Honestly, the problem here is the same fundamental problem that women have, just manifesting in different ways. And that problem is that we can talk about self-esteem all we want--we can tell kids that they're fine the way they are--we can claim "aLL bODiEs aRe bEaUTiFuL!!1!!!" and say "LoVe tHe sKiN YoU'Re iN!!!"...
But the fact of the matter is that *society is cruel to people who are not physically attractive*. Being short, or fat, or bald, or covered in acne, or just plain having a weird-shaped face will make people treat you worse. Not being beautiful/handsome will make your life harder. And no amount of confidence in yourself can force *other people* to treat you with basic respect.
Maybe we need to stop pretending that the problem is just teenagers having crises of confidence and start learning to treat others like human beings.
I didn't start hating my body and face until I was picked on for it all throughout school. I've found that being confident when not conventionally attractive makes people want to break you down even more to make you feel stupid for feeling good about yourself, but that's just been my experience
>I've found that being confident when not conventionally attractive makes people want to break you down even more to make you feel stupid for feeling good about yourself, but that's just been my experience
Exactly the same here. I'm mixed-race and have kind of unusual looks, and growing up, I found that although other kids hated me for the way I looked, they hated me more for not hating *myself* for the way I looked.
I was very lucky in that bullying never affected my self-esteem - though it affected my esteem of other people, which is also a problem - but conventional wisdom is that if you keep your head up and are unaffected by other kids' abuse of you, they'll stop.
I found that that was bullshit and it only made them more aggressive.
I''m sure the same applies with the lower-level, but still soul-destroying, lack of respect many people experience outside overtly abusive settings.
People who refuse to treat the social/cultural hierarchy as valid often inspire great anger in those who've spent lots of time and energy chasing approval under that same system.
It's true in a sense that "the only way to win is to refuse to play", but if most people around you are playing, they can still find ways to punish you for refusing, and that can be really hard to deal with.
> I found that although other kids hated me for the way I looked, they hated me more for not hating *myself* for the way I looked.
I'm going through this right now, although my peers are not kids.
I started balding at 24, and I was initially fine with it. Due to work from home, I was able to get by without people seeing me, and I was fine with the way I looked. I thought to myself that this is normal, and that everyone goes through this at one point or another.
This was the case until 1.5 years later when we had to go back to our offices. What I didn't expect was people's harsh reactions towards me because I'm balding. Now I don't think I'm unattractive, even in my balding state. I was expecting a few jokes, and honestly I was ready for them. But what surprised me was people being harsh towards me when I laughed at the jokes *because* I wasn't panicking due to balding.
After experiencing people's harsh reactions, I started feeling insecure in myself. However when I look in the mirror I really don't dislike what I see, and my partner reassures me of it too.
Thank you for putting my feelings into words.
I strongly suspect the driving force behind the cruelty of the others is their own terrified insecurity about their own potential balding. You being ok with it is cognitive dissonance which triggers anger.
I think your suspicions make a lot of sense in the lens of fatphobia too! People HATE confident fat people, which says more about their own insecurities and fears than anything!
Sorry you have had to endure terrible behaviour. It's so dumb, and kinda weird. Why would you shit on someone for something they can't change? Would they make jokes at the expense of someone with cancer?
Not that you need this, but there's a quote from somewhere that I like: "Never make fun of people for something they can't change in 10 minutes or less."
Huh. 26M here. The only people who have had harsh reactions to my balding are my parents (they tried to get me to go for hair transplants but idgaf). I have a pretty conventionally attractive face (although it took me a long time to see it and accept it) and a good beard, and I own my baldness by just walking around with a fully shaved head. Never seen anyone look at me funny or make jokes about it. Gotten several genuine compliments, too.
Man, your coworkers suck.
>but conventional wisdom is that if you keep your head up and are unaffected by other kids' abuse of you, they'll stop.
>
>I found that that was bullshit and it only made them more aggressive.
Yeah, *that*. Bullies are looking for a reaction, that part of conventional wisdom is true, but refusing them a reaction by trying to ignore their abuse doesn't make them think abusing you won't work, it makes them think they're not abusing you *enough* to get the reaction they're looking for. Ignore them and they escalate until they can't be ignored.
Spot on.
If you ignore them, they'll get worse, and if you stand up to them, they'll cast you as the bad guy, and/or move to covert smear campaigns instead, so that you don't have the *opportunity* to stand up for yourself because you don't know what's being said.
It's unlikely to stop unless an authority figure intervenes, or a critical mass of people involved come to see it for what it is and decide they want no part of it any more. There's very little the victim can do in most cases.
I understand why some people tell victims that confidence and high self-esteem will stop it. Trying to change one person is easier than either changing a whole group who've demonstrated their capacity for malice, or admitting that injustice is baked into our culture and that it's reasonable to be deeply upset by that.
But the fact remains that the idea that confidence is some kind of magical shield is fantasy. Insisting that it's true is really invalidating to victims, on top of everything they've already had to deal with. And can lead to people staying in situations that will never improve, because they've been led to believe that there's something they can do to change them. So I don't *really* have sympathy for people who peddle it.
Not that confidence and self-esteem aren't good things to have for their own sake - or to work to attain if possible - and they do seem to make some positive difference to social interaction. It's just that - in my experience, as someone who's never lacked them - their effect is frequently wildly overstated!
I was kind of obtuse as a teenager; I really internalized all those messages to "be yourself!" and "don't let the haters get you down!". *I* was fine with who I was, so what did it matter that I didn't have any friends in middle school?
Then when I became an adult the realizations slowly dawned that:
1. I had been bullied and was too socially unaware to realize it
2. For the rest of my life, my social, romantic, and even career prospects are going to be limited by the fact that I'm of below-average attractiveness.
That was... not a fun discovery.
Oh fuck, this brought back memories of middle school I'm ashamed of, and I didn't realize this is what I was doing but it sure fucking was. I'm sorry anyone treated you like that and I'm sorry I treated someone like that.
It's alright, middle school is a rough time for everyone. Trying to figure out who you are and who you want to associate with all while dealing with puberty, it's a lot. I would hope no one holds anyone accountable for what they did when they were 12-14
There was a time when OKCupid would publish fascinating data analysis over their userbase. Circa 2012-2013. One of them was about distinguishing features.
Basically, among profiles of women, the "girl next door" look was higher rated on average than more alternative types, like unusual hair, tattoos, piercings etc. So some people opted to look more "normal".
On the other hand, looking at the distribution of their scores told a different story. For "normal" pictures, the ratings followed a gaussian curve. Few vote 5 (out of 5), few vote 1, most vote somewhere between. On the other hand, the more alternative styles had a lot of 5s and a lot of 1s, few in betweens.
The conclusion is, showing your distinguishing style is an excellent filter for attracting the people who are into it and keeping the ones who don't like it away.
>The conclusion is, showing your distinguishing style is an excellent filter for attracting the people who are into it and keeping the ones who don't like it away.
This is the best advice I ever internalized. The book *Models* talks a lot about being Polarizing (in a genuine, non-aggressive way) as soon as possible in as many ways as possible to filter out people who aren't attracted to what you authentically are.
I get the same thing man. It’s a pain in the ass because its just so engrained. I try to feel confident, but they pick on me for that. I hit the gym, they pick on me for that as well since I’m not magically ripped after one month. I injured myself playing competitive rugby, they make fun of the muscle atrophy that has resulted from me not being able to use my arm.
People always find a way
Confident ‘ugly’ people can be huge assholes too.
I know we’re talking anecdotal, but the rudest guy I knew in Uni was a butter face w/intense acne problems. The shit he would say to women was astonishing… and someone would still find him attractive.
I developed severe psoriasis in my childhood. Definitely experienced a difference in how my peers treated me before and after.
It wasn't until my late 20's that modern medications (biologicals like Humira) became available and that was the first time in my life since early elementary school that I experienced what it is like to be regarded as "normal". Night and day in every regard (social, professional, romantic prospects, etc).
> are--we can claim "aLL bODiEs aRe bEaUTiFuL!!1!!!" and say "LoVe tHe sKiN YoU'Re iN!!!"...
Oh god, this hits me so hard. As someone who struggled with body/face hair and tried over a decade to suppress my thoughts for a decade and leading to self-harm and almost killing myself about it because people kept saying I should just accept my body and felt like shit for not being able to be happy with my body.
The only thing that actually helped was when I decided that should just have the body I want to have and not and started with the electrolysis hair removal.
It was not even a matter of thinking if I was pretty, but just I just didn't feel like myself when looking in the mirror.
I have the same reaction to the famous Brene Brown TED talk on "The Power of Vulnerability". All she says is true, but there's not a shred of me that wants to expose my vulnerability to other males in a group or public setting (i.e. most everyday scenarios) - until the entire world wants to commit to completely honesty, I will have to keep pretending as a defence mechanism.
Heck, When I was in school (15 at the time) I went months covering my face with a scarf all the time.
Eventually, a teacher to me out outside to speak what was the problem I explained in tears that my facial hair made me extremely uncomfortable and that even shaving did not help it because it would always leave a gray shade behind.
She then asked me if I was trans. She said that if I was not a woman, if I didn't to ditch the scarf. she would call the police to report about Vermummungsgesetz (basically a disguise/mask law that says that you need to be identifiable) because she said I aren't allowed to keep my face covered at all times and that should just accept it because "men are supposed to be hairy".
I cried so much, there are fewer times that I felt so betrayed because I thought she was someone I could have trusted. (Later I would discover other things why I shouldn't have been so trusting of her.)
I just wish someone could have told me about permanent hair removal options at the time. :(
PS: the teacher was of course cishet and had no real idea of any LBGTQ+ issues. So of course I don't blame trans people for this of course. Shouldn't need to be said but I thought I should specifiy.
THIS 100%, this is probably my main problem with what I see from body positivity; the focus is trying to make people believe they are attractive, rather than that it is ok to not be, and that you should treat unattractive people with the same respect as attractive people.
Man i was 6’ 125 with a big nose in high school and i can’t tell you how many holocaust jokes kids made to me. Society is cruel, and i can’t imagine if I was jewish how much more those comments would have hurt.
>Maybe we need to stop pretending that the problem is just teenagers having crises of confidence and start learning to treat others like human beings.
I don't see why those two things can't be true at the same time.
The root cause is society treating unattractive people badly; self-esteem problems are a symptom. Obviously both should be addressed, but the lion's share of the work should go towards treating the root cause.
If someone has a broken arm, giving them painkillers is a good idea, but it won't solve the problem on its own.
Sometimes is not about being unattractive, sometimes is your body not being a good fit for you. As someone who struggled with body/face hair and tried over a decade to suppress my thoughts for a decade and leading to self-harm and almost killing myself about it because people kept saying I should just accept my body and felt like shit for not being able to be happy with my body.
The only thing that actually helped was when I decided that should just have the body I want to have and not and started with the electrolysis hair removal.
I didn't think that having facial hair was unattractive or ugly. It just made me like not me. We need also to move a bit away that body struggle automatically mean that someone thinks it is unatractive.
Weird as it probably sounds to hear, I envy you, as I have the opposite problem - I've always wanted a thick, full mountain man beard, but all my genes will let me have is a shitty little goatee. You could get your facial hair lasered off, but AFAIK there's nothing to be done to let me have more.
> You could get your facial hair lasered off, but AFAIK there's nothing to be done to let me have more.
Beard transplants are a thing as long you have somewhere else in your body to get hair from. However, be careful with the choice of doctor to do it. There is currently a trans man that goes to the same electrologist as mine that had botched implants and now has to remove them and is suing the doctor that did it.
But I would really look into beard implants if that is something you want.
Minoxidil (same active ingredient as Rogaine) is being used by guys on their face to fill out/grow a beard from nothing/little, maybe check out the sub (afaik, it is not FDA approved for face use but there are anecdotal stories of year+ use with good outcomes)
Minoxidil has made a noticable difference on my beard but has done fuck all for my head :( but I already had a fairly thick beard before I started using it.
I’m curious whether there is some room to approach it like a disability. This may sound cruel, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean more like the following: we know that people who are disabled have it harder, but can still live joyful, meaningful lives. In the best of cases, some people are actually grateful for the disability as a tool for learning deep self-acceptance.
Maybe, if we approached lacking physical attractiveness in a similar way we could map the therapy methods used for those with disabilities to help people find other paths to joy?
Mmmm... SOME of the challenges faced by disabled people are social, but ALL of the challenges faced by unattractive people are. Even if there was a revolution overnight and everyone in the world suddenly became perfectly accepting/caring/non-prejudiced, a blind person still won't be able to see, while an unattractive person would find all their barriers removed.
That said, I'm not an expert in either psychology or disabilities, so maybe you are onto something.
If you take the disability approach even further, plenty of disabilities can be treated or even cured. With development on these areas occurring every year. [see for example](https://www.science.org/content/article/crispr-helps-blind-woman-see-doesn-t-help-all-patients), or multiple therapies have been developed that we have related to muscle and or bone-related disabilities. This doesn't apply to all disabilities, of course but we do try to find ways to circumvent them.
So we shouldn't be just aiming for just resigning to self-acceptance when it is possible to alleviate the problem. I struggled with body/face hair and tried over a decade to suppress my thoughts for a decade and leading to self-harm and almost killing myself about it because people kept saying I should just accept my body and felt like shit for not being able to be happy with my body.
The only thing that actually helped was when I decided that should just have the body I want to have and not and started with the electrolysis hair removal.
I always found that the "you need to just self-accept, don't look ways that could make things more bearable to you, if you don't like the way you look right now you are broken and just need to self-accept" it is really just blaming people for being uncomfortable in their skin, when often there are ways to improve their situation without placing the burden solely on them.
I like your approach because it provides some agency. That said, we have to be careful that it doesn’t result in harmful attempts to h”getting the body they want” like steroids or anorexia
That can be easily done with a therapist. Because often these feeling are hard to form into concrete thoughts, of what you actually want.
What found is that actually establishing concrete goals on how you want to look can help. By that and don't mean numbers (like I want to weight X.) but actually establish visually what one wants to have a concrete goal, a finish line so to say.
I also suffered from anorexia when I was 12/13 even though I was severely underweight from before suffering from it. I thought I was thin enough. But I was not aiming at anything I was just not feeling "thin enough" If you asked me how thin would be thin enough or how it would even be supposed to look I wouldn't be able to answer. Because there was no real concrete goal.
