Synopsis
Combining case studies with scientific research, this book reveals a threat that is as serious as the beauty myth for women or anorexia nervosa for girls. Growing numbers of young men are taking the quest for perfect muscles, skin and hair too far, crossing the line from normal interest to abnormal obsession. The symptoms of this body obsession, excessive workouts, steroid abuse, eating disorders, and body and muscle dysmorphic disorder lead to problems with sex and intimacy, relationships and work. This book shows what men really think and feel about their bodies, so no-one need suffer alone.
Extrait
Chapter One: Secrets of the Men at the Olympic Gym
It is 6 P.M. on a warm spring evening in a small city ten miles west of Boston. In an industrial park near the highway, the two-storied, white-brick Olympic Gym is surrounded by nearly half an acre of parking, but the lot is overflowing with cars. Some are old Fords and Chevys belonging to students at the nearby college; others are the pickups and delivery trucks of tradesmen and service men who've stopped to lift weights after work. There are also pristine Corvettes and Porsches, a Mercedes or two, and half a dozen BMWs. Every social class in America has come here to work out.
Inside, the frenetic beat of "Get Ready for This" is punctuated by the occasional clanging of a weight stack on a machine, or a 45-pound plate being loaded onto a bar. Although the gym has half an acre of floor space, it still seems crowded. Groups of weightlifters cluster around the cables and the squat racks; others wait to use the lat pull-down machine or the Roman chair. A blond-haired twenty-six-year-old trainer instructs a prominent Boston attorney on the fine points of abdominal exercises. The gym's owner is out on the floor, giving a tour of the facilities to two young high school students who want to sign up. Wide-eyed and slightly frail-looking, they glance furtively at two big bodybuilders doing shoulder presses at the dumbbell rack nearby. Dozens of treadmills, StairMasters, stationary bicycles, and ergometers hum and whir on the balcony overhead. At the front counter, a handsome, highly muscular staff member, still in his teens, smiles brightly and mixes protein shakes in a blender as groups of clients joke together, read magazines, and search for their car keys among the hundreds of key rings hanging on the big pegboard on the wall. And this is only the evening crowd. At five-thirty tomorrow morning, twenty or thirty people will line up at the door, waiting eagerly for the gym to open. A hundred more will show up over the next couple of hours to lift weights before work. They will be followed by dozens of lunchtime regulars, with many stragglers in between.
The Olympic Gym has 2,400 members, and it is only one of several gyms in this small city of 60,000. All over the United States, in small towns, suburbs, and cities, big gyms like this one have their own large and faithful followings. In greater Boston alone, the major gyms collectively count well over 100,000 members -- and some metropolitan areas have far more. As recently as twenty or thirty years ago, you would hardly ever see a crowd like this at any gym, with the possible exception of a few hard-core bodybuilding establishments in Southern California. But over the last two decades, gym memberships have exploded across America.
More than two-thirds of the people working out at the Olympic Gym tonight are men. Some wear old T-shirts and dirty cutoff shorts; others are carefully dressed in striped workout pants and Olympic Gym sweatshirts; a few wear deep-cut tank tops and tight spandex shorts, carefully chosen to show off their musculature. But the "muscleheads" are only a small minority of the gym community. Most of the members are ordinary-looking guys: they're a slice of America, ranging from squeaky-voiced boys of twelve or thirteen to gray-haired elders in their seventies.
You would think that the men at the Olympic Gym, or any gym, would be happy with their bodies. After all, they're here getting in shape rather than vegetating on the couch watching TV after work. But surprisingly, many aren't content at all. Many, in fact, harbor nagging anxieties about how they look. They don't talk about it publicly -- and they may not even admit it to themselves -- but they suffer silently from chronic shame and low self-esteem about their bodies and themselves. And many are obsessed with trying to change how they look. Beneath the seemingly benign exterior of this scene at Olympic, and among millions of other men around the country, a crisis is brewing.
If we begin to look carefully around the gym, we see hints of this crisis everywhere. John and Mark, both twenty-four-year-old graduate students at a nearby university, are at the counter debating what kinds of protein supplements to buy from the bewildering display of boxes that crowd the wall. Many of the boxes boast "supermale" images: photographs of smiling bodybuilders with massive shoulders, rock-hard pectorals, and impossibly sculptured and chiseled abdominal muscles. All of the supermales exude health, power, and sexuality. Not even the biggest bodybuilder at the Olympic Gym resembles these images, and John and Mark don't come close -- even though they've been lifting weights for years and have spent thousands of dollars on nutritional supplements they hoped would thin their waists, stomachs, and buttocks, while swelling their chests, arms, and thighs. Privately, John and Mark are slightly embarrassed that they don't even begin to look like the guys in the pictures. But they've never admitted these concerns to anyone.
