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

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