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

The Bully in the Mirror
that his physical appearance made him a social outcast and a target -- neither of
which is a good thing to be in early adolescence.
hen you visit the office of Harrison (Skip) Pope, in a grim institutional
building on the rolling grounds of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.,
the first thing you notice are the calipers hanging on the wall -- partly as
objets d'art, but partly as a reminder that what we subjectively consider attractive
can sometimes yield to objective measurement. Pope, after all, was one of the
scientists who devised what might be called the Buff Equation, or: FFMI = W x
(1-BF/100) x h-2 + 6.1 x (1.8-H).
The formula is ostensibly used to calculate a person's Fat-free Mass Index; it has
sniffed out presumed steroid use by Mr. America winners, professional
bodybuilders and men whose unhealthy preoccupation with looking muscular
has induced them to use drugs.
Pope is a wiry, compact psychiatrist who can squat 400 pounds in his spare time.
("You can reach me pretty much all day except from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.," he told
me, "when I'm at the gym.") I had gone to see him and his colleague Roberto
Olivardia not only because they were the lead authors on the G.I. Joe study, but
also because their studies of body-image disorders in slightly older
postadolescent men may be the best indicator yet of where male body-image
issues are headed.
Shortly after I arrived, Olivardia emptied a shopping bag full of male action dolls
onto a coffee table in the office. The loot lay in a heap, a plastic orgy of
superhero beefcake -- three versions of G.I. Joe (Hasbro's original 1964 version
plus two others) and one G.I. Joe Extreme, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in
their 1978 and mid-90's versions, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Batman,
Superman, Iron Man and Wolverine. The inspiration for the whole study came
from . . . an adolescent girl. Pope's 13-year-old daughter, Courtney, was surfing
the Web one night, working on a school project on how Barbie's body had
radically changed over the years, and Pope thought to himself, There's got to be
the male equivalent of that.
Once Pope and Olivardia gathered new and "vintage" action figures, they
measured their waist, chest and biceps dimensions and projected them onto a
5-foot-10 male. Where the original G.I. Joe projected to a man of average height
with a 32-inch waist, 44-inch chest and 12-inch biceps, the more recent figures
have not only bulked up, but also show much more definition. Batman has the
equivalent of a 30-inch waist, 57-inch chest and 27-inch biceps. "If he was your
height," Pope told me, holding up Wolverine, "he would have 32-inch biceps."
Larger, that is, than any bodybuilder in history.
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