Supermale images appear not only on the boxes of protein powder, but throughout the gym. They're on magazine covers in the waiting area, on posters on the walls, and on a clothes advertisement posted on the bulletin board. John examines a magazine showing amazing "before" and "after" pictures of a middle-aged man who appears to have transformed in three months from a couch potato into a muscle-bound hunk, allegedly with the help of the food supplement advertised. John has tried a lot of food supplements himself, and he wonders why he still hasn't achieved the same Herculean image. All of these displays convey the same message to men: If you're a real man, you should look bigger and better than you do.
While John may feel as though he's the only guy at the gym who's so worried about his appearance and size, in reality he's surrounded by many others with similar secret feelings. But lost in his own thoughts of insecurity, John doesn't seem to notice all the other men who are covertly checking out their reflections in the big mirrors that line the walls. When they're sure that nobody is looking, some flex their arms, puff out their chests, or suck in their stomachs, almost as a reflex gesture. They don't say anything, of course. But many, like John, can't stop thinking about the discrepancy between the image in the mirror and the one they desperately want.
Alan, a math teacher from nearby Cambridge, notices, for the tenth or the twentieth time that day, the stubborn ring of fat that has accumulated around his abdomen in the years since college. Bob, a truckdriver, wears a baseball cap with the visor turned back, even though he's thirty-eight years old and the baseball-cap look is usually reserved for teenagers. But he'd rather wear the cap than expose his "prematurely" receding hairline. Meanwhile, John himself wears three layers of shirts -- a T-shirt, then a regular shirt on top, and then a sweatshirt on top of that. He's sweating inside all of those layers, but they make him look bigger, and he's ashamed of how small he'd look without them. Bertrand, an attorney in his fifties who arrived a few minutes earlier in an immaculate, six-foot-high sport utility vehicle, despondently eyes his unappealing reflection in the mirror next to the drinking fountain. Above the drinking fountain, a poster of a famous bodybuilder twice his size, majestically posing on a rocky summit in the desert, stares back at him.
These are men who have achieved success in their careers; some are leaders in their community. They come from different classes, races, and sociological backgrounds. But they are all victims of a relentless message: You don't look good enough. Most of the time, men are unable to talk to each other about this message and the inferiority it makes them feel. So the message gets louder, the problem becomes bigger, and the isolation grows deeper.
Three college students arrive and head into the locker room. They're laughing and joking with each other, exchanging gossip about a party last weekend, while they get ready to go out onto the gym floor. But once they're in the locker room, none of them actually takes off his clothes in front of the others. Although they haven't shared their feelings with one another, one of the young men is terribly ashamed of the acne scars on his back. Another is convinced he's too fat, and he's especially upset at the "female" fat that he thinks has accumulated under his nipples. The third privately worries that his penis is too small. Even though they've been good friends for years, none of these young men has felt comfortable enough to reveal these secret concerns to any other person.
MALE BODY IMAGE OBSESSION:
A TROUBLING DOUBLE BIND
In our research at Harvard and Brown Medical Schools, and in studies collaborating with scientists across the country and overseas, the three of us have met countless otherwise "normal" boys and men who share these same feelings of inadequacy, unattractiveness, and even failure. By interviewing hundreds of men working out at gyms, and compiling our collective clinical experience with the hundreds more who have seen us at our offices, we've learned that men like John, Alan, Bob, Bertrand, and the three college students represent a broad and growing group who feel insecure and anxious -- even paralyzed -- by how they look. Society is telling them now, more than ever before, that their bodies define who they are as men. Because they find it impossible to meet this supermale standard, they are turning their anxiety and humiliation inward.
On the surface, most of the boys and men we've talked with, and the millions of other men like them across the country and around the globe, lead what appear to be regular, well-adjusted lives. In fact, the vast majority would never dream of going to see a mental health professional. But behind the smiling, behind the cheerful athletic bravado, many of these men worry about their looks and their masculinity. Some are even clinically depressed, and many are intensely self-critical. Because these men carry a secret that they're uncomfortable sharing even with their closest loved ones, their self-doubts can become almost toxic, insidiously eating away at their self-esteem and self-confidence as men.
