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: Here is a confession: I like to watch. For two summer weeks every four years, I avoid the lure of sun and sand to hole myself up in a darkened room and watch mesmerised as nearly naked people perform curious acts on television. On the evidence of the broadcast hours being devoted to satisfying this obsession, it cannot be mine alone.

Across the two-plus weeks of the Beijing Olympics, channels across the world will have broadcast nearly 2,900 hours of live coverage (and 3,600 hours of total coverage).

Without question, this is too much Bob Costas of NBC — he of the ready cliché, the coltish forelock and the jaw-dropping impertinence. (Has another broadcast journalist ever concluded an interview with an American president by informing him that he was “dismissed”?)

Even so, it is worth enduring Costas’s banalities, along with the welter of kooky color stories (“There is this and there is that,” noted the sage Al Trautwig, always quick with a koan, during one prime-time feature on a gymnast), the commercial barrage of beer-barrel Americana and even the sometimes thinly veiled journalistic partisanship in order to get to the heart of the Summer Games.

By that one means that, for days and nights in the privacy of one’s living room, and without once resorting to XTube, a viewer is permitted and even encouraged to ogle an ongoing parade of muscled and lithe and rippling and toned and occasionally highly perplexing bodies, wearing little more than the evidence of our mutating cultural ideals.

Here, for example, is Michael Phelps, the Baltimore merman, whose varied anatomical particulars (short legs, long torso, jug ears, size 14 feet, Olympic rings tattoo below right hipbone, on latitude with the pubic bone) have in recent days become more familiar in some ways than our own. Here are the gnomish female gymnasts, seemingly more compact than ever, more muscularly developed and yet at the same time troublingly arrested, to judge from the lack of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts.

Here is Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer with the blister-pack abs and the padded deltoids, her stupendous physique attained, she says, through Herculean training, and now unquestionably resembling that of a cover boy for Men’s Health.

What is it that happened to the human body, one finds oneself asking. Is it diet or drugs or training or mysterious substances like human growth hormone that have turned so many sports stars into bendable action figures? Just as in baseball, when athletes overnight began looking more like Humvees than the reliable mid-size family Chevy, one’s eye registers a difference that defies any easy effort to comprehend.

It was the art historian Anne Hollander who noted that, even naked, the body is subject to fashion and that the body beautiful differs according to an era’s prevailing mores and tastes. Because the Greek word gymnasium translates as something more or less like “nuditorium,” it seems clear that few events offer a richer opportunity to see how physical beauty is currently constructed than the Beijing Games.

None of this is to suggest that the Olympic ideals have been forever lost. Even in the classical world, the range of forms at the Games was broad enough to encompass lean bodies suited to running, wiry wrestlers with bantam bodies, refrigerator-size hulks capable of feats like lifting a young ox.

However distorted, the belief that to be fit is not merely to be brimming with sexual aliveness, but also to be prepared for hardship and battle, to be pure and good, remains deeply enmeshed in every Olympiad.

Goony for athletic beauty, Socrates managed to find in all that young flesh not only a delight to the eyes, but also food for the soul.

In many ways, the marketers of the Summer Olympics are still mining Socratic ideals, even if purity in sports at this point is surely a fantasy. At least that is the impression one obsessive has taken away from the Games thus far, as the shape of human perfection continues to evolve.