The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

The Bully in the Mirror
been teased and harassed about
being short in stature. Like me, he
had struggled to overcome his
physical shortcomings as a member
of the high-school wrestling team.
Unlike me, he also battled a severe
weight problem, but at a similar
moment in life, we had both looked
in the mirror and hadn't liked what
we'd seen.
Still, a lot has changed since I was
15. Consider the current batch of
cold messages from the culture at
large. The new anabolic Tarzan.
The mirror on the wall tells James, Mickey and
Adel whether they "fit" in — or not.
"Chicks dig the long ball." Littleton. (Buried beneath a ton of prose about gun
control was the report that Eric Harris apparently felt dissatisfied with his height,
repeatedly complaining that he was smaller than his brother.)
Aggressive advertising campaigns showing half-naked men in which the
Obsession could just as easily be about your own very toned body as about
someone else's. Even a lawsuit at the higher echelons of American business
peeled away the pretense of adult civility to show that the classic junior-high
body-image put-down -- Michael Eisner dissing Jeffrey Katzenberg as a "little
midget" -- is alive and well in the boardroom, as it has been in the locker room
for decades. You would never know that for the past quarter-century, feminist
thought and conversation has created room for alternatives to traditional
masculinity, in which toughness is equated with self-worth and physical stature
is equated with moral stature.
No one can quite cite any data, any scientific studies proving that things are
different, but a number of psychologists with whom I spoke returned to the same
point again and again: the cultural messages about an ideal male body, if not
new, have grown more insistent, more aggressive, more widespread and more
explicit in recent years.
Since roughly 90 percent of teen-agers who are treated for eating disorders are
female, boys still have a way to go. Young girls have suffered greatly from
insecurity about appearance and body image, and the scientific literature on
anorexia and related body-image disorders depicts a widespread and serious
health problem in adolescent females. But to hear some psychologists tell it,
boys may be catching up in terms of insecurity and even psychological
pathology. An avalanche of recent books on men and boys underlines the
precarious nature of contemporary boyhood in America. A number of studies in
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