THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INFORMS US THAT MEN HAVE BODY ISSUES TOO:
Movies and TV shows full of svelte celebrities. Magazines and websites pushing weight loss and exercise.
It is tough being a man these days.
Just-published research, from one of the largest studies on male body image, shows how much men worry about being thin and muscular: Not quite as much as women agonize about their bodies. But still a lot. And it affects their relationships in surprising ways.
A partner may become resentful that her man slimmed down without her—or jealous of all the new attention he is getting. She may worry he will find someone else. Or he might encourage her to lose weight or work out to feel better, and she could view this as a not-so-subtle hint.
We all make sure our online presence makes us look fantastic. Better tone up the dad bod.
“There’s a much more extreme model today of what a healthy man looks like,” says David Frederick, assistant professor in health psychology at Chapman University, in Orange, Calif., and lead researcher on the new male body-image study.
But don’t worry, because the article concludes with advice . . . on how to make women feel better.
If you’re a man who isn’t comfortable receiving compliments, explain that to your partner. Say: “I like it when you tell me I look great, but too many compliments makes me worry you didn’t find me attractive before.”
A man whose partner is worried or insecure should work to make her more comfortable, says Dawnn Karen, a therapist and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Hold her hand tightly when you go out. Compliment her more. And be careful on social media: Shirtless shots that garner a lot of likes aren’t going to help.
So there you are.
UPDATE: Yeah, pretty much.
ANOTHER UPDATE: In the comments, Kim du Toit invokes beefy stars of yesteryear like Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, which reminds me of this piece from back when Salon was actually worth reading. “Yes Alec Baldwin and John Travolta have aged into the barrel (well, Travolta’s just getting kind of portly), but where are all these men now, or rather, where are the young barrel-chested men of today? They are in the gym, sculpting what could be a perfect barrel into the ‘six-pack’ — one of the worst things to happen to men’s style since bag-off-your-ass pants. . . . Men are now being raised to be harder on the outside and softer on the inside.”
The experiments—conducted by psychologists at the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California, the University of Portland and Oklahoma State—showed a group of volunteers images of young men and women supposedly hired by a new consulting firm. In the pictures, the young people, who had previously been tested and scored for upper-body strength, wore tank tops that showed off their physiques.
When shown sets of men, the volunteers consistently rated the ones with higher strength scores as having more leadership ability, evidently inferring strength from buff physiques. But when shown sets of women, there was no correlation between perceived strength and leadership qualities. Greater height, on the other hand, made both men and women seem more like leaders (and smarter too), although the leadership effect of height wasn’t as great as that of strength.
A key caveat: If a man looked to the raters as if he were likely to use his strength “in forceful pursuit of self-interest”—if he somehow looked like a bully—it detracted from his leadership aura.
The researchers didn’t ask the raters about something as vague as “leadership skills.” Instead, they hypothesized that people see “physical formidability” as a measure of the ability to perform specific leadership roles. Sure enough, the experiments revealed that the more muscular men were rated as more likely to enforce rules and norms within a group and to represent that group effectively in encounters with other groups.
I’m sure this is mostly a problem for women, too.