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

The Bully in the Mirror
Now let it be said that measuring the
styrene hamstrings of G.I. Joe does
not represent 20th-century science
at its most glorious. But Pope says
it's a way to get at what he calls
"evolving American cultural ideals
of male body image." Those ideals,
he maintains, create "cultural
expectations" that may contribute to
body-image disorders in men.
"People misinterpreted our findings
to assume that playing with toys, in
and of itself, caused kids to develop One way to get a "foot in the door": carry a
six-pack, courtesy of the McBurney Y.
into neurotic people as they grew up
who abused anabolic steroids," Pope said. "Of course that was not our
conclusion. We simply chose the toys because they were symptomatic of what
we think is a much more general trend in our society."
Since the early 1990's, evidence has emerged suggesting that a small number of
adult males suffer from extreme body-image disorders. In 1993, in a study of
steroid use among male weight lifters, Pope discovered that 10 percent of the
subjects "perceived themselves as physically small and weak, even though they
were in fact large and muscular." Researchers termed this syndrome "reverse
anorexia nervosa" and started looking for more cases. Two years ago, the Pope
group renamed this disorder "muscle dysmorphia," the more specialized
condition that involves an obsessive preoccupation with muscularity. Men who
were clearly well developed and, by anyone's standards, exceedingly muscular,
repeatedly expressed the feeling that they were too small, too skinny and too
weak, to the point that their obsessive quest to build up their bodies began to
interfere with work and relationships -- in short, their entire lives.
"It's very hard to document trends like this in quantitative terms," Pope said,
"because people who are insecure about their body appearance are unlikely to
come out of the woodwork to confess that they're insecure about their body
appearance. And so it is an epidemic which by definition is covert. But it clearly
has become a much more widespread concern among men in the United States."
lexander said he felt that insecurity at a visceral level. He was not only
overweight, but also undersize. "I've been called short umpteen times," he
said during a pause in his routine, and the only time I saw a hint of visible
anger in his face was when he talked about being discriminated against because
of being short.
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