Indeed, many of these men, we believe, are caught in a double bind they can neither understand nor escape. On the one hand, they're increasingly surrounded with media images of masculine perfection -- not just here in the gym, but in advertisements, on television, in the movies. And if this alone weren't enough to make them feel inadequate about their bodies, they're also bombarded with messages from burgeoning multibillion-dollar industries that capitalize upon their body insecurities. These "male body image industries" -- purveyors of food supplements, diet aids, fitness programs, hair-growth remedies, and countless other products -- now prey increasingly on men's worries, just as analogous industries have preyed for decades on the appearance-related insecurities of women.
But the problem gets compounded further. Women, over the years, have gradually learned -- at least to some extent -- how to confront society's and the media's impossible ideals of beauty. Many women can now recognize and voice their appearance concerns, speaking openly about their reactions to these ideals, rather than letting them fester inside. But men still labor under a societal taboo against expressing such feelings. Real men aren't supposed to whine about their looks; they're not even supposed to worry about such things. And so this "feeling and talking taboo" adds insult to injury: to a degree unprecedented in history, men are being made to feel more and more inadequate about how they look -- while simultaneously being prohibited from talking about it or even admitting it to themselves.
And so, trapped between impossible ideals on the one side and taboos against feeling and talking on the other, millions of boys and men are suffering. For some, body image concerns have grown into outright psychiatric disorders, ruining their own lives and often the lives of those who care about and love them. And for every boy or man with a full-scale body image disorder, there are many more with milder cases of the same body obsessions -- not disabling in any way, but still enough to hurt.
THE ADONIS COMPLEX:
MEN UNHAPPY WITH THEIR BODIES
We call this syndrome the "Adonis Complex." In Greek mythology, Adonis was half man and half god -- the ultimate in masculine beauty. So beautiful was his body that he won the love of Aphrodite, queen of the gods. But Persephone, who had raised Adonis, refused to give him up to Aphrodite. So Zeus, the king of the gods, brokered a deal: Adonis would spend four months out of every year in the underworld with Persephone, four months with Aphrodite, and four months on his own. It is said that he chose to spend his own personal four months with Aphrodite as well.
Throughout the centuries, many a great artist has attempted to depict the physical perfection of Adonis. Most famously, the Renaissance painter Titian shows him about to go hunting with his dogs, with Aphrodite clutching his body in her arms. The body of Adonis presumably represents the ultimate male physique imaginable to a sixteenth-century artist -- but Titian's Adonis looks fat and out of shape in comparison to the men pictured on the boxes of protein powder at the Olympic Gym.
We should note that "Adonis Complex" isn't an official medical term, and it doesn't describe any one body image problem of men. We use it in this book to refer to an array of usually secret, but surprisingly common, body image concerns of boys and men. These concerns range from minor annoyances to devastating and sometimes even life-threatening obsessions -- from manageable dissatisfaction to full-blown psychiatric body image disorders. In one form or another, the Adonis Complex touches millions of boys and men -- and inevitably, the women in their lives.
Nowadays, it seems, increasing numbers of boys and men, including some of those lifting weights tonight at the Olympic Gym, have become fixated on achieving a perfect, Adonis-like body. Take Scott, for example. He's a twenty-six-year-old personal trainer at the gym. Right now, he isn't training anybody because it's his own time to lift. He's just started his leg routine -- three sets of squats, two sets of leg presses, two or three sets of leg extensions on a Nautilus machine, three sets of leg curls on another machine, and then on to some hack squats, leg abductions, and side leg raises. The whole routine will take him an hour and a half, and then he still has to do his calves for another half hour after that. He's working out alone, because he doesn't like any distractions to come between him and the weights.
To a casual observer, Scott seems like a perfect picture of fitness and health. Five feet nine inches tall, with shortly cropped dark brown hair and handsome facial features, Scott weighs 180 pounds and has only 7 percent body fat, making him leaner than at least 98 percent of American men his age. Beneath his worn gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, he has the proportions of a Greek statue. He has a 31-inch waist, a "six-pack" of sculptured abdominal muscles, a 46-inch chest, and shoulders as big as grapefruits. But surprisingly, and unknown to even many of his closest friends, Scott constantly fears that he isn't big enough.
As a result, Scott has surprisingly low self-esteem. He puts all his hopes and dreams into his workouts and not into his daily life. This makes him withdraw from others and hold himself back from social situations he would otherwise enjoy....
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