ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, there has been a plethora of research studying women ’ s body image. However, during the same time period, researchers focused very little energy studying men ’ s body image. Several relatively robust and consistent factors combined to create this knowledge gap. First, researchers had shown that, compared with women, men were much less concerned or dissatisfied with their bodies. 1 Second, men tended not to be as concerned as women with their degree of body fat and, even though they were more likely than women to be overweight, 2 they were less likely to be dieting to lose weight. Third, men were much less likely than women to experience clinical eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, men representing approximately 5 – 15 % of anorexics and 0.4 – 20 % of bulimics. 3 These types of sex differences led many researchers and clinicians to assume that men are relatively happy with their bodies and do not have significant body image concerns. 1
However, what this generation of researchers failed to address was that the social standard of attractiveness for men ’ s bodies is qualitatively different from the social standard for women ’ s bodies. That is, while the female standard is focused on a thin ideal, the male standard is focused on a muscular ideal: what Mishkind et al. described as the muscular mesomorphic shape. 4 In other words, Western society does not want its men to be small and thin, it wants them to be big and muscular.