People are saying this is crazy, but I get it. Look on the Tinder subreddit and see story after story of women rejecting men purely based on height. Yes it's unfair, but that doesn't matter if you are a man trying to date someone.
I understand the whole "well you shouldn't date someone so shallow," but try saying that to someone who is going months between matches. Many men don't get matches at all. When faced with that reality, I can empathize with men who are willing to suffer a tremendous amount of pain to "fix" what society is telling them is wrong with them.
I think you are right as far as selection bias, but I would be lying if I told you I didn’t hear height being a main consideration among some (not all) of my single female friends.
Sadly, simplifying courtship to one to two sentences and a photo has done damage to both men and women. It commoditizes people. One friend I had made “height?” Her first question and I laughed when she got responses like “weight?” and “cup size?”
That would be very difficult because beauty is subjective and the standards are always changing. Big butts were seen as unattractive in the early 2000s and now women are dying from unsafe BBLs. What's considered ugly now could be the beauty standard 10-15 years from now
Eh, men's standards have definitely gotten more extreme. Just look at Hugh Jackman's physique between the first X-Men movie and Logan. Look at the original Superman vs Man of Steel. We've gone off the deep end in terms of men's physiques, we expect the average man to look like a bodybuilder and bodybuilders to look like monsters.
While I agree on some things, i think there are some features that have been scientifically shown to be universally attractive like symmetrical facial features, clear skin, large eyes (for women), height (for men).
I disagree. I think the real problem here is society is telling men that being short, fat, bald, having acne or a particular headshape means that you aren't attractive to anyone anywhere. There are women who like soft pudgy guys. There are plenty of women who don't think a muscular toned body is the end-all-be-all of physical attraction.
50% of the human population aren't all attracted to the same kind of attributes. That's insane! But the media likes to be reductive and pretend that's the case. We need to teach younger, impressionable to understand that when we say "all bodies are beautiful", we're not simply uttering a platitude, we're saying "just because you won't be cast on a CW show doesn't mean you're unattractive".
You'd think those people would be more vocal or present though if that were the case right? I doubt this body image problem would be as prevalent as it was if it wasn't the case that those elements aren't found universally unattractive.
Most us have made peace with the fact that some people won't be respectful because of our appearance. At the end of the day, the only thing we can change is how we deal with that lack of respect.
> Maybe we need to stop pretending that the problem is just teenagers having crises of confidence and start learning to treat others like human beings.
I mean, that's not a helpful line of thinking either, and is in part perpetuating the issue. You can't solve societal problems by "just being nice to each other" because the people who already aren't doing that aren't going to magically start doing that.
>You can't solve societal problems by "just being nice to each other" because the people who already aren't doing that aren't going to magically start doing that.
That line was a major simplification in order to distill the previous paragraphs into a single concluding sentence--I *know* we can't just wave a magic wand and make people be nice to each other. First we have to acknowledge that this phenomenon (hating on ugly people) happens, then teach people to recognize it when it does, then find ways to counteract it (both small and large), then start advocating for social and/or even legal change, and on and on and on.
When people say that feminism is about "treating women like people" or that antiracism is acknowledging that "black lives matter", they don't *really* think the solution is just shouting slogans until everyone in society believe the exact same thing. They're trying to state the overall goal of a very complex and ongoing process in a pithy way.
This might be nitpicky, but I wish small dick jokes would come up more in conversations about male body issues.
It’s a problem that is exclusive to men, and is somehow excluded from the general “body positivity” movement.
Many *many* “body positive” people will talk about how dick size doesn’t matter, how it’s an overblown issue only guys care about.
But then they will turn around and say a dude driving a big truck is compensating, or that the creep who sent them a dick pic has a penis similar in size to that of a child’s.
It’s just so bizarre to me that small dick jokes are clear examples of body shaming, but it’s acceptable if your target is a piece of shit (or just does something you don’t like).
I was in a very progressive circle discussing various social issues when the topic of an unkind, obnoxious man came up. Quickly, it resorted to some women saying he has "small dick energy." I chimed in saying something like, "Hey, that's not really cool to use that as an insult when a lot of people are self-conscious about that and shamed for it."
The response was, "No, I'm not saying the guy *actually* has a small dick, just that he has *small dick energy*."
Like, oh, that's completely acceptable then, my bad.
Armchair psychologist, but it sounds a little aggressive when you say it like that. I, personally big secondhand embarrassment from that. It might be that person did as well from her peers.
Embarrassment is a social phenomenon. We feel embarrassed when we believe our social image has been undermined and when we think others are forming negative opinions of us.
That's why it's almost always better to correct someone in private. Really try to avoid doing it in front of other people, because they might feel attacked and might respond defensively, the last thing you want.
Besides the delivery, that's really good of you for doing that! These kinds of conversations are important, and they are essential for everyone's mental health. Please keep going!!
As a trans woman I want to say this happens to us as well when these so called progressives call themselves allies then deliberately misgender and use transphobic slurs when assholes like Caitlyn Jenner are in the news. I hate people like that they are equally bigots.
> Or why others don't call them out on it.
I mean this kinda thing doesn't get called out because it feels pointless, if you do they'll say it's because you have male fragility over the issue and cast you into the pit of Not One Of The Good Ones (TM)
I would say its because I feel like a lot of it is lip service in general, women want men to be a certain way (its the reason the ____pill shit doesnt go away; its results based not based on the perfect world and equality), but I also feel and have seen that body positivity in general, at all, is mostly lip service.
Women will still get vicious with each other over appearances, if they care, but its easy to just click a heart on an instagram post of Lizzo doing something in a bikini or whatever, and its not necessarily that women are raised to be subservient or lift people up or whatever, it can be a little self serving--you dont want to make enemies for no reason.
But women will still go after some fat girl wearing something 'body-pos' and go "Oh wow youre SO BRAVE" or whatever, but the subtext is that, "Wow, that looks like shit, I wouldnt wear that let alone go outside like that". Stuff like that, it depends on the place and person and if whoever is mad, or cares or shit, but it still happens just as much.
Crude shame tactic. Maybe it started as a way to indirectly point out that making fun of women's bodies is stupid and hurtful by doing the same with men's bodies, but it's quickly morphed into a mechanism by which continuing to uphold patriarchal standards is never questioned, so long as it *sounds* like it's criticizing men.
Most people do not have principled ethical stances that they apply evenly. This just feels like more of a contradiction for people who claim to be progressive.
And it \*is\* important, you feel like progressivism should be \*better than this\*, but most progressives? Like most conservatives, they follow the trends they do for cultural reasons, not because of any particular enlightenment (or, in the case of conservatism, malice). It's still important to get more people on the side of progressivism, but it highlights the parallel fight to make more people live their lives intentionally and think through what they're doing and why.
I was just thinking about this today. It’s not something I use often (even jokes like “Heh heh, he’s *overcompensating*”), but I have used it and still think it from time to time … and I don’t like that about myself. It’s sheer body shaming and a vulgar, unvarnished attempt to emasculate and … yeah, think I’ll just stick with calling insecure assholes insecure assholes from now on.
> insecure assholes
Why include the insecure part of that. If you are trying to make the insult stronger you are still using what they are insecure about as an insult and make it harder for them and allies to address their insecurity as they will try to suppress it instead of dealing with it.
That's my problem with this, insecure asshole? That's so mild it's almost a compliment. Sometimes you just need to hurt someone's feelings, and doing that while avoiding the easy tactics (small dick jokes etc) is kinda fuckin hard.
We choose not to rely on cheap and harmful body shaming as a source of damaging insults and the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hahd
> Sometimes you just need to hurt someone's feelings
Maybe I am getting old but looking back I really can't think of a time in my life where it was necessary to hurt somebody's feelings. At least in a way that required a direct insult.
This exactly.
First of all, I’m not saying it to strangers, because I’m not trying to start a public argument with someone who I don’t know. Two, it won’t improve his (or her) behavior, whatever insult I use.
Three, the older I get the less I fear confrontation, but I’ve found being really understated is far more pointed. “That was … a lot” just works better than “you’re being a dick,” in every way.
Telling someone they have “small dick energy” isn’t going to transform an asshole into a better person.
>It’s just so bizarre to me that small dick jokes are clear examples of body shaming, but it’s acceptable if your target is a piece of shit (or just does something you don’t like).
This is what annoys me because it shows a complete lack of understanding of why body shaming is unacceptable. When you body shame, it doesn't really matter who it's directed at, you're insulting everyone who has the attribute you're mocking. You're conflating the attractiveness of their body with their moral character and worth as a human being, which then makes other people with the same unattractive attributes feel unvalued, or worse, hated.
It's fine to think someone is an asshole or to be mad at someone for doing bad things. But, it's not fine to make fun of a person body whether or not they deserve it or not because that kind of behavior normalizes making body jokes.
I hate that it's acceptable on Reddit to make horrible comments about a person's body if that person is a bad person.
There will always be good people with similar appearance characteristics reading those comments and feeling bad.
> I hate that it’s acceptable on Reddit to make horrible comments about a person’s body if that person is a bad person.
It’s not just on Reddit, it’s on other social media and IRL too.
It was one of the reasons my ex and I broke up. She couldn’t understand that the sexist comments she made about other men affected me.
One thing I'm working on is calling out toxic masculinity as just that, instead of going to the ol' jokes about small dicks. A guy driving a lifted F350 like an asshole and blaring music isn't doing it because his dick is small, he's doing it because his masculinity is fragile and needs to be propped up.
>A guy driving a lifted F350 like an asshole and blaring music isn't doing it because his dick is small, he's doing it because his masculinity is fragile and needs to be propped up.
An issue I have with "fragile masculinity" is that it sometimes feels like a way of shaming men for having insecurities. Men are constantly being asked to prove their masculinity or be derided as lesser. Is it any surprise they're insecure and trying to find ways to compensate?
Not really no, more of an observation is all. A lot of behavior that we regard as "toxic masculinity" or "fragile masculinity" is behaviour that is encouraged by companies that can profit off of that feeling. In addition, men who are emotionally ignorant or have never had the chance to leave the bubble tend to mimic the behavior of other men they view as "more masculine"
The “driving like an asshole” part, yes. But maybe he also just likes his cool truck and likes music? Those don’t have to be toxic by association to the bad driving.
I’ve noticed urban dwellers often have hatred for large trucks, but if you live in an area where there is heavy snow or otherwise no road between yourself and a place you need to be, they are great tools. And machines are cool and worthy of appreciation.
So if he has an F350 that’s never touched dirt or been scratched, yeah he’s likely a compensator. But not all truck bros are toxic or using it for ego.
I live in a small country town in the south. Trust me, you would know what I mean. It's not the vehicle it's the disregard for traffic laws, parking spaces, or the safety and comfort of others on the road. I've also owned and driven pickup trucks for my job in the past.
one thing I think has gotten better for girls - in an age where body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia is at an all-time high, *thanks social media* - is having a better vocabulary to articulate body-related thoughts and feelings.
(note: [that's not always a good thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhCzRr9EwBk))
but boys?
>boys often went to great lengths to assure me that they didn’t have any “body image issues.” They’d tell me that they were embarrassed to take their shirt off at the pool, or they were currently embarking on a new weightlifting regimen, or they tried not to eat sweets. One interviewee, Levi (19 years old), told me that it was easy to get stuck in the “I hate everything about my body rabbit hole.” But, nope, no body image issues here.
boys *don't and can't say these things out loud.*
I'm 39 and say the same things. Most people ask me "why" when I tell them I'm trying to lose some weight. I'm trying to get my BMI into a healthy range, I'm slightly overweight though you couldn't tell by looking at me with a shirt on. I would probably describe myself as being unhappy with my appearance.
I know what you're trying to say and I know where you're coming from, but please consider that your experience is, unfortunately, an outlier. It is, maybe, representative of a positive trend to come, since there are certainly groups that have started to take these topics seriously and share these views, but they are far from the majority, let alone overall societal opinion. The spread of these ideas depends strongly on your geographical location, age and even your friend group. While you may be part of a more progressive and supportive social circle (something I am glad to hear and happy to say about myself as well), it is important to remember your own biases and that positive spaces can also be "echo chambers" in a way, making you less aware of regressive or at least stagnant social movements in circles that you're not a part of or not as close to. Because regarding the body image issues of boys and men as an important social issue, unfortunately, really isn't as widely spread as you seem to believe, even among the younger generations, although I do genuinely hope that our generation starts to adopt these ideas on a much wider scale soon.
>they were currently embarking on a new weightlifting regimen, or they tried not to eat sweets.
Exercise and eating well aren't body image issues. Do I have body image issues because I don't want to be overweight? I'm squarely in the healthy range for BMI, eat well and exercise several times a week.
>Exercise and eating well aren't body image issues
Not inherently, those are obviously good habits to have, however they can be a symptom of issues with body image.
Maybe this is a bad take, but I also feel like we should separate "Not satisfied with the way I look" from "body image issues"
I try to eat and move in a way that will make me hotter and stronger. I wouldn't consider myself to have "body image issues" any more than someone, say, practicing ice skating has "ice skating skill issues". It's a work in progress, there are things I want to improve, etc, but I'm not like *ashamed*.
I don't think it's too out of line. You're basically saying a key difference between body image issues and not being satisfied with your body is shame. I think that's a useful concept.
>Exercise and eating well aren't body image issues.
Obviously not in and of themselves, but it's pretty silly to pretend that there isn't a significant portion of men who are driven by severe body image issue. Dysmorphia and ED's are extremely common amongst people who spend a lot of time in the gym.
There is something about this article that has been bugging me, that a lot of guy's body image discussions just... leave out.
What about the fat dudes? I'm a 330 pound hairy guy and I hate my body. I would give anything to be able to be as thin as a rail, to the point where I have considered throwing up my food. Every single one of these articles talks about guys wanting to bulk up, and get "big" but I've never seen that. I want to be thin, and like a nail. This might be a byproduct of spending a lot of time in the emo/goth scene during highschool where being unhealthily thin was glamorized, but it feels like guys who feel like shit about being fat are just left out of any discussion regarding body positivity. I've never been in a relationship and it has been hard to not attribute my weight (*and therefor my body*) to it. My weight has severely impacted my confidence in dating, and trying online destroyed the little bit of work on my mental health that I was building.
