Males insecure over muscle mass

For decades, women have had insecurities about their weight. Those insecurities have helped make the diet industry a $40 billion-a-year enterprise. Men and boys are now more frequently dealing with body image insecurities of their own, researchers say.

Dr. Harrison Pope Jr., author of “The Adonis Complex” (Free Press, $25), says that while women and girls set unattainable goals of thinness, men and boys see bigger — specifically more muscular — as better.

In one study, Pope and his colleagues gave American and European college men a computer test that allowed them to manipulate the amount of muscle on a male image. When asked to select a body that women preferred, they typically chose a body with 20 or 30 pounds more muscle than an average man.

Women, as well as men in Taiwan and Kenya, were given the same test but chose a normal male body without the extra muscle.

There are many theories as to how this body distortion came about. The most commonly cited one is that images of chiseled men in the media have warped men’s idea of what’s normal. Even the toys that today’s children play with are more buff than they used to be.

In the 1960s, the action figure GI Joe had a flat but not chiseled stomach. Today he has biceps the size of his head and six-pack abs. If the modern-day GI Joe were a real person, Pope says, he’d have larger biceps than any bodybuilder in history. The same trend held true for other action figures Pope studied.

In another study, he found that the proportion of partially undressed men in advertisements in the magazines Cosmopolitan and Glamour has increased from less than 10 percent in the 1950s to nearly 30 percent in the 1990s. The effects of this media barrage of muscled men are just now being examined.

In a study published earlier this year, researchers at the University of Central Florida took a group of 160 male college students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a game show that had commercials that featured men wearing business or casual clothes, while the other group watched the same game show with commercials featuring muscular men in ads for products such as deodorant and cologne.

Those watching the commercials with the muscular, bare-chested men later reported feeling more depressed and less satisfied with their muscles, leading the researchers to conclude that today’s “culture of muscularity” may be leading men to unhealthy and extreme exercise and, not surprisingly, steroid use.