill-meaning banter illustrated a new truth: people’s idea of the “ideal” male body has never been clearer, and that can only be problematic thing.