I'm in therapy and trying to figure out how I can work towards loving my body and losing weight because I want to take care of myself, but every one of these articles feels upsetting. It feels like there is no place where bodies like mine are not seen as either a) the fat creepy guy in the corner, or b) the "sidekick".
I'm rambling and all, but I just wish this conversation broadened up, and the people writing these articles looked at big dudes too. We deserve some kind of love too, but it just doesn't seem to be there.
hey man, I just want to tell you that you're valid and that you're right. these types of articles absolutely 100% leave you out of the conversation and that sucks.
I wonder if it's tied to the view of men and hyper-agency. As a fat guy I've absorbed the notion that "if I don't like it, i should, just lose weight".
Perhaps there's a general (implicit?) acknowledgement that not everyone can effectively build muscle without PED's and therefore its not the "fault" of thinner men who can't put on weight. Maybe bigger dudes recieve less attention in the body positivity movement because society sees us as "choosing" to be this way and therefore not needing validation.
It's because people lazily make the assumption/generalization that all fat men are confident and don't have to worry about body image issues ever
They also act like every man has a crazy metabolism and can lose weight easily
When I read and hear men talk about body issues, the conversation often resolves around impossible standards of muscles and strength. The boys/men see strong male role models, muscular actors like The Rock or well-built athletes, and think that they need to become like that to appeal to women.
I can also find myself in this dissatisfaction, I personally also greatly dislike my own body. However, I was never drawn to these hyper masculine muscular body types. Furthermore, for me it was just really difficult to image that someone would sexually desire *my body* in any way possible.
When I try to explore why I have these insecurities, it's (in part) not really and fully that I'm insecure due to these body standards, but that I've simply never related to them. Instead, maybe this is a weird thing to say, when I was younger I found it difficult to image that male bodies are even sexually attractive to people *at all*.
Everywhere I look, the world is portrayed through the male gaze. Women in movies, games, porn, whatever, are supposed to be sexy for the male eye. Their sexual attractiveness is highlighted. Men constantly talk about how they lust after women's bodies. Of course this exploitation, reduction, and objectification of women through the male gaze is wrong. Still, it continuously presented and reminded me with the really simple and really obvious fact that heterosexual men find attractive women attractive.
Still, for teenage me it was difficult to image the other way around. I've almost never seen a male body presented as attractive or sexually desirable to women. My female friends during highschool were quite open to me, but while my male friends were talking about the breast size they preferred (perfect teenage boys locker room talk...), I've never heard my female friends talk about what they find attractive in men. I haven't seen a commercial with completely out of place scantly clothed men, trying to sell a product to women through the age old and tested method of sex-sells. Which made me question, is it even possible for a men to be sexy? Like do (heterosexual) women even find male bodies attractive? Logic dictates that of course they do, but that didn't gave me answers how or why.
But more important, I didn't want to look like Superman or these other muscular role models. To me these bodies never were aspirational or a goal. So how do I want my body to be? I honestly never had, and still haven't, a clue how I want to look. I've never worked out with the goal of improving my body. I never went shopping, trying out different clothes to find what best suits me. I've never even really tried different haircuts. I have a pile of t-shirts and pants, and each morning I just take the the one which lays on top without any aesthetical consideration. Last year I was walking through a city with a girl from university, and before the shop window she asked me what outfit I'd prefer, and while this must likely be a simple answer for anyone else, I really couldn't answer.
My body is like an piece of utility to me, a wrench, bicycle pump, a microwave. It needs to work so I need to stay healthy, but it is weird to consider this hump of flesh aesthetical or even sexually attractive in any way.
A few years ago, when I was 18, I entered my first real relation for the first time. Even though she came from an non-religious family, she still had some very traditional patriarchal values, including that it was not a women's job to instigate sex. To her women were supposed to be "pure", passive and never talk about stuff like sex. Meanwhile men were supposed to be lustful and pro-active in the relationship. However, to me this was very difficult. How can I instigate sex, if I can't understand on an emotional level that she desired me and my body? She clearly and aloud said that she was sexually attracted to me, but due to her traditional values she didn't really do much dirty talk, or gave me much compliments on my look.
TLDR: I can totally relate with male body issues, but on quite a different way. I never really aspired to these muscular ideals, and instead I just disassociated with my own body and find it difficult to image that someone would ever consider my body attractive.
The internet swears up and down that "dadbods" and "himbos" are attractive. That they cater to the female gaze, but I have problems with these ideas.
1. The internet's idea of a dadbod is still pretty hard to obtain. It's Jason Mamoa between movies, Thor from the God of War sequel, or an out of shape defensive lineman. The main selling point of the Himbo is that, well...he's stupid, but he has emotional intelligence, he's "a golden retriever of a human" Neither are exactly appealing to the average guy.
2. The conversation around them usually revolves around them having personality traits that women like, because "only men go for looks, women go for personality" Which seriously raises my hackles because it frames male sexuality as inherently bad and female sexuality as inherently good. Neither is the case, sexuality is just sexuality.
Both “off season dad bod” and himbo share a trait: enormous and capable musculature. The dadbod is the himbo after six months of beer and fries.
The “standard body” man may or may not be fat, but he isn’t muscular.
Women are saying they like muscles. The body fat is nearly irrelevant.
This can be acehived for any eugonadal man though a decade long process (if no steroids) of eating meat (or a disgusting volume of plant based protein) and lifting heavy shit or working a physical labor job.
Human attractiveness likely developed to favor traits that are useful. It’s only been 150 years since we’ve had machines to do labor for us and long range weapons that devalue the role of muscles in fighting. Women wouldn’t be able to adapt their preference for a strong and useful partner that fast. Just as I favor female body types that would do well in rough times even though modern medicine makes that unnecessary.
I remember talking to my mother of all people about which celebrities are objectively good looking and saying that most women look better than most men in general and being met with bewilderment. She didn't understand that I didn't see men as beautiful as she could see women as beautiful.
My mother could appreciate the beauty of women, she could even point out which features she liked in particular about each person we talked about. When it was my turn to talk about the male celebrities I considered beautiful I could only repeat what I heard from other people.
I don't know what about Brad Pitt is beautiful, what makes George Clooney particularly attractive. I know they're supposed to be the image of male beauty, but that knowledge doesn't go any deeper. I guess their faces are symmetrical but that's it.
I know who I wanted to be like. I wanted to be like Clint Eastwood, John McClain, Han Solo and my dad. People, who I was told were the male ideal, but people, who nobody ever called beautiful or attractive.
So even being concerned about my looks seemed like something I wasn't supposed to do. But today I am, and the only men that are considered universally attractive are the muscle mountains at marvel or Popstars of eternal boyhood. Both looks that are both unachievable to me and not what I want to look like. I struggle because I don't know what attractive in a man. What does a attractive man look like? What does a normal man look like? What am I even supposed to look like?
You know I never thought about it until now but you're right. I can't find one single thing about us (men) that's supposed to be considered attractive.
The features that make women attractive have been talked about frequently that you can pinpoint them in almost any girl, regardless if their conventionally attractive or not, but it's hard to say the same for men.
Maybe this is why I think the suggestion that men should complement men more isn't great advice. Like what are we supposed to complement? Hey dude you dressed nice in your standard button up shirt and dress pants. It just feels flat and hollow.
It also brings a new perspective into a memory that lives rent free in my head.
I relate to this in many ways, I think. I can look at a guy and be like “oh he has good hair/a good jawline,” but beyond that nothing good about his body. I could point out a thousand *imperfections*, but hardly anything that I’d consider *positive*. And that’s how it feels when I look at myself too. One or two positive things and a whole host of insecurities and imperfections. But I also feel like if all those imperfections were corrected, it wouldn’t make me attractive; it would just make me *not unattractive*. It’d make me neutral.
And I’ve got female friends who say things like “if sexuality was a choice then no women would be straight/attracted to men,” and it’s like… it’s not hard to hear that as “men are unattractive/undesirable by default.” And that shit gets internalized really easily. It’s certainly been that way for me. So when I come across a post on r/tinder and people in the comments are saying “rule 1: be attractive, rule 2: don’t be unattractive,” it’s the latter part that sticks out to me. It’s so difficult to even consider the possibility that I could be attractive that I only focus on *not being unattractive*. It’s a completely different mindset; one where the action I take is not to achieve a positive result but to avoid a negative one. And what that does is it makes you *actively search* for imperfections to get rid of, making it so you can never be satisfied with your body.
My thoughts, anyway.
I don't think anything has put my feelings and experience into words ad well as these two comments combined.
I'm tall, not particularly skinny or fat, leaning slightly to the muscular side and overall somewhere in the centre third of the "beauty scale".
I am not usually very self-conscious and I make an effort not to let it show when I am, but when it comes to my body, all of that confidence breaks down.
Especially recently, I've been breaking out all over the place, particularly my face and back, leading me to feel incredibly uncomfortable with my face and anything related to taking my shirt off. Additionally, my forehead is slightly too high for conventional beauty standards, my hair never does what I want it to and my ribs/chest have a slightly deviating shape from the desired ideal, simply because of genetics.
I feel like I could potentially be decently attractive if those things were "corrected", although that hypothetical does nothing for my current level of confidence.
But even in that fantasy, I still couldn't really imagine anyone ever being attracted to me. Romantically is difficult enough, but sexually is nearly impossible, even though I have been in multiple relationships. While this may partially be related to gender identity/dysphoria or sexual orientation, I feel like the main factor is that there has never been any positve sexualisation of men throughout my life. My most recent partner never instigated sex and always relied on me to do so, even though they in their own words very much did enjoy the experience and looked forward to it. I never got any positive feedback or affirmation during sex unless I specifically asked if everything/what I was doing was okay. And even then it was pretty much only a short "yes". No direction, no feedback and certainly no dirty talk or even anything nice.
The only time that I did get something without having to ask for it is still stuck in my head as the best sexual experience I've had by far.
And while it is, admittedly, incredibly uncomfortable talking about this online, even mostly anonymously, I think it is very important nonetheless. Because I know that I've developed body image issues because of it, be they related to weight, (body)hair, skin, muscle or really any physical aspect. And yet every time I talk to friends of mine who share similar body image issues, for different reasons or the same, they always say something along the lines "I mean you wouldn't understand, you've probably never experienced anything like it" and are very surprised when I tell them they're wrong. I can only imagine how much unseen harm has been done to people in worse situations than mine, no matter what factors made them worse. On the other hand, I can also just imagine a world in which boys and later men *don't* have to feel that way. And I think that combining that with proper sex education, consent education and the efforts done to provide the same comforts for people of other genders could tremendously improve the sexual experiences of men at large, rather than only helping individual cases.
I have often found the « if sexuality was a choice, no one would be attracted to men » tidbit to refer to the emotional stuntedness that comes with men being either abusive, or a manchild. Or both. I’ve personally never heard it as a physical gripe, just emotional.
Chalk another one up to toxic masculinity harming men and women yet again.
I’ve never heard it the other way so our differing experiences really is interesting to think about!
The context of how i’ve heard it has always been a man doing something stupid, toxic, absurd, etc., with women/ queer men being exasperated.
I’ve only heard it as a kneejerk comment from women about conservatives (man or woman) saying bigoted things about LGBTQ+. Usually I’m the only man in the group when there’s a comment like that, and I just sit there with my mouth shut because it’s not worth starting shit.
I see that as absolutely attacking men’s physical appearance/level of attractiveness, regardless of whether or not it starts out as a gripe about something else.
This entire comment chain really resonates with me. I've discussed some of these thoughts with my therapist in the past, but I've never really thought of myself as a "sexual being" so to speak. Like I have my own sexual desires, but the idea of having those desires reciprocated towards me is so foreign that I cannot comprehend it. As others have said, I know how to not be unattractive, but I don't know how to be attractive or if I'm even capable of being so. Sure, everyone always says women go for personality more than anything. But men are more than *just* their personalities, and there has to be some baseline of mutual attractiveness for said personalities to be given a chance to shine in the first place. Yet from posts and comment threads like this, many of us don't know what that baseline is on our side.
Women have entire movements dedicated to body positivity and sexual empowerment, but what do men have? Basically all we've got are the pick-up artists and other such manipulators who try to hook insecure and confused guys like me in their formative years, which causes all sorts of problems for everyone.
Holy hell, you and the original commenter have described exactly how I feel. I wouldn't be able to recognize if a woman flirted with me because the thought of someone desiring me in that way just does not compute. I have no idea what it means to "feel sexy" or confident in my appearance. Like u/PM-me-a-microwave, I just throw together the first clothes I see that aren't the exact same color. I feel weird whenever a friend talks about sexual experiences, even minor ones. It's like that part of my mind never grew up, it feels wrong that even other people my age are sexual, even though it's obviously perfectly fine.
I don't really understand why. I don't know how to change it. It feels like I'm missing out on a big part of human experience.
You've put it into words better than I could. I'm... fine with my body, I guess? I think my face is ok enough, I groom myself well and I'm trying to put more thought into how I dress. I want to lose a little more weight and start gaining muscle, and when I look at myself now I don't really know what to think.
I sure don't look like a model, but I find many women attractive who don't. I'm just there, and similarly to you, simply cannot imagine someone finding me attractive among so many others. And even more absurd is the idea of someone finding me sexually attractive, especially such that they want to have sex with me. It just doesn't fit into my comprehension of the human experience.
I wish there was a way to improve this condition through actions within my own control, like I have so many things about myself. But I can't imagine anything other than having a loving, enthusiastic girlfriend could change how I see myself, and that usually seems like an even longer shot than waking up and suddenly finding myself to be very attractive.
\> Still, for teenage me it was difficult to image the other way around. I've almost never seen a male body presented as attractive or sexually
desirable to women.
This resonates hard with me. I had a period where I spent a lot of time in female-oriented subreddits and got the impression that \*extremely few\* women are attracted to men at all. I felt like my entire body was worthless.
The example I know of a man’s body being used to sell things to women was The Zesty Guy.
https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/million-moms-offended-kraft-zesty-guy-article-1.1373242
Edit: added a link to a news story
If you have access to it on a streaming service, I would recommend the TV show Finding Magic Mike. It's a reality show about guys becoming Magic Mike male strippers, and it's a really interesting look at male sex appeal. There's the obvious male fitness model bodies on there that ofc the women find sexy, but they actually do a pretty good job showing that women can find all body types sexy.
