I’ve been reading a bit lately about the changing nature of western society’s view of male bodies. By and large, the debate over female body image has been going on now for over fifty years – the mass media has marketed a particular type of female body in western society as being ideal and desirable for as long as it has existed. Anorexia is widely-known and widely-recognised as a problem, there has always been a debate over the sexualisation of women in advertising, etc.
Now, there is a similar thing going on with men. It’s much newer, and therefore not as recognised. But the signs are interesting, as the article I’ve posted below shows – the use of unclothed men in advertising has increased, action figures have become more muscular, action movie stars have bulked up over the decades and are spending more time without their shirts on (he uses Batman as an example, but I’d also add in James Bond and the ancient warrior from the old sword-and-sandal epics compared to those in Troy and 300 as well). It’s unlikely that men of the 1920s and 1930s thought much about their bodies (unless they were overweight). In contrast, many, if not most, young men today aspire for a more muscular physique than they could possibly achieve. This the cause of muscle dysmorphia, informally called 'bigorexia'.
Here is the article, probably the most interesting that I’ve read on the subject. This is the part that deals with what I’m discussing in the thread:
Quote: The marketing of nude men has likewise skyrocketed in recent years, putting the male body in the spotlight in a manner once exclusive to women. Researchers at Harvard Medical School conducted a study on this increase by reviewing advertisements in Glamour and Cosmopolitanâ€"prominent beauty magazines for womenâ€"over the last forty years.
What they found was "Over that time... the women shown in a "state of undress" stayed roughly constant, but the percentage of men showing skin "rose from virtually zero, until it surpassed the number of undressed women by the 1990s" (Swift 4). These findings reinforce the dramatic increase in the objectification of the male body, and reflect the origins of a process that has generated the increasedâ€"and increasingly unrealisticâ€"expectations of masculine appearance.
More disturbing, the evolution of cartoon and comic strip heroes has followed a similar process of supernatural bulking-up. Marketed to appeal to children and young men, these images leave a long-lasting impression on the malleable minds of those looking outward for models of what it means to be a man. One need only compare the fairly normal physique of Adam West as "Batman" from the 1960s to the muscled bat-suit donned by his modern-day successors to see how drastically these masculine icons have changed.
Likewise, G.I. JOE figuresâ€"arguably the most popular and enduring cartoon and toy marketed to boysâ€"have undergone a similar and more startling metamorphosis. From the time of their development in the 1970s to their present-day counterparts, the average G.I. JOE figure has undergone a radical body transformation in which his physique has becomeâ€"much like that of Barbieâ€"grossly unrealistic.
In a recent study entitled "Evolving ideals of male body image as seen through action toys," researchers discovered the scope of this muscular transformation. The results are startling: "Extrapolating the figures to a height of 5-foot-10 shows early [G.I. Joe] figures having chests of about 44 inches, compared with 46 to 62 today, and biceps of 12 inches, compared with 18 to 32 today" (Weight Net.1). So too have Star Wars figures released in the 1990s achieved proportions startlingly larger and more muscled than those originally released in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
A recent study by researchers at Harvard Medical School interviewed a sampling of young men about their satisfaction with their physique. The findings reflect the manifestation of a growing dissatisfaction with how they feel about their bodies. "College-age men in the United States, Austria, and France indicated they wantâ€"and believe women to preferâ€"a body with at least 27 more pounds of muscle than they possess..." (CNN 1).
Interestingly, these researchers also found through informal inquiry and anecdotal evidence that the average woman does not consider the ideal man to be as muscular as the men questioned believed they do (CNN 1). Due largely to manipulation by the media and its advertising syndicates, many men are being seduced into believing that their muscularity determines their success with women. The problem is that the men's assumption regarding what is "muscular" is exaggerated with respect to what "attracts" the typical. Men are fueled by an erroneous and socially propagated notion that such a body is what women wantâ€"that muscularity determines and almost exclusively reflects sexual potency.
In The Adonis Complex Pope cites a study in which young men were asked how satisfied they were with their own bodies. If dissatisfied, the young men were asked how they would like to be different. The results are startling, again confirming a growing trend: "...Boys of all ages, from eleven to seventeen, chose a body ideal that possessed about thirty-five pounds more muscle than they actually had themselves...This means that the majority of boys chose a body ideal that most men could attain only with steroids" (Pope 174).