I stopped reading fashion and tabloid magazines a long time ago. Mostly because I found that they made me feel worse about myself rather than better. I have spoken to many women whose experience is similar to mine. In fact, many studies have shown that women’s self-esteem goes down after reading fashion magazines. But what about men?
A recent article suggested that men suffer from body image issues after reading magazines just like women do. The study took a group of undergraduate males and had them look at magazines that featured highly sexualized women (i.e. Maxim). Interestingly enough, these men reported feeling more self-conscious after reading the magazines than before they picked them up. Why would this be?
“This was surprising because if you look at the cover of these magazines, they are mainly images of women,” Aubrey said. “We wondered why magazines that were dominated by sexual images of women were having an effect on men’s feelings about their own bodies.”
She reported that the main reason men feel self-conscious after reading a magazine filled with images of sexualized women is that they feel they have to live up to the same level of attractiveness in order to be worthy of the women they see in the magazines.
“Men make the inference that in order to be sexual and romantic with women of similar caliber that they see in Maxim magazine, they also need to be attractive,” said lead researcher Jennifer Aubrey of the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia.”
This was very interesting to me because I have never really thought that men had it as bad as we women do when it comes to body image. And maybe on some level that’s true, but I think it’s probably more accurate to infer that we have our own sets of issues when it comes to being self-conscious about our looks; and often times, we don’t hear much from the male side of things.
Two years sfter completing the Beautiful Women Project our “brother”, The Genuine Men Project (www.thegenuinemen.com), was born. Thirty five men from all walks of life shared with me their life stories, let me into the inner sanctum of men’s lives. Men do have the same insecurities and body image issues as women, the difference is they are not given the same kind of attention as women’s issues. Slowly, this is beginning to change as men speak more openly and freely about their experiences, obstacles, struggles, and strengths. We can all learn from teh stories of men.
I think men share this struggle with us too. A lot of men wouldn’t get this blogg like a lot of women don’t. But a couple of my guy friends were trying to bet on who could look like 300 the fastest. And it might have all been fun and games but in the end what they had in mind was really unhealthy. It is all the same struggle that is to “look better”. Whatever that means.