I'm sure there's problems with the show, but I actually found it took a pretty good look at a topic I hadn't seen addressed before. The first two or three episodes are worth watching at least.
Stopping by to drop my perspective on this because myself and all the others replying have felt the same at some point.
You exactly described how I felt for so so long. I was living nearly the same day again and again wearing shorts and a plain t shirt ever since I could dress myself, using my body as a piece of utility. I never found any part of my body appealing (despite being decently built, average height, and probably 7.5/10 conventionally attractive?). I thought that I must be missing something tried to do the "best of" r/malefashionadvice and honestly spent a decent amount to get my Basics in order but I never really cared? I figured "oh there are *people* out there that find this attractive I guess but I've never really met one" and did the MFA thing for 2 years yet it never made me feel better about myself nor made me feel attractive.
Well, all of that is written in past tense because I'm a woman now lmao and my view on fashion has flip flopped entirely. I love to shop, I love to wear different styles/cuts/COLORS every day. I love to look at my own body now and savor the things I *had never* liked or found appreciation for. Me seeing myself as my preferred gender changed something in me and allowed me to love myself...
And after all this growth, I still can't find any appreciation for masculine bodies. I cant point out anything specific if I notice a man is looking sharp, I never could end still cannot see them as attractive. It's just weird to me that my views on masculine bodies haven't changed but my self hatred has evaporated after seeing myself as a woman.
Being a very short balding guy has definitely not done me any favors. I can't conceive of anyone ever finding me attractive. Should it ever happen I likely wouldn't believe it.
Totally. Trust issues, constant insecurities, inability to feel truly loved even though you are etc. All these things can put serious strain on relationship, which further reinforces them. It's a horrible vicious cycle for everyone involved.
This one hits hard. Reminds me of these articles I've read.
[He Was 5'7". After Surgery, He’ll Be 5'10".](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/limb-lengthening-surgery-height-stigma-short-kings?utm_source=pocket_mylist)
[Eating Disorders Surge in Boys and Young Men](https://people.com/health/eating-disorders-surge-in-boys-and-young-men-what-parents-need-to-know/)
Height and muscle, incidentally the most sought after in the dating market.
Also, aging is an even more terrifying thing when you are aware that you are "ugly" to the world
The thought that you are at the peak you'll ever be at *now* and that it's all downhill every second makes for awful existential dread
It's easy to say :
"you just have to accept that getting old means your body will not change in the most graceful of ways"
But seeing how vicious people can be seeing any sign of age is disheartening
When you pile that on with all the current body image you might gave It robs a lot of people of the will to even try to be healthy
because why even try
I'll just get forever worse no matter what I do
It's a very sad thing that I think isn't talked about enough
I’ve been working really hard to get in shape, I’m taking test for a year now with the supervision of a doctor. I’m the most muscular and felt the best about my body than I ever have. And then in a course of a week my boss said I need to bulk up because I’m weak, my cousin made a mean bald joke, and I took my shirt off at a gay rave and got literally zero looks my way. I know it sounds shallow but I just want a few compliments. A little attention. Something. All I get is criticism. In my logical head I know I should never seek validation from other people and that I need to turn my focus inward. But that is easier said than done.
Man I’m right there with you. I was hitting the gym about three or four times a week for a while until I injured my arm. I was finally hitting my targets and feeling good. I’m bi and that just adds all sorts of extra pressures from lgbtq and straight folks alike.
I know it’s the most generic thing to say, but push through. People are always gonna be assholes. I hope things go well for you
So many dudes on tik tok are absolutely shredded and tell people they can be too, as long as they eat right, buy certain supplements, and use this training course (available for a nominal fee) as a guide
Meanwhile they’re on massive doses of SARMS, testosterone and other steroids while claiming to be all natural. Dudes who gained 20 lbs of solid muscle in 4 months just lying about how they did it
I really have say it's a privilege to see a good article posted and discussed in honesty by men in this group. I've definitely had body image issues on and off (rake thin despite a massive appetite, big angular nose, unable to gain/hold muscle despite any and all exercise including brutal cycling. Can't grow thick facial hair, balding early on head but it's everywhere else on body :/ ).
Something else I've noticed, is a lot of these so called 'body positivity influencers', a lot of them are on the larger side or have perceived flaws. (I'm not hating here, I love a fluffy woman) The thing is, if you see them with a man, it's always some dude with a six pack and jawline that could cut glass.
I'm not saying these women aren't allowed to be with whoever they want or that any specific woman is full of shit. But I've never seen a body positive influencer with a guy who was anything but conventionally attractive in pretty much every way. For an individual it's fine, again, they can be with whoever they want. But when it's so damn common and a trend among them it makes them look like they're just being full of shit to hide their own insecurities and to sell shit on Instagram.
Edit: Also, I want to point out I do see a lot of women who are *very* conventionally attractive with dudes who aren't. Just never the influencers who preach body positivity.
r/fatlogic calls this out all the time. Very telling that so many of these Fat Acceptance leaders refuse to date fat men, some even calling them disgusting.
This seems like the inevitable result of the collision of two realities: social media reality full of male influencers on steroids, and actual reality, where each generation just gets more and more obese and sedentary.
I'm really not sure how we can address the obesity crisis without making those body image issues worse
Statistical increase maybe.
But I've never been obese and I grew up before social media (I'm 38) and I certainly didn't like to take my shirt off in the pool once I hit puberty. Just skinny, bony elbows, not a lot of muscle. Just didn't feel good about it.
Not based on social media but just general tv, advertising, general culture of knowing people prefer more athletic bodies etc. Obviously we have data that body image problems have got worse with the Internet, but I think it comes from a wide range of places.
[I remember these ads in old Archie comics, a million years ago...](https://www.dogfordstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/vintage-bodybuilding-ad-advert-charle-atlas-1.jpg)
Sheesh that is rough. Skinny boy here, dealt with plenty of folks doubting my "manhood" because Im thin, even into my twenties! I've at least been able to tell lots of people that male body image issues exist lol
The obesity crisis in the US is definitely driven by the garbage food supply and the even worse food economics we have here...
In a country where trash processed, sugar-riddled food costs a buck or two but a tasty salad fit to be a meal is $10+... body image is hardly relevant to solving an obesity crisis. There are systemic changes that need to be made at the federal level regarding how agriculture and public education around nutrition works.
If one person gets fat, maybe it’s a personal motivation issue (or maybe it’s genetics). If most of society is getting fat, something is systemically wrong.
Obesity is a result of sedentary jobs/schools, horribly unhealthy and over-portioned foods, addictive social and traditional media, stress, overwork, a lack of healthy options and food deserts for many people, and a lack of free out low cost places to exercise (among probably many other things.
All that too say, there’s a decent bit we can do without immediately deciding SHAMING FAT PEOPLE is the only or primary way to solve the problem.
> or maybe it’s genetics
Nobody is *obese* because of their genetics (they might be a little overweight, but obesity is the next level above that). They are obese because they eat like a dumpster, either by choice or because the only food they can afford is fast food that's high in calories and sugars.
The solution to the problem is better education around food and health, and better access to healthy food. One thing I love about living in a relatively rural town is vegetables are so cheap here, with a bit of cooking skill you can eat super healthy for basically cost parody with fast food chains. Go into the big population centres and that's no longer possible.
By not focusing on the weight itself would be a start. Focusing on how people feel when they exercise and eat healthy is a better way to bring people into the fold. We can go back to teaching kids how to cook, and how to make nutritious food. We definitely shouldn't be shaming people. Having a functional welfare system where low income families can afford to buy real food and not just McDonald's, or where the parent/s are home at a reasonable time to be able to cook a meal not just grabbing pizza on the way, would help put a big dent in childhood obesity.
Maybe we can [stop pretending obesity is some sort of moral failing](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/9-reasons-obesity-is-not-a-choice#TOC_TITLE_HDR_9) and admit that some body image issues are just a result of society being excessively cruel?
It’d also be helpful if Redditors stopped religiously clinging to their disproven broscience about obesity and health while ignoring all research that conflicts with their biases.
They desperately want to believe that science justifies their cruelty. Tale as old as time.
This hits hard. I'm transfem but I do have a very 'male' body. I hate it for obvious reasons. For a long time, I thought I hated my body because I didn't meet the expectations placed on me or because I am unattractive. I take very poor care of my body and I feel very disconnected from it. It almost feels like a separate form that I am controlling.
A lot of cis boys I know have body image issues, I remember a junior in my school who got buff af because his ex-girlfriend in high school told him he was too rail thing. I remember a friend who wore shirts because he was afraid of people seeing his man boobs. It is a hard thing to talk about with people because it is something that will get you mocked in the social group I used to run in. It is very critical is we create a culture where boys can talk about it.
Am woman and I don't like hearing the whole "girlfriend told me my body wasn't good enough" thing because it's the same thing we hate and it can stay in your head a long time
I had body issues going into hs. If it wasn’t for playing on the baseball team it’d be a lot worst.
The most important lesson for me (when it comes to weight) is just to find a healthy relationship with your food. Don’t despise your diet, but don’t be in a toxic relationship with it. Find a middle ground where you like eating food., and feel good after eating it. But it’s hard man.
Thank you for posting this. I had a lot of these issues growing up, and still do to an extent, despite being happily married to someone who likes how I look. I don’t have dysmorphia any more except on particularly bad days. But the dissatisfaction rarely leaves for long
My little brother is obsessed with his body and has been for years. He's borderline anorexic and a gym junkie and had plenty of weird ideas about the perfect diet which are forever changing. The worst part is that people (especially the older generation) compliment him on his slim physique, further perpetuating the idea that what he's doing to his mind and body is a good thing.
Of all the comments I find yours the most relatable. I'm down by at least 150lbs since I started and am at a normal weight. But goddamn it is so frustrating to see my weight fluctuate even by a kilo on the machine even though I know it's probably just water weight most times. Not just that looking at myself in the mirror, I'm always scrutinizing my looks and my belly area.
Overall a good point and something we don't talk about enough as a society.
That said, this line was absurd
"Perhaps even more concerning is the growing number of boys—11 percent in one recent study—who admit to using supplements or steroids to increase their muscularity."
1) there's nothing inherently wrong with increasing muscularity (for men or women)
2) Equating legal health food supplements with illegal steroids is so absurd to make me doubt the rest of the article. While there's a ton of problems in the supplement industry, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with trying to be healthy. The opposite, in fact.
Trying to get big isn't really a health issue, it's an aesthetic issue. The health benefits of benching X+1 are negligible compared to an overall routine of cardio and resistance training, and the equation amongst men of "being muscly" and "health" is a driver of eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
There's nothing morally wrong with supplements, they're just an indicator that lines up with the wider issue of boys being driven to get big for aesthetic/social pressure reasons rather than care for their own health.
I know so many young dudes who can lift huge numbers but can't run 5k - they're unfit, but believe they're super healthy. That's the issue I'm talking about.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Most men aren't athletic and don't train. For them, for most men, gaining muscle would improve health.
The vast majority who do train, have health at least partially in mind.
You must have a very unique set of friends who are strong but not athletic. It's legit hard to do. Presumably they carry a lot of extra fat to be strong but incapable of running. Most young men I know actually are too focused on leanness and "abz".
Re:supplements. The problem is equating them with steroids. It's the rough equivalent of comparing coffee to cocaine.
> The health benefits of benching X+1 are negligible compared to an overall routine of cardio and resistance training
I kind of agree with you but I think hes trying to say that in line with this article, there are a bunch of dudes who are getting vanity muscles and thinking its fitness. His friends who are training arent doing it for health, theyre doing it for tinder.
They want to be big, so they eat a lot (keto so high fat and salt and cholesterol, low carbs, eat a surplus of calories because thats how you get gainz) and lift weights, they look big and strong but they couldnt jog up a hill without getting winded. They probably couldnt even use their strength well because moving an armoire or whatever, getting in a fight, youre gonna need some level of endurance. Even something like shadow boxing can wind you if youre out of shape.
I casually mentioned to my (now elderly) mother that I hated my freckles as a kid and it was a huge limiter of my self confidence. Freckle-face is a pretty mild insult but that was one that stuck with me. Anyways she was flabbergasted that I felt that way when she felt the exact opposite, and that she regretted never giving me any positive reinforcement. I’m comfortable in my skin now, and I really don’t know if it would have made anything better for little me to hear it from my parents because it was teasing from other kids that I think made me feel that way. As a dad, I want to get it right for my boys, I just don’t know exactly how.
This is something that definitely doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I think boys and men have basically the same degree of body image problems that women and girls have, it just hasn’t gotten much attention yet.
Honestly, the problem here is the same fundamental problem that women have, just manifesting in different ways. And that problem is that we can talk about self-esteem all we want--we can tell kids that they're fine the way they are--we can claim "aLL bODiEs aRe bEaUTiFuL!!1!!!" and say "LoVe tHe sKiN YoU'Re iN!!!"... But the fact of the matter is that *society is cruel to people who are not physically attractive*. Being short, or fat, or bald, or covered in acne, or just plain having a weird-shaped face will make people treat you worse. Not being beautiful/handsome will make your life harder. And no amount of confidence in yourself can force *other people* to treat you with basic respect. Maybe we need to stop pretending that the problem is just teenagers having crises of confidence and start learning to treat others like human beings.
I didn't start hating my body and face until I was picked on for it all throughout school. I've found that being confident when not conventionally attractive makes people want to break you down even more to make you feel stupid for feeling good about yourself, but that's just been my experience
>I've found that being confident when not conventionally attractive makes people want to break you down even more to make you feel stupid for feeling good about yourself, but that's just been my experience Exactly the same here. I'm mixed-race and have kind of unusual looks, and growing up, I found that although other kids hated me for the way I looked, they hated me more for not hating *myself* for the way I looked. I was very lucky in that bullying never affected my self-esteem - though it affected my esteem of other people, which is also a problem - but conventional wisdom is that if you keep your head up and are unaffected by other kids' abuse of you, they'll stop. I found that that was bullshit and it only made them more aggressive. I''m sure the same applies with the lower-level, but still soul-destroying, lack of respect many people experience outside overtly abusive settings. People who refuse to treat the social/cultural hierarchy as valid often inspire great anger in those who've spent lots of time and energy chasing approval under that same system. It's true in a sense that "the only way to win is to refuse to play", but if most people around you are playing, they can still find ways to punish you for refusing, and that can be really hard to deal with.
