The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
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<strong>The</strong> Bully in the Mirror<br />
In this weight room, in a gym in a northern <strong>New</strong> Jersey suburb, the gym rats<br />
have a nickname for Alexander: Mirror Boy. That's a vast improvement over the<br />
nicknames he endured at school not long ago. "I know it sounds kind of odd to<br />
have favorite insults," he told me with a wry smile, munching on a protein bar<br />
before moving on to his next set of lifts, "but Chunk Style always was kind of<br />
funny." And kind of appropriate. Until recently, Alexander carried nearly 210<br />
pounds on a 5-foot-6 frame, and when I asked if he was teased about his weight,<br />
he practically dropped a dumbbell on my feet. "Oh! Oh, man, was I teased? Are<br />
you kidding?" he said in his rapid, agreeable patter. "When I was fat, people<br />
must have gone home and thought of nothing else except coming in with new<br />
material the next day. <strong>The</strong>y must have had study groups just to make fun of<br />
people who were overweight." He even got an earful at home. "My parents --<br />
God bless them, but they would make comments all the time. My father would<br />
say, 'If you eat all that, you'll be as big as a house.' And I'm, like: 'Dad, it's a little<br />
late for that. What am I now? A mobile home?"'<br />
<strong>The</strong> day of reckoning came in April 1998, during a spring-break vacation in<br />
Boca Raton, Fla. As his family was about to leave its hotel room to go to the<br />
beach, Alexander, then 15, stood in front of a mirror and just stared at the<br />
spectacle of his shirtless torso. "I remember the exact, like, moment in my mind,"<br />
he said. "Everything about that room is burned into my head, every little thing. I<br />
can tell you where every lamp was, where my father was standing, my mother<br />
was sitting. We were about to go out, and I'm looking in this mirror -- me, with<br />
my gut hanging over my bathing suit -- and it was, like: Who would want to look<br />
at this? It's part of me, and I'm disgusted! That moment, I realized that nobody<br />
was giving me a chance to find out who I was because of the way I looked."<br />
And so Alexander decided to do something about it, something drastic.<br />
here is a kind of timeless, archetypal trajectory to a teen-ager's battle with<br />
body image, but in most accounts the teen-ager is female and the issue is<br />
anorexia or bulimia. As any psychologist knows, however, and as any<br />
sufficiently evolved adult male could tell you, boys have body-image problems,<br />
too. Traditionally, they have felt pressure to look not thin, but rather strong and<br />
virile, which increasingly seems to mean looking bulked up and muscular, and<br />
that is why I was interested in talking to Alexander.<br />
Although more than 30 years in age separates us, hearing him give voice to his<br />
insecurities, to imagined physical flaws, reminded me all over again of my own<br />
tortured passage through adolescence, my own dissatisfaction with a body that<br />
seemed punitively untouched by any growth spurt and my own reluctant<br />
accommodation with certain inalienable facts of nature. Like me, Alexander had<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/199908<strong>22</strong>mag-boys-self-image.html (3 of 18) [8/<strong>22</strong>/1999 9:17:<strong>22</strong> PM]