Male body dysmorphia is a modern epidemic that's only worsening
If you’ve ever been trapped in a conversation about “dream dinner party guests”, you’ll know the curious schadenfreude of watching people work out which aspects of their personality they want to showcase. The last time it happened to me, someone picked Jason Momoa and Channing Tatum for “eye candy”, alongside – who else? – Martin Luther King Jr. While we’ll perhaps never know Aquaman’s views on the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the conversation did highlight our society’s continued deference to jacked, hyper-masculine bodies.
Tatum himself was in the news earlier this year for speaking up about his own physique, specifically in the Magic Mike films. Appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show, the actor deflected praise for a topless picture from that era, explaining that the routine was “unhealthy” and that it had required starvation to achieve his look. Last week, social media was once again obsessing over Zac Efron’s body as an image leaked of him filming a new role in a wrestling movie. This is a man, you may recall, who has been open about his struggles with body image, diet, and taking so many diuretics to get into shape for Baywatch (2017) that he fell into “a pretty bad depression” and suffered from insomnia. If the tide is finally beginning to turn in how we talk about the societal expectations put on men’s bodies, it’s long overdue.
Historically, of course, the stereotypical image associated with eating disorders and body dysmorphia has been of a painfully thin young woman – and with good reason. Women’s bodies have been scrutinised, criticised and idealised by men for millennia, a power dynamic that has accelerated over the last century with the rise of TV and film, supermodels, Instagram – developments that ushered in a cavalcade of highly edited and stylised images, framed by and for the male gaze. It is only to be expected, then, that data and studies around the subject have typically focused on women.
In 2022, it’s harder to make that case. A study last year found that the majority of men (54 per cent) displayed signs of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), compared to 49 per cent of women. If those numbers seem startling, based on the visibility of body image case studies and campaigns both online and offline today, one of the main factors will come as no surprise: too many men are simply not talking about it. Worse still, in some cases they aren’t even recognising that their obsessive thoughts about their own weight and body image may have spiralled into dysmorphia.
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