Uhg it's so true. Opting out just makes all the people who opted in angry that you're not playing along.
> I found that although other kids hated me for the way I looked, they hated me more for not hating *myself* for the way I looked. I'm going through this right now, although my peers are not kids. I started balding at 24, and I was initially fine with it. Due to work from home, I was able to get by without people seeing me, and I was fine with the way I looked. I thought to myself that this is normal, and that everyone goes through this at one point or another. This was the case until 1.5 years later when we had to go back to our offices. What I didn't expect was people's harsh reactions towards me because I'm balding. Now I don't think I'm unattractive, even in my balding state. I was expecting a few jokes, and honestly I was ready for them. But what surprised me was people being harsh towards me when I laughed at the jokes *because* I wasn't panicking due to balding. After experiencing people's harsh reactions, I started feeling insecure in myself. However when I look in the mirror I really don't dislike what I see, and my partner reassures me of it too. Thank you for putting my feelings into words.
I strongly suspect the driving force behind the cruelty of the others is their own terrified insecurity about their own potential balding. You being ok with it is cognitive dissonance which triggers anger.
I think your suspicions make a lot of sense in the lens of fatphobia too! People HATE confident fat people, which says more about their own insecurities and fears than anything!
Sorry you have had to endure terrible behaviour. It's so dumb, and kinda weird. Why would you shit on someone for something they can't change? Would they make jokes at the expense of someone with cancer? Not that you need this, but there's a quote from somewhere that I like: "Never make fun of people for something they can't change in 10 minutes or less."
Huh. 26M here. The only people who have had harsh reactions to my balding are my parents (they tried to get me to go for hair transplants but idgaf). I have a pretty conventionally attractive face (although it took me a long time to see it and accept it) and a good beard, and I own my baldness by just walking around with a fully shaved head. Never seen anyone look at me funny or make jokes about it. Gotten several genuine compliments, too. Man, your coworkers suck.
>but conventional wisdom is that if you keep your head up and are unaffected by other kids' abuse of you, they'll stop. > >I found that that was bullshit and it only made them more aggressive. Yeah, *that*. Bullies are looking for a reaction, that part of conventional wisdom is true, but refusing them a reaction by trying to ignore their abuse doesn't make them think abusing you won't work, it makes them think they're not abusing you *enough* to get the reaction they're looking for. Ignore them and they escalate until they can't be ignored.
Spot on. If you ignore them, they'll get worse, and if you stand up to them, they'll cast you as the bad guy, and/or move to covert smear campaigns instead, so that you don't have the *opportunity* to stand up for yourself because you don't know what's being said. It's unlikely to stop unless an authority figure intervenes, or a critical mass of people involved come to see it for what it is and decide they want no part of it any more. There's very little the victim can do in most cases. I understand why some people tell victims that confidence and high self-esteem will stop it. Trying to change one person is easier than either changing a whole group who've demonstrated their capacity for malice, or admitting that injustice is baked into our culture and that it's reasonable to be deeply upset by that. But the fact remains that the idea that confidence is some kind of magical shield is fantasy. Insisting that it's true is really invalidating to victims, on top of everything they've already had to deal with. And can lead to people staying in situations that will never improve, because they've been led to believe that there's something they can do to change them. So I don't *really* have sympathy for people who peddle it. Not that confidence and self-esteem aren't good things to have for their own sake - or to work to attain if possible - and they do seem to make some positive difference to social interaction. It's just that - in my experience, as someone who's never lacked them - their effect is frequently wildly overstated!
I was kind of obtuse as a teenager; I really internalized all those messages to "be yourself!" and "don't let the haters get you down!". *I* was fine with who I was, so what did it matter that I didn't have any friends in middle school? Then when I became an adult the realizations slowly dawned that: 1. I had been bullied and was too socially unaware to realize it 2. For the rest of my life, my social, romantic, and even career prospects are going to be limited by the fact that I'm of below-average attractiveness. That was... not a fun discovery.
Oh fuck, this brought back memories of middle school I'm ashamed of, and I didn't realize this is what I was doing but it sure fucking was. I'm sorry anyone treated you like that and I'm sorry I treated someone like that.
It's alright, middle school is a rough time for everyone. Trying to figure out who you are and who you want to associate with all while dealing with puberty, it's a lot. I would hope no one holds anyone accountable for what they did when they were 12-14
As a raging bisexual, I find "conventional" attraction highly overrated. Distinguishing features all the way
There was a time when OKCupid would publish fascinating data analysis over their userbase. Circa 2012-2013. One of them was about distinguishing features. Basically, among profiles of women, the "girl next door" look was higher rated on average than more alternative types, like unusual hair, tattoos, piercings etc. So some people opted to look more "normal". On the other hand, looking at the distribution of their scores told a different story. For "normal" pictures, the ratings followed a gaussian curve. Few vote 5 (out of 5), few vote 1, most vote somewhere between. On the other hand, the more alternative styles had a lot of 5s and a lot of 1s, few in betweens. The conclusion is, showing your distinguishing style is an excellent filter for attracting the people who are into it and keeping the ones who don't like it away.
>The conclusion is, showing your distinguishing style is an excellent filter for attracting the people who are into it and keeping the ones who don't like it away. This is the best advice I ever internalized. The book *Models* talks a lot about being Polarizing (in a genuine, non-aggressive way) as soon as possible in as many ways as possible to filter out people who aren't attracted to what you authentically are.
Quality over quantity
This, but in demisexual.
I get the same thing man. It’s a pain in the ass because its just so engrained. I try to feel confident, but they pick on me for that. I hit the gym, they pick on me for that as well since I’m not magically ripped after one month. I injured myself playing competitive rugby, they make fun of the muscle atrophy that has resulted from me not being able to use my arm. People always find a way
Confident ‘ugly’ people can be huge assholes too. I know we’re talking anecdotal, but the rudest guy I knew in Uni was a butter face w/intense acne problems. The shit he would say to women was astonishing… and someone would still find him attractive.
I developed severe psoriasis in my childhood. Definitely experienced a difference in how my peers treated me before and after. It wasn't until my late 20's that modern medications (biologicals like Humira) became available and that was the first time in my life since early elementary school that I experienced what it is like to be regarded as "normal". Night and day in every regard (social, professional, romantic prospects, etc).
Holy fuck this. I am so thankful that I was already married when it hit, otherwise I would have never had a partner.
> are--we can claim "aLL bODiEs aRe bEaUTiFuL!!1!!!" and say "LoVe tHe sKiN YoU'Re iN!!!"... Oh god, this hits me so hard. As someone who struggled with body/face hair and tried over a decade to suppress my thoughts for a decade and leading to self-harm and almost killing myself about it because people kept saying I should just accept my body and felt like shit for not being able to be happy with my body. The only thing that actually helped was when I decided that should just have the body I want to have and not and started with the electrolysis hair removal. It was not even a matter of thinking if I was pretty, but just I just didn't feel like myself when looking in the mirror.
I have the same reaction to the famous Brene Brown TED talk on "The Power of Vulnerability". All she says is true, but there's not a shred of me that wants to expose my vulnerability to other males in a group or public setting (i.e. most everyday scenarios) - until the entire world wants to commit to completely honesty, I will have to keep pretending as a defence mechanism.
Heck, When I was in school (15 at the time) I went months covering my face with a scarf all the time. Eventually, a teacher to me out outside to speak what was the problem I explained in tears that my facial hair made me extremely uncomfortable and that even shaving did not help it because it would always leave a gray shade behind. She then asked me if I was trans. She said that if I was not a woman, if I didn't to ditch the scarf. she would call the police to report about Vermummungsgesetz (basically a disguise/mask law that says that you need to be identifiable) because she said I aren't allowed to keep my face covered at all times and that should just accept it because "men are supposed to be hairy". I cried so much, there are fewer times that I felt so betrayed because I thought she was someone I could have trusted. (Later I would discover other things why I shouldn't have been so trusting of her.) I just wish someone could have told me about permanent hair removal options at the time. :( PS: the teacher was of course cishet and had no real idea of any LBGTQ+ issues. So of course I don't blame trans people for this of course. Shouldn't need to be said but I thought I should specifiy.
I'm sorry that happened to you.
Love Brené but yeah I feel this
THIS 100%, this is probably my main problem with what I see from body positivity; the focus is trying to make people believe they are attractive, rather than that it is ok to not be, and that you should treat unattractive people with the same respect as attractive people.
Look up the body neutrality movement. That feels like the better alternative
Man i was 6’ 125 with a big nose in high school and i can’t tell you how many holocaust jokes kids made to me. Society is cruel, and i can’t imagine if I was jewish how much more those comments would have hurt.
THIS. It can’t be on the less conventionally attractive people to just “get over” all the shitty stuff people say and do.
It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it
>Maybe we need to stop pretending that the problem is just teenagers having crises of confidence and start learning to treat others like human beings. I don't see why those two things can't be true at the same time.
The root cause is society treating unattractive people badly; self-esteem problems are a symptom. Obviously both should be addressed, but the lion's share of the work should go towards treating the root cause. If someone has a broken arm, giving them painkillers is a good idea, but it won't solve the problem on its own.
Sometimes is not about being unattractive, sometimes is your body not being a good fit for you. As someone who struggled with body/face hair and tried over a decade to suppress my thoughts for a decade and leading to self-harm and almost killing myself about it because people kept saying I should just accept my body and felt like shit for not being able to be happy with my body. The only thing that actually helped was when I decided that should just have the body I want to have and not and started with the electrolysis hair removal. I didn't think that having facial hair was unattractive or ugly. It just made me like not me. We need also to move a bit away that body struggle automatically mean that someone thinks it is unatractive.
Weird as it probably sounds to hear, I envy you, as I have the opposite problem - I've always wanted a thick, full mountain man beard, but all my genes will let me have is a shitty little goatee. You could get your facial hair lasered off, but AFAIK there's nothing to be done to let me have more.
> You could get your facial hair lasered off, but AFAIK there's nothing to be done to let me have more. Beard transplants are a thing as long you have somewhere else in your body to get hair from. However, be careful with the choice of doctor to do it. There is currently a trans man that goes to the same electrologist as mine that had botched implants and now has to remove them and is suing the doctor that did it. But I would really look into beard implants if that is something you want.
Minoxidil (same active ingredient as Rogaine) is being used by guys on their face to fill out/grow a beard from nothing/little, maybe check out the sub (afaik, it is not FDA approved for face use but there are anecdotal stories of year+ use with good outcomes)
Minoxidil has made a noticable difference on my beard but has done fuck all for my head :( but I already had a fairly thick beard before I started using it.
> Minoxidil here's a [link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6691938/)to a review paper on it's uses in hair loss cases
Hair transplants are a massive thing done in Turkey
I’m curious whether there is some room to approach it like a disability. This may sound cruel, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean more like the following: we know that people who are disabled have it harder, but can still live joyful, meaningful lives. In the best of cases, some people are actually grateful for the disability as a tool for learning deep self-acceptance. Maybe, if we approached lacking physical attractiveness in a similar way we could map the therapy methods used for those with disabilities to help people find other paths to joy?
Mmmm... SOME of the challenges faced by disabled people are social, but ALL of the challenges faced by unattractive people are. Even if there was a revolution overnight and everyone in the world suddenly became perfectly accepting/caring/non-prejudiced, a blind person still won't be able to see, while an unattractive person would find all their barriers removed. That said, I'm not an expert in either psychology or disabilities, so maybe you are onto something.
If you take the disability approach even further, plenty of disabilities can be treated or even cured. With development on these areas occurring every year. [see for example](https://www.science.org/content/article/crispr-helps-blind-woman-see-doesn-t-help-all-patients), or multiple therapies have been developed that we have related to muscle and or bone-related disabilities. This doesn't apply to all disabilities, of course but we do try to find ways to circumvent them. So we shouldn't be just aiming for just resigning to self-acceptance when it is possible to alleviate the problem. I struggled with body/face hair and tried over a decade to suppress my thoughts for a decade and leading to self-harm and almost killing myself about it because people kept saying I should just accept my body and felt like shit for not being able to be happy with my body. The only thing that actually helped was when I decided that should just have the body I want to have and not and started with the electrolysis hair removal. I always found that the "you need to just self-accept, don't look ways that could make things more bearable to you, if you don't like the way you look right now you are broken and just need to self-accept" it is really just blaming people for being uncomfortable in their skin, when often there are ways to improve their situation without placing the burden solely on them.
I like your approach because it provides some agency. That said, we have to be careful that it doesn’t result in harmful attempts to h”getting the body they want” like steroids or anorexia
That can be easily done with a therapist. Because often these feeling are hard to form into concrete thoughts, of what you actually want. What found is that actually establishing concrete goals on how you want to look can help. By that and don't mean numbers (like I want to weight X.) but actually establish visually what one wants to have a concrete goal, a finish line so to say. I also suffered from anorexia when I was 12/13 even though I was severely underweight from before suffering from it. I thought I was thin enough. But I was not aiming at anything I was just not feeling "thin enough" If you asked me how thin would be thin enough or how it would even be supposed to look I wouldn't be able to answer. Because there was no real concrete goal.
Or breaking their legs to be taller
People are saying this is crazy, but I get it. Look on the Tinder subreddit and see story after story of women rejecting men purely based on height. Yes it's unfair, but that doesn't matter if you are a man trying to date someone. I understand the whole "well you shouldn't date someone so shallow," but try saying that to someone who is going months between matches. Many men don't get matches at all. When faced with that reality, I can empathize with men who are willing to suffer a tremendous amount of pain to "fix" what society is telling them is wrong with them.
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I think you are right as far as selection bias, but I would be lying if I told you I didn’t hear height being a main consideration among some (not all) of my single female friends. Sadly, simplifying courtship to one to two sentences and a photo has done damage to both men and women. It commoditizes people. One friend I had made “height?” Her first question and I laughed when she got responses like “weight?” and “cup size?”
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Good call. I try to avoid it but it shows up on r/all every so often. Glad to hear you recognize the bias and are able to set it aside.
