The long and the short of men's anatomical angst

N A world-first exploration, Marika Tiggemann has charted the anatomical angst of a generation of young men. It ranges from physique, height and hair loss to the big one - penis size. In the fraught geography of male body image, shoulder hair is a trouble spot while chest muscles are an outright war zone.

"People thought this was only a women's issue," Professor Tiggemann, from Flinders University, said. Previous studies had underestimated men's dissatisfaction with their appearance because they assumed men would be unhappy about the same things as women: weight and body proportions.

The new study instead had used open-ended interviews to determine men's concerns and then made those the basis of a more formal survey, pinpointing their relative contribution to men's overall feelings about their body.

"Clearly it is not a small sub-group of pathologically narcissistic men who experience dissatisfaction with these body parts, but a substantial proportion," said Professor Tiggemann, whose study of 200 young heterosexual men found two-thirds wished they had less back or buttock hair and a bigger penis, while 82 per cent wished they were more muscular.

It had become so common for men to worry about their biceps, pectorals and six-pack that such concerns could now be considered normal - just as virtually all women worried about their weight, Professor Tiggemann said. But like women who risk eating disorders from extreme dieting, men's muscle concerns could also lead to serious health problems, such as steroid abuse or injury.

The amount and distribution of hair on the face and body were clearly important to men, said Professor Tiggemann, whose study is published in the Journal Of Health Psychology. But there were contradictions - such as the trend of shaving the entire head to conceal partial baldness, and the shift towards smooth male torsos in advertising, a reversal of the traditional association between male body hair and virility.

Other evidence - the arrival of men's salons and skin products and a reported increase in men undergoing cosmetic surgery - suggested male body worries were increasing, Professor Tiggemann said, and this in turn might be attributable to social change. In the past, she said, it could have been that appearance "didn't matter very much because what mattered was the amount of money you made, the job you had … Some of this is a function of the male role being less clear." A beefy body might be "a way of asserting [masculinity] again".

LNK

The long and the short of men's anatomical angst

The long and the short of men's anatomical angst

Anarcho-Capitalist Non-Miscellaneous

AnCaps With FreeStyle Miscellaneous