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 />
the past decade -- of men, not boys -- have suggested that "body-image<br />
disturbances," as researchers sometimes call them, may be more prevalent in<br />
men than previously believed and almost always begin in the teen-age years.<br />
Katharine Phillips, a psychiatrist at the Brown University School of Medicine,<br />
has specialized in "body dysmorphic disorder," a psychiatric illness in which<br />
patients become obsessively preoccupied with perceived flaws in their<br />
appearance -- receding hairlines, facial imperfections, small penises, inadequate<br />
musculature. In a study on "30 cases of imagined ugliness," Phillips and<br />
colleagues described a surprisingly common condition in males whose<br />
symptoms include excessive checking of mirrors and attempts to camouflage<br />
imagined deformities, most often of the hair, nose and skin. <strong>The</strong> average age of<br />
onset, Phillips says, is 15.<br />
Two years ago, Harrison G. Pope Jr., of Harvard Medical School, and his<br />
colleagues published a modest paper called "Muscle Dysmorphia: An<br />
Underrecognized Form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder" in a relatively obscure<br />
journal called Psychosomatics. <strong>The</strong> study described a group of men and women<br />
who had become "pathologically preoccupied" by their body image and were<br />
convinced that they looked small and puny, even though they were bulging with<br />
muscles. <strong>The</strong> paper got a lot of attention, and it led to an even more widely<br />
publicized study earlier this year from the same lab reporting how male<br />
action-figure toys like G.I. Joe and the "Star Wars" characters have bulked up<br />
over the years.<br />
Of all<br />
body-image<br />
issues, size is<br />
the most<br />
important,<br />
because it leads<br />
to a kind of<br />
involuntary<br />
self-definition.<br />
<strong>The</strong> kids were<br />
called Mouse.<br />
String Bean.<br />
Little J.<br />
Leprechaun.<br />
Recent figures on cosmetic surgery indirectly<br />
confirm the anecdotal sense that men are going to<br />
greater extremes to improve their appearances.<br />
Women still account for about 90 percent of all<br />
procedures, but the number of men undergoing<br />
cosmetic surgery rose about 34 percent between<br />
1996 and 1998, with liposuction being the most<br />
sought service. "Basically, men in general are<br />
getting the same medicine that women have had to<br />
put up with for years, which was trying to match an<br />
unattainable ideal in terms of body image," says<br />
Pope, who has focused his studies on college-age<br />
men just past adolescence. "Boys are much more<br />
prone at this point to worry about being beefed up,<br />
about having muscles," says Mary Pipher, a<br />
psychologist and the author of "Reviving Ophelia,"<br />
a book about adolescent girls. "As we've<br />
commodified boys' bodies to sell products, with<br />
advertisements that show boys as bodies without<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/199908<strong>22</strong>mag-boys-self-image.html (5 of 18) [8/<strong>22</strong>/1999 9:17:<strong>22</strong> PM]