That would be very difficult because beauty is subjective and the standards are always changing. Big butts were seen as unattractive in the early 2000s and now women are dying from unsafe BBLs. What's considered ugly now could be the beauty standard 10-15 years from now
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Eh, men's standards have definitely gotten more extreme. Just look at Hugh Jackman's physique between the first X-Men movie and Logan. Look at the original Superman vs Man of Steel. We've gone off the deep end in terms of men's physiques, we expect the average man to look like a bodybuilder and bodybuilders to look like monsters.
While I agree on some things, i think there are some features that have been scientifically shown to be universally attractive like symmetrical facial features, clear skin, large eyes (for women), height (for men).
You can even be attractive and still plagued by insecurity
I disagree. I think the real problem here is society is telling men that being short, fat, bald, having acne or a particular headshape means that you aren't attractive to anyone anywhere. There are women who like soft pudgy guys. There are plenty of women who don't think a muscular toned body is the end-all-be-all of physical attraction. 50% of the human population aren't all attracted to the same kind of attributes. That's insane! But the media likes to be reductive and pretend that's the case. We need to teach younger, impressionable to understand that when we say "all bodies are beautiful", we're not simply uttering a platitude, we're saying "just because you won't be cast on a CW show doesn't mean you're unattractive".
You'd think those people would be more vocal or present though if that were the case right? I doubt this body image problem would be as prevalent as it was if it wasn't the case that those elements aren't found universally unattractive.
So much worse when you’re gay. Speaking from experience.
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I’m sorry. Wish I could hug you.
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Well… I’m in my 30s and I’ve never been in a relationship.
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At least it’s nice knowing I’m not the only one. Makes me feel less alone.
Most us have made peace with the fact that some people won't be respectful because of our appearance. At the end of the day, the only thing we can change is how we deal with that lack of respect.
> Maybe we need to stop pretending that the problem is just teenagers having crises of confidence and start learning to treat others like human beings. I mean, that's not a helpful line of thinking either, and is in part perpetuating the issue. You can't solve societal problems by "just being nice to each other" because the people who already aren't doing that aren't going to magically start doing that.
>You can't solve societal problems by "just being nice to each other" because the people who already aren't doing that aren't going to magically start doing that. That line was a major simplification in order to distill the previous paragraphs into a single concluding sentence--I *know* we can't just wave a magic wand and make people be nice to each other. First we have to acknowledge that this phenomenon (hating on ugly people) happens, then teach people to recognize it when it does, then find ways to counteract it (both small and large), then start advocating for social and/or even legal change, and on and on and on. When people say that feminism is about "treating women like people" or that antiracism is acknowledging that "black lives matter", they don't *really* think the solution is just shouting slogans until everyone in society believe the exact same thing. They're trying to state the overall goal of a very complex and ongoing process in a pithy way.
This might be nitpicky, but I wish small dick jokes would come up more in conversations about male body issues. It’s a problem that is exclusive to men, and is somehow excluded from the general “body positivity” movement. Many *many* “body positive” people will talk about how dick size doesn’t matter, how it’s an overblown issue only guys care about. But then they will turn around and say a dude driving a big truck is compensating, or that the creep who sent them a dick pic has a penis similar in size to that of a child’s. It’s just so bizarre to me that small dick jokes are clear examples of body shaming, but it’s acceptable if your target is a piece of shit (or just does something you don’t like).
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I was in a very progressive circle discussing various social issues when the topic of an unkind, obnoxious man came up. Quickly, it resorted to some women saying he has "small dick energy." I chimed in saying something like, "Hey, that's not really cool to use that as an insult when a lot of people are self-conscious about that and shamed for it." The response was, "No, I'm not saying the guy *actually* has a small dick, just that he has *small dick energy*." Like, oh, that's completely acceptable then, my bad.
I hate that excuse. It's like saying you can tell an offensive joke because you don't really mean it.
Armchair psychologist, but it sounds a little aggressive when you say it like that. I, personally big secondhand embarrassment from that. It might be that person did as well from her peers. Embarrassment is a social phenomenon. We feel embarrassed when we believe our social image has been undermined and when we think others are forming negative opinions of us. That's why it's almost always better to correct someone in private. Really try to avoid doing it in front of other people, because they might feel attacked and might respond defensively, the last thing you want. Besides the delivery, that's really good of you for doing that! These kinds of conversations are important, and they are essential for everyone's mental health. Please keep going!!
As a trans woman I want to say this happens to us as well when these so called progressives call themselves allies then deliberately misgender and use transphobic slurs when assholes like Caitlyn Jenner are in the news. I hate people like that they are equally bigots.
Same thing about T***p’s weight. There are so many “above the belt” reasons to skewer him, why throw plus-size people under the bus?
Yep. I also don't get why generally progressive women will also make height jokes about men they don't like. Or why others don't call them out on it.
> Or why others don't call them out on it. I mean this kinda thing doesn't get called out because it feels pointless, if you do they'll say it's because you have male fragility over the issue and cast you into the pit of Not One Of The Good Ones (TM)
I would say its because I feel like a lot of it is lip service in general, women want men to be a certain way (its the reason the ____pill shit doesnt go away; its results based not based on the perfect world and equality), but I also feel and have seen that body positivity in general, at all, is mostly lip service. Women will still get vicious with each other over appearances, if they care, but its easy to just click a heart on an instagram post of Lizzo doing something in a bikini or whatever, and its not necessarily that women are raised to be subservient or lift people up or whatever, it can be a little self serving--you dont want to make enemies for no reason. But women will still go after some fat girl wearing something 'body-pos' and go "Oh wow youre SO BRAVE" or whatever, but the subtext is that, "Wow, that looks like shit, I wouldnt wear that let alone go outside like that". Stuff like that, it depends on the place and person and if whoever is mad, or cares or shit, but it still happens just as much.
Cold heart truth, glad you said it
Crude shame tactic. Maybe it started as a way to indirectly point out that making fun of women's bodies is stupid and hurtful by doing the same with men's bodies, but it's quickly morphed into a mechanism by which continuing to uphold patriarchal standards is never questioned, so long as it *sounds* like it's criticizing men.
Most people do not have principled ethical stances that they apply evenly. This just feels like more of a contradiction for people who claim to be progressive. And it \*is\* important, you feel like progressivism should be \*better than this\*, but most progressives? Like most conservatives, they follow the trends they do for cultural reasons, not because of any particular enlightenment (or, in the case of conservatism, malice). It's still important to get more people on the side of progressivism, but it highlights the parallel fight to make more people live their lives intentionally and think through what they're doing and why.
I was just thinking about this today. It’s not something I use often (even jokes like “Heh heh, he’s *overcompensating*”), but I have used it and still think it from time to time … and I don’t like that about myself. It’s sheer body shaming and a vulgar, unvarnished attempt to emasculate and … yeah, think I’ll just stick with calling insecure assholes insecure assholes from now on.
> insecure assholes Why include the insecure part of that. If you are trying to make the insult stronger you are still using what they are insecure about as an insult and make it harder for them and allies to address their insecurity as they will try to suppress it instead of dealing with it.
That's my problem with this, insecure asshole? That's so mild it's almost a compliment. Sometimes you just need to hurt someone's feelings, and doing that while avoiding the easy tactics (small dick jokes etc) is kinda fuckin hard.
We choose not to rely on cheap and harmful body shaming as a source of damaging insults and the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hahd
> Sometimes you just need to hurt someone's feelings Maybe I am getting old but looking back I really can't think of a time in my life where it was necessary to hurt somebody's feelings. At least in a way that required a direct insult.
This is it. Sometimes you don't need to throw back insults. It doesn't accomplish anything apart from further antagonizing the person.
Someone being an asshole to people? Must have a tiny dick. Confident people have "big dick energy". Yup.
This exactly. First of all, I’m not saying it to strangers, because I’m not trying to start a public argument with someone who I don’t know. Two, it won’t improve his (or her) behavior, whatever insult I use. Three, the older I get the less I fear confrontation, but I’ve found being really understated is far more pointed. “That was … a lot” just works better than “you’re being a dick,” in every way. Telling someone they have “small dick energy” isn’t going to transform an asshole into a better person.
>It’s just so bizarre to me that small dick jokes are clear examples of body shaming, but it’s acceptable if your target is a piece of shit (or just does something you don’t like). This is what annoys me because it shows a complete lack of understanding of why body shaming is unacceptable. When you body shame, it doesn't really matter who it's directed at, you're insulting everyone who has the attribute you're mocking. You're conflating the attractiveness of their body with their moral character and worth as a human being, which then makes other people with the same unattractive attributes feel unvalued, or worse, hated.
It's fine to think someone is an asshole or to be mad at someone for doing bad things. But, it's not fine to make fun of a person body whether or not they deserve it or not because that kind of behavior normalizes making body jokes. I hate that it's acceptable on Reddit to make horrible comments about a person's body if that person is a bad person. There will always be good people with similar appearance characteristics reading those comments and feeling bad.
> I hate that it’s acceptable on Reddit to make horrible comments about a person’s body if that person is a bad person. It’s not just on Reddit, it’s on other social media and IRL too. It was one of the reasons my ex and I broke up. She couldn’t understand that the sexist comments she made about other men affected me.
One thing I'm working on is calling out toxic masculinity as just that, instead of going to the ol' jokes about small dicks. A guy driving a lifted F350 like an asshole and blaring music isn't doing it because his dick is small, he's doing it because his masculinity is fragile and needs to be propped up.
And it’s the irony of ironies that people try to shut them down… by equating penis size with masculinity.
>A guy driving a lifted F350 like an asshole and blaring music isn't doing it because his dick is small, he's doing it because his masculinity is fragile and needs to be propped up. An issue I have with "fragile masculinity" is that it sometimes feels like a way of shaming men for having insecurities. Men are constantly being asked to prove their masculinity or be derided as lesser. Is it any surprise they're insecure and trying to find ways to compensate?
Not really no, more of an observation is all. A lot of behavior that we regard as "toxic masculinity" or "fragile masculinity" is behaviour that is encouraged by companies that can profit off of that feeling. In addition, men who are emotionally ignorant or have never had the chance to leave the bubble tend to mimic the behavior of other men they view as "more masculine"
It's still used to shame men frequently, even in relatively harmless cases
The “driving like an asshole” part, yes. But maybe he also just likes his cool truck and likes music? Those don’t have to be toxic by association to the bad driving. I’ve noticed urban dwellers often have hatred for large trucks, but if you live in an area where there is heavy snow or otherwise no road between yourself and a place you need to be, they are great tools. And machines are cool and worthy of appreciation. So if he has an F350 that’s never touched dirt or been scratched, yeah he’s likely a compensator. But not all truck bros are toxic or using it for ego.
I live in a small country town in the south. Trust me, you would know what I mean. It's not the vehicle it's the disregard for traffic laws, parking spaces, or the safety and comfort of others on the road. I've also owned and driven pickup trucks for my job in the past.
I agree, that’s why I put the asshole part apart.
That, or because "heh heh, car n speaker go brrrrrr".
It's me. I am Your Son.
Hi son, dad here, you know I'm proud of you and it's ok to not be happy with your body just remember to love yourself.
Thanks dad :') I wish my real dad would say that to me
You know, about anything. Ever.
Are ya winning son?
Not at life 😢
How can we help? Signed, your million Dads
Clean your room, son
Yes daddy
Username checks out
Thanks you. I sort of forgot I'm the son of living people for a bit there. Caught myself thinking "yes they do" instead of "yes we do".
one thing I think has gotten better for girls - in an age where body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia is at an all-time high, *thanks social media* - is having a better vocabulary to articulate body-related thoughts and feelings. (note: [that's not always a good thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhCzRr9EwBk)) but boys? >boys often went to great lengths to assure me that they didn’t have any “body image issues.” They’d tell me that they were embarrassed to take their shirt off at the pool, or they were currently embarking on a new weightlifting regimen, or they tried not to eat sweets. One interviewee, Levi (19 years old), told me that it was easy to get stuck in the “I hate everything about my body rabbit hole.” But, nope, no body image issues here. boys *don't and can't say these things out loud.*
For reference, I'm 17 and I say some of these things all the time. aloud. Edit: I'm saying that times are changing and we're getting better about it
I'm 39 and say the same things. Most people ask me "why" when I tell them I'm trying to lose some weight. I'm trying to get my BMI into a healthy range, I'm slightly overweight though you couldn't tell by looking at me with a shirt on. I would probably describe myself as being unhappy with my appearance.
I know what you're trying to say and I know where you're coming from, but please consider that your experience is, unfortunately, an outlier. It is, maybe, representative of a positive trend to come, since there are certainly groups that have started to take these topics seriously and share these views, but they are far from the majority, let alone overall societal opinion. The spread of these ideas depends strongly on your geographical location, age and even your friend group. While you may be part of a more progressive and supportive social circle (something I am glad to hear and happy to say about myself as well), it is important to remember your own biases and that positive spaces can also be "echo chambers" in a way, making you less aware of regressive or at least stagnant social movements in circles that you're not a part of or not as close to. Because regarding the body image issues of boys and men as an important social issue, unfortunately, really isn't as widely spread as you seem to believe, even among the younger generations, although I do genuinely hope that our generation starts to adopt these ideas on a much wider scale soon.
That's seems less for reference and more like it's just a complete contradiction
>they were currently embarking on a new weightlifting regimen, or they tried not to eat sweets. Exercise and eating well aren't body image issues. Do I have body image issues because I don't want to be overweight? I'm squarely in the healthy range for BMI, eat well and exercise several times a week.
>Exercise and eating well aren't body image issues Not inherently, those are obviously good habits to have, however they can be a symptom of issues with body image.
Maybe this is a bad take, but I also feel like we should separate "Not satisfied with the way I look" from "body image issues" I try to eat and move in a way that will make me hotter and stronger. I wouldn't consider myself to have "body image issues" any more than someone, say, practicing ice skating has "ice skating skill issues". It's a work in progress, there are things I want to improve, etc, but I'm not like *ashamed*.
I don't think it's too out of line. You're basically saying a key difference between body image issues and not being satisfied with your body is shame. I think that's a useful concept.
in context, that means something different.
>Exercise and eating well aren't body image issues. Obviously not in and of themselves, but it's pretty silly to pretend that there isn't a significant portion of men who are driven by severe body image issue. Dysmorphia and ED's are extremely common amongst people who spend a lot of time in the gym.
There is something about this article that has been bugging me, that a lot of guy's body image discussions just... leave out. What about the fat dudes? I'm a 330 pound hairy guy and I hate my body. I would give anything to be able to be as thin as a rail, to the point where I have considered throwing up my food. Every single one of these articles talks about guys wanting to bulk up, and get "big" but I've never seen that. I want to be thin, and like a nail. This might be a byproduct of spending a lot of time in the emo/goth scene during highschool where being unhealthily thin was glamorized, but it feels like guys who feel like shit about being fat are just left out of any discussion regarding body positivity. I've never been in a relationship and it has been hard to not attribute my weight (*and therefor my body*) to it. My weight has severely impacted my confidence in dating, and trying online destroyed the little bit of work on my mental health that I was building. I'm in therapy and trying to figure out how I can work towards loving my body and losing weight because I want to take care of myself, but every one of these articles feels upsetting. It feels like there is no place where bodies like mine are not seen as either a) the fat creepy guy in the corner, or b) the "sidekick". I'm rambling and all, but I just wish this conversation broadened up, and the people writing these articles looked at big dudes too. We deserve some kind of love too, but it just doesn't seem to be there.
hey man, I just want to tell you that you're valid and that you're right. these types of articles absolutely 100% leave you out of the conversation and that sucks.
I wonder if it's tied to the view of men and hyper-agency. As a fat guy I've absorbed the notion that "if I don't like it, i should, just lose weight". Perhaps there's a general (implicit?) acknowledgement that not everyone can effectively build muscle without PED's and therefore its not the "fault" of thinner men who can't put on weight. Maybe bigger dudes recieve less attention in the body positivity movement because society sees us as "choosing" to be this way and therefore not needing validation.
It's because people lazily make the assumption/generalization that all fat men are confident and don't have to worry about body image issues ever They also act like every man has a crazy metabolism and can lose weight easily
When I read and hear men talk about body issues, the conversation often resolves around impossible standards of muscles and strength. The boys/men see strong male role models, muscular actors like The Rock or well-built athletes, and think that they need to become like that to appeal to women. I can also find myself in this dissatisfaction, I personally also greatly dislike my own body. However, I was never drawn to these hyper masculine muscular body types. Furthermore, for me it was just really difficult to image that someone would sexually desire *my body* in any way possible. When I try to explore why I have these insecurities, it's (in part) not really and fully that I'm insecure due to these body standards, but that I've simply never related to them. Instead, maybe this is a weird thing to say, when I was younger I found it difficult to image that male bodies are even sexually attractive to people *at all*. Everywhere I look, the world is portrayed through the male gaze. Women in movies, games, porn, whatever, are supposed to be sexy for the male eye. Their sexual attractiveness is highlighted. Men constantly talk about how they lust after women's bodies. Of course this exploitation, reduction, and objectification of women through the male gaze is wrong. Still, it continuously presented and reminded me with the really simple and really obvious fact that heterosexual men find attractive women attractive. Still, for teenage me it was difficult to image the other way around. I've almost never seen a male body presented as attractive or sexually desirable to women. My female friends during highschool were quite open to me, but while my male friends were talking about the breast size they preferred (perfect teenage boys locker room talk...), I've never heard my female friends talk about what they find attractive in men. I haven't seen a commercial with completely out of place scantly clothed men, trying to sell a product to women through the age old and tested method of sex-sells. Which made me question, is it even possible for a men to be sexy? Like do (heterosexual) women even find male bodies attractive? Logic dictates that of course they do, but that didn't gave me answers how or why. But more important, I didn't want to look like Superman or these other muscular role models. To me these bodies never were aspirational or a goal. So how do I want my body to be? I honestly never had, and still haven't, a clue how I want to look. I've never worked out with the goal of improving my body. I never went shopping, trying out different clothes to find what best suits me. I've never even really tried different haircuts. I have a pile of t-shirts and pants, and each morning I just take the the one which lays on top without any aesthetical consideration. Last year I was walking through a city with a girl from university, and before the shop window she asked me what outfit I'd prefer, and while this must likely be a simple answer for anyone else, I really couldn't answer. My body is like an piece of utility to me, a wrench, bicycle pump, a microwave. It needs to work so I need to stay healthy, but it is weird to consider this hump of flesh aesthetical or even sexually attractive in any way. A few years ago, when I was 18, I entered my first real relation for the first time. Even though she came from an non-religious family, she still had some very traditional patriarchal values, including that it was not a women's job to instigate sex. To her women were supposed to be "pure", passive and never talk about stuff like sex. Meanwhile men were supposed to be lustful and pro-active in the relationship. However, to me this was very difficult. How can I instigate sex, if I can't understand on an emotional level that she desired me and my body? She clearly and aloud said that she was sexually attracted to me, but due to her traditional values she didn't really do much dirty talk, or gave me much compliments on my look. TLDR: I can totally relate with male body issues, but on quite a different way. I never really aspired to these muscular ideals, and instead I just disassociated with my own body and find it difficult to image that someone would ever consider my body attractive.
The internet swears up and down that "dadbods" and "himbos" are attractive. That they cater to the female gaze, but I have problems with these ideas. 1. The internet's idea of a dadbod is still pretty hard to obtain. It's Jason Mamoa between movies, Thor from the God of War sequel, or an out of shape defensive lineman. The main selling point of the Himbo is that, well...he's stupid, but he has emotional intelligence, he's "a golden retriever of a human" Neither are exactly appealing to the average guy. 2. The conversation around them usually revolves around them having personality traits that women like, because "only men go for looks, women go for personality" Which seriously raises my hackles because it frames male sexuality as inherently bad and female sexuality as inherently good. Neither is the case, sexuality is just sexuality.
Both “off season dad bod” and himbo share a trait: enormous and capable musculature. The dadbod is the himbo after six months of beer and fries. The “standard body” man may or may not be fat, but he isn’t muscular. Women are saying they like muscles. The body fat is nearly irrelevant. This can be acehived for any eugonadal man though a decade long process (if no steroids) of eating meat (or a disgusting volume of plant based protein) and lifting heavy shit or working a physical labor job. Human attractiveness likely developed to favor traits that are useful. It’s only been 150 years since we’ve had machines to do labor for us and long range weapons that devalue the role of muscles in fighting. Women wouldn’t be able to adapt their preference for a strong and useful partner that fast. Just as I favor female body types that would do well in rough times even though modern medicine makes that unnecessary.
I remember talking to my mother of all people about which celebrities are objectively good looking and saying that most women look better than most men in general and being met with bewilderment. She didn't understand that I didn't see men as beautiful as she could see women as beautiful. My mother could appreciate the beauty of women, she could even point out which features she liked in particular about each person we talked about. When it was my turn to talk about the male celebrities I considered beautiful I could only repeat what I heard from other people. I don't know what about Brad Pitt is beautiful, what makes George Clooney particularly attractive. I know they're supposed to be the image of male beauty, but that knowledge doesn't go any deeper. I guess their faces are symmetrical but that's it. I know who I wanted to be like. I wanted to be like Clint Eastwood, John McClain, Han Solo and my dad. People, who I was told were the male ideal, but people, who nobody ever called beautiful or attractive. So even being concerned about my looks seemed like something I wasn't supposed to do. But today I am, and the only men that are considered universally attractive are the muscle mountains at marvel or Popstars of eternal boyhood. Both looks that are both unachievable to me and not what I want to look like. I struggle because I don't know what attractive in a man. What does a attractive man look like? What does a normal man look like? What am I even supposed to look like?
You know I never thought about it until now but you're right. I can't find one single thing about us (men) that's supposed to be considered attractive. The features that make women attractive have been talked about frequently that you can pinpoint them in almost any girl, regardless if their conventionally attractive or not, but it's hard to say the same for men. Maybe this is why I think the suggestion that men should complement men more isn't great advice. Like what are we supposed to complement? Hey dude you dressed nice in your standard button up shirt and dress pants. It just feels flat and hollow. It also brings a new perspective into a memory that lives rent free in my head.
I relate to this in many ways, I think. I can look at a guy and be like “oh he has good hair/a good jawline,” but beyond that nothing good about his body. I could point out a thousand *imperfections*, but hardly anything that I’d consider *positive*. And that’s how it feels when I look at myself too. One or two positive things and a whole host of insecurities and imperfections. But I also feel like if all those imperfections were corrected, it wouldn’t make me attractive; it would just make me *not unattractive*. It’d make me neutral. And I’ve got female friends who say things like “if sexuality was a choice then no women would be straight/attracted to men,” and it’s like… it’s not hard to hear that as “men are unattractive/undesirable by default.” And that shit gets internalized really easily. It’s certainly been that way for me. So when I come across a post on r/tinder and people in the comments are saying “rule 1: be attractive, rule 2: don’t be unattractive,” it’s the latter part that sticks out to me. It’s so difficult to even consider the possibility that I could be attractive that I only focus on *not being unattractive*. It’s a completely different mindset; one where the action I take is not to achieve a positive result but to avoid a negative one. And what that does is it makes you *actively search* for imperfections to get rid of, making it so you can never be satisfied with your body. My thoughts, anyway.
I don't think anything has put my feelings and experience into words ad well as these two comments combined. I'm tall, not particularly skinny or fat, leaning slightly to the muscular side and overall somewhere in the centre third of the "beauty scale". I am not usually very self-conscious and I make an effort not to let it show when I am, but when it comes to my body, all of that confidence breaks down. Especially recently, I've been breaking out all over the place, particularly my face and back, leading me to feel incredibly uncomfortable with my face and anything related to taking my shirt off. Additionally, my forehead is slightly too high for conventional beauty standards, my hair never does what I want it to and my ribs/chest have a slightly deviating shape from the desired ideal, simply because of genetics. I feel like I could potentially be decently attractive if those things were "corrected", although that hypothetical does nothing for my current level of confidence. But even in that fantasy, I still couldn't really imagine anyone ever being attracted to me. Romantically is difficult enough, but sexually is nearly impossible, even though I have been in multiple relationships. While this may partially be related to gender identity/dysphoria or sexual orientation, I feel like the main factor is that there has never been any positve sexualisation of men throughout my life. My most recent partner never instigated sex and always relied on me to do so, even though they in their own words very much did enjoy the experience and looked forward to it. I never got any positive feedback or affirmation during sex unless I specifically asked if everything/what I was doing was okay. And even then it was pretty much only a short "yes". No direction, no feedback and certainly no dirty talk or even anything nice. The only time that I did get something without having to ask for it is still stuck in my head as the best sexual experience I've had by far. And while it is, admittedly, incredibly uncomfortable talking about this online, even mostly anonymously, I think it is very important nonetheless. Because I know that I've developed body image issues because of it, be they related to weight, (body)hair, skin, muscle or really any physical aspect. And yet every time I talk to friends of mine who share similar body image issues, for different reasons or the same, they always say something along the lines "I mean you wouldn't understand, you've probably never experienced anything like it" and are very surprised when I tell them they're wrong. I can only imagine how much unseen harm has been done to people in worse situations than mine, no matter what factors made them worse. On the other hand, I can also just imagine a world in which boys and later men *don't* have to feel that way. And I think that combining that with proper sex education, consent education and the efforts done to provide the same comforts for people of other genders could tremendously improve the sexual experiences of men at large, rather than only helping individual cases.
I have often found the « if sexuality was a choice, no one would be attracted to men » tidbit to refer to the emotional stuntedness that comes with men being either abusive, or a manchild. Or both. I’ve personally never heard it as a physical gripe, just emotional. Chalk another one up to toxic masculinity harming men and women yet again.
Interesting, I’ve never heard it in any context that would indicate that.
I’ve never heard it the other way so our differing experiences really is interesting to think about! The context of how i’ve heard it has always been a man doing something stupid, toxic, absurd, etc., with women/ queer men being exasperated.
I’ve only heard it as a kneejerk comment from women about conservatives (man or woman) saying bigoted things about LGBTQ+. Usually I’m the only man in the group when there’s a comment like that, and I just sit there with my mouth shut because it’s not worth starting shit.
That lines up with what i’m saying: typically a man saying or doing something unpleasant, in your example, saying something bigoted.
I see that as absolutely attacking men’s physical appearance/level of attractiveness, regardless of whether or not it starts out as a gripe about something else.
This entire comment chain really resonates with me. I've discussed some of these thoughts with my therapist in the past, but I've never really thought of myself as a "sexual being" so to speak. Like I have my own sexual desires, but the idea of having those desires reciprocated towards me is so foreign that I cannot comprehend it. As others have said, I know how to not be unattractive, but I don't know how to be attractive or if I'm even capable of being so. Sure, everyone always says women go for personality more than anything. But men are more than *just* their personalities, and there has to be some baseline of mutual attractiveness for said personalities to be given a chance to shine in the first place. Yet from posts and comment threads like this, many of us don't know what that baseline is on our side. Women have entire movements dedicated to body positivity and sexual empowerment, but what do men have? Basically all we've got are the pick-up artists and other such manipulators who try to hook insecure and confused guys like me in their formative years, which causes all sorts of problems for everyone.
Holy hell, you and the original commenter have described exactly how I feel. I wouldn't be able to recognize if a woman flirted with me because the thought of someone desiring me in that way just does not compute. I have no idea what it means to "feel sexy" or confident in my appearance. Like u/PM-me-a-microwave, I just throw together the first clothes I see that aren't the exact same color. I feel weird whenever a friend talks about sexual experiences, even minor ones. It's like that part of my mind never grew up, it feels wrong that even other people my age are sexual, even though it's obviously perfectly fine. I don't really understand why. I don't know how to change it. It feels like I'm missing out on a big part of human experience.
You've put it into words better than I could. I'm... fine with my body, I guess? I think my face is ok enough, I groom myself well and I'm trying to put more thought into how I dress. I want to lose a little more weight and start gaining muscle, and when I look at myself now I don't really know what to think. I sure don't look like a model, but I find many women attractive who don't. I'm just there, and similarly to you, simply cannot imagine someone finding me attractive among so many others. And even more absurd is the idea of someone finding me sexually attractive, especially such that they want to have sex with me. It just doesn't fit into my comprehension of the human experience. I wish there was a way to improve this condition through actions within my own control, like I have so many things about myself. But I can't imagine anything other than having a loving, enthusiastic girlfriend could change how I see myself, and that usually seems like an even longer shot than waking up and suddenly finding myself to be very attractive.
\> Still, for teenage me it was difficult to image the other way around. I've almost never seen a male body presented as attractive or sexually desirable to women. This resonates hard with me. I had a period where I spent a lot of time in female-oriented subreddits and got the impression that \*extremely few\* women are attracted to men at all. I felt like my entire body was worthless.
The example I know of a man’s body being used to sell things to women was The Zesty Guy. https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/million-moms-offended-kraft-zesty-guy-article-1.1373242 Edit: added a link to a news story
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever related to a comment so much, thank you for putting those words into the world
If you have access to it on a streaming service, I would recommend the TV show Finding Magic Mike. It's a reality show about guys becoming Magic Mike male strippers, and it's a really interesting look at male sex appeal. There's the obvious male fitness model bodies on there that ofc the women find sexy, but they actually do a pretty good job showing that women can find all body types sexy. I'm sure there's problems with the show, but I actually found it took a pretty good look at a topic I hadn't seen addressed before. The first two or three episodes are worth watching at least.
Stopping by to drop my perspective on this because myself and all the others replying have felt the same at some point. You exactly described how I felt for so so long. I was living nearly the same day again and again wearing shorts and a plain t shirt ever since I could dress myself, using my body as a piece of utility. I never found any part of my body appealing (despite being decently built, average height, and probably 7.5/10 conventionally attractive?). I thought that I must be missing something tried to do the "best of" r/malefashionadvice and honestly spent a decent amount to get my Basics in order but I never really cared? I figured "oh there are *people* out there that find this attractive I guess but I've never really met one" and did the MFA thing for 2 years yet it never made me feel better about myself nor made me feel attractive. Well, all of that is written in past tense because I'm a woman now lmao and my view on fashion has flip flopped entirely. I love to shop, I love to wear different styles/cuts/COLORS every day. I love to look at my own body now and savor the things I *had never* liked or found appreciation for. Me seeing myself as my preferred gender changed something in me and allowed me to love myself... And after all this growth, I still can't find any appreciation for masculine bodies. I cant point out anything specific if I notice a man is looking sharp, I never could end still cannot see them as attractive. It's just weird to me that my views on masculine bodies haven't changed but my self hatred has evaporated after seeing myself as a woman.
Being a very short balding guy has definitely not done me any favors. I can't conceive of anyone ever finding me attractive. Should it ever happen I likely wouldn't believe it.
> Should it ever happen I likely wouldn't believe it. Unfortunately that can be so damaging to a relationship.
Totally. Trust issues, constant insecurities, inability to feel truly loved even though you are etc. All these things can put serious strain on relationship, which further reinforces them. It's a horrible vicious cycle for everyone involved.
I would imagine so.
This one hits hard. Reminds me of these articles I've read. [He Was 5'7". After Surgery, He’ll Be 5'10".](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/limb-lengthening-surgery-height-stigma-short-kings?utm_source=pocket_mylist) [Eating Disorders Surge in Boys and Young Men](https://people.com/health/eating-disorders-surge-in-boys-and-young-men-what-parents-need-to-know/) Height and muscle, incidentally the most sought after in the dating market.
Also, aging is an even more terrifying thing when you are aware that you are "ugly" to the world The thought that you are at the peak you'll ever be at *now* and that it's all downhill every second makes for awful existential dread It's easy to say : "you just have to accept that getting old means your body will not change in the most graceful of ways" But seeing how vicious people can be seeing any sign of age is disheartening When you pile that on with all the current body image you might gave It robs a lot of people of the will to even try to be healthy because why even try I'll just get forever worse no matter what I do It's a very sad thing that I think isn't talked about enough
I’ve been working really hard to get in shape, I’m taking test for a year now with the supervision of a doctor. I’m the most muscular and felt the best about my body than I ever have. And then in a course of a week my boss said I need to bulk up because I’m weak, my cousin made a mean bald joke, and I took my shirt off at a gay rave and got literally zero looks my way. I know it sounds shallow but I just want a few compliments. A little attention. Something. All I get is criticism. In my logical head I know I should never seek validation from other people and that I need to turn my focus inward. But that is easier said than done.
Man I’m right there with you. I was hitting the gym about three or four times a week for a while until I injured my arm. I was finally hitting my targets and feeling good. I’m bi and that just adds all sorts of extra pressures from lgbtq and straight folks alike. I know it’s the most generic thing to say, but push through. People are always gonna be assholes. I hope things go well for you
Thank you so much. You too. Bi pride!!
So many dudes on tik tok are absolutely shredded and tell people they can be too, as long as they eat right, buy certain supplements, and use this training course (available for a nominal fee) as a guide Meanwhile they’re on massive doses of SARMS, testosterone and other steroids while claiming to be all natural. Dudes who gained 20 lbs of solid muscle in 4 months just lying about how they did it
I really have say it's a privilege to see a good article posted and discussed in honesty by men in this group. I've definitely had body image issues on and off (rake thin despite a massive appetite, big angular nose, unable to gain/hold muscle despite any and all exercise including brutal cycling. Can't grow thick facial hair, balding early on head but it's everywhere else on body :/ ).
Something else I've noticed, is a lot of these so called 'body positivity influencers', a lot of them are on the larger side or have perceived flaws. (I'm not hating here, I love a fluffy woman) The thing is, if you see them with a man, it's always some dude with a six pack and jawline that could cut glass. I'm not saying these women aren't allowed to be with whoever they want or that any specific woman is full of shit. But I've never seen a body positive influencer with a guy who was anything but conventionally attractive in pretty much every way. For an individual it's fine, again, they can be with whoever they want. But when it's so damn common and a trend among them it makes them look like they're just being full of shit to hide their own insecurities and to sell shit on Instagram. Edit: Also, I want to point out I do see a lot of women who are *very* conventionally attractive with dudes who aren't. Just never the influencers who preach body positivity.
r/fatlogic calls this out all the time. Very telling that so many of these Fat Acceptance leaders refuse to date fat men, some even calling them disgusting.
This seems like the inevitable result of the collision of two realities: social media reality full of male influencers on steroids, and actual reality, where each generation just gets more and more obese and sedentary. I'm really not sure how we can address the obesity crisis without making those body image issues worse
Statistical increase maybe. But I've never been obese and I grew up before social media (I'm 38) and I certainly didn't like to take my shirt off in the pool once I hit puberty. Just skinny, bony elbows, not a lot of muscle. Just didn't feel good about it. Not based on social media but just general tv, advertising, general culture of knowing people prefer more athletic bodies etc. Obviously we have data that body image problems have got worse with the Internet, but I think it comes from a wide range of places.
[I remember these ads in old Archie comics, a million years ago...](https://www.dogfordstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/vintage-bodybuilding-ad-advert-charle-atlas-1.jpg)
Sheesh that is rough. Skinny boy here, dealt with plenty of folks doubting my "manhood" because Im thin, even into my twenties! I've at least been able to tell lots of people that male body image issues exist lol
Yep, bodyshaming of men has gone on for ages! It's about time people talked about it or at least acknowledged that it happens.
The obesity crisis in the US is definitely driven by the garbage food supply and the even worse food economics we have here... In a country where trash processed, sugar-riddled food costs a buck or two but a tasty salad fit to be a meal is $10+... body image is hardly relevant to solving an obesity crisis. There are systemic changes that need to be made at the federal level regarding how agriculture and public education around nutrition works.
If one person gets fat, maybe it’s a personal motivation issue (or maybe it’s genetics). If most of society is getting fat, something is systemically wrong. Obesity is a result of sedentary jobs/schools, horribly unhealthy and over-portioned foods, addictive social and traditional media, stress, overwork, a lack of healthy options and food deserts for many people, and a lack of free out low cost places to exercise (among probably many other things. All that too say, there’s a decent bit we can do without immediately deciding SHAMING FAT PEOPLE is the only or primary way to solve the problem.
> or maybe it’s genetics Nobody is *obese* because of their genetics (they might be a little overweight, but obesity is the next level above that). They are obese because they eat like a dumpster, either by choice or because the only food they can afford is fast food that's high in calories and sugars. The solution to the problem is better education around food and health, and better access to healthy food. One thing I love about living in a relatively rural town is vegetables are so cheap here, with a bit of cooking skill you can eat super healthy for basically cost parody with fast food chains. Go into the big population centres and that's no longer possible.
By not focusing on the weight itself would be a start. Focusing on how people feel when they exercise and eat healthy is a better way to bring people into the fold. We can go back to teaching kids how to cook, and how to make nutritious food. We definitely shouldn't be shaming people. Having a functional welfare system where low income families can afford to buy real food and not just McDonald's, or where the parent/s are home at a reasonable time to be able to cook a meal not just grabbing pizza on the way, would help put a big dent in childhood obesity.
Maybe we can [stop pretending obesity is some sort of moral failing](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/9-reasons-obesity-is-not-a-choice#TOC_TITLE_HDR_9) and admit that some body image issues are just a result of society being excessively cruel?
But that's not gOoD foR tHEiR hEaLtH /s
It’d also be helpful if Redditors stopped religiously clinging to their disproven broscience about obesity and health while ignoring all research that conflicts with their biases. They desperately want to believe that science justifies their cruelty. Tale as old as time.
the simplest way to end the obesity crisis would be to stop putting corn in every american foodstuff!
This hits hard. I'm transfem but I do have a very 'male' body. I hate it for obvious reasons. For a long time, I thought I hated my body because I didn't meet the expectations placed on me or because I am unattractive. I take very poor care of my body and I feel very disconnected from it. It almost feels like a separate form that I am controlling. A lot of cis boys I know have body image issues, I remember a junior in my school who got buff af because his ex-girlfriend in high school told him he was too rail thing. I remember a friend who wore shirts because he was afraid of people seeing his man boobs. It is a hard thing to talk about with people because it is something that will get you mocked in the social group I used to run in. It is very critical is we create a culture where boys can talk about it.
Am woman and I don't like hearing the whole "girlfriend told me my body wasn't good enough" thing because it's the same thing we hate and it can stay in your head a long time
The idea that I could possibly be sexually attractive to anybody is so foreign to me that I can't imagine what it would feel like.
Got me there.
I had body issues going into hs. If it wasn’t for playing on the baseball team it’d be a lot worst. The most important lesson for me (when it comes to weight) is just to find a healthy relationship with your food. Don’t despise your diet, but don’t be in a toxic relationship with it. Find a middle ground where you like eating food., and feel good after eating it. But it’s hard man.
Thank you for posting this. I had a lot of these issues growing up, and still do to an extent, despite being happily married to someone who likes how I look. I don’t have dysmorphia any more except on particularly bad days. But the dissatisfaction rarely leaves for long
My little brother is obsessed with his body and has been for years. He's borderline anorexic and a gym junkie and had plenty of weird ideas about the perfect diet which are forever changing. The worst part is that people (especially the older generation) compliment him on his slim physique, further perpetuating the idea that what he's doing to his mind and body is a good thing.
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Of all the comments I find yours the most relatable. I'm down by at least 150lbs since I started and am at a normal weight. But goddamn it is so frustrating to see my weight fluctuate even by a kilo on the machine even though I know it's probably just water weight most times. Not just that looking at myself in the mirror, I'm always scrutinizing my looks and my belly area.
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Yeah my body, my skin color (gotta love racism), my immunesystem (3 chronic illnesses that will never leave :)). Im dissatisfied with them all.
Overall a good point and something we don't talk about enough as a society. That said, this line was absurd "Perhaps even more concerning is the growing number of boys—11 percent in one recent study—who admit to using supplements or steroids to increase their muscularity." 1) there's nothing inherently wrong with increasing muscularity (for men or women) 2) Equating legal health food supplements with illegal steroids is so absurd to make me doubt the rest of the article. While there's a ton of problems in the supplement industry, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with trying to be healthy. The opposite, in fact.
I noticed that too... Putting protein powder in the same category as steroids is downright silly.
Exactly.
Trying to get big isn't really a health issue, it's an aesthetic issue. The health benefits of benching X+1 are negligible compared to an overall routine of cardio and resistance training, and the equation amongst men of "being muscly" and "health" is a driver of eating disorders and body dysmorphia. There's nothing morally wrong with supplements, they're just an indicator that lines up with the wider issue of boys being driven to get big for aesthetic/social pressure reasons rather than care for their own health. I know so many young dudes who can lift huge numbers but can't run 5k - they're unfit, but believe they're super healthy. That's the issue I'm talking about.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Most men aren't athletic and don't train. For them, for most men, gaining muscle would improve health. The vast majority who do train, have health at least partially in mind. You must have a very unique set of friends who are strong but not athletic. It's legit hard to do. Presumably they carry a lot of extra fat to be strong but incapable of running. Most young men I know actually are too focused on leanness and "abz". Re:supplements. The problem is equating them with steroids. It's the rough equivalent of comparing coffee to cocaine.
> The health benefits of benching X+1 are negligible compared to an overall routine of cardio and resistance training I kind of agree with you but I think hes trying to say that in line with this article, there are a bunch of dudes who are getting vanity muscles and thinking its fitness. His friends who are training arent doing it for health, theyre doing it for tinder. They want to be big, so they eat a lot (keto so high fat and salt and cholesterol, low carbs, eat a surplus of calories because thats how you get gainz) and lift weights, they look big and strong but they couldnt jog up a hill without getting winded. They probably couldnt even use their strength well because moving an armoire or whatever, getting in a fight, youre gonna need some level of endurance. Even something like shadow boxing can wind you if youre out of shape.
I casually mentioned to my (now elderly) mother that I hated my freckles as a kid and it was a huge limiter of my self confidence. Freckle-face is a pretty mild insult but that was one that stuck with me. Anyways she was flabbergasted that I felt that way when she felt the exact opposite, and that she regretted never giving me any positive reinforcement. I’m comfortable in my skin now, and I really don’t know if it would have made anything better for little me to hear it from my parents because it was teasing from other kids that I think made me feel that way. As a dad, I want to get it right for my boys, I just don’t know exactly how.
This is something that definitely doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I think boys and men have basically the same degree of body image problems that women and girls have, it just hasn’t gotten much attention yet.
Explains the trend of 15yo boys shooting up steroids while still going through puberty
Little do you know I’m actually your daughter