Standards of beauty: How to change the concept of male appearance
Recently, the topic of perception of one’s own body is being discussed more and more, and it is gratifying: after all, the way we treat our own and someone else's appearance directly affects our state, both physical and psychological. To live when you actively dislike yourself is at least an unpleasant and painful task, and loving your body, when from each magazine you see models that are retouched to unnaturalness is actually difficult.
Discussing problems in the so-called body image, while more often talk about female physicality. There is nothing bad or surprising in this: firstly, for obvious reasons, the female body throughout the history of mankind has been subjected to objectification much more. Secondly, feminism deals with the problems and protection of women's rights, while there are still very few defenders of the rights of men who do not consider their fight against "aggressive femini" their main goal. Nevertheless, men in the same way see in the media “ideal” bodies and also do not remain intact.
Public perception of beauty is a tangled tangle of social demands with many sources of pressure. Conventional standards of appearance are formed depending on racial, cultural, class prerequisites. The ideal of the male body, unlike the female, throughout the history of mankind has changed little: it is always toned muscular body, like the statue of David. However, in the last 50-60 years, the importance of muscle mass has grown rapidly: the men on the covers, the heroes of comics, and even toy soldiers become more tall and muscular.
The more unrealistic images of people of all genders we see, the greater our dissatisfaction with our own body grows and the more stringent our requirements for ourselves and those around us. The gap between our real bodies and our ideas about how an ideal figure should look is constantly increasing. And men, too, are victims of the system of oppression, from which only women had suffered, with rare exceptions. Moreover, the situation was tangled as women won the right to be independent - including in the choice of a partner, which turns into the right to choose a beautiful partner. As a result, women are still more often put forward to conventional requirements for men’s appearance.
Of course, gender-colored priorities still dominate in society, and especially in Russia: we grow up on the stereotype that “a girl should be beautiful and a boy should be smart” - we have been promoting this idea from childhood in cartoons and books. In this world, appearance is considered almost the main criterion for assessing women and one of the few socially acceptable ways of self-realization. Self-esteem in men is much less dependent on compliance with beauty standards, and the standards themselves are less strict: being "ugly" and "unkempt" for a man is a much smaller psychological and social problem than for a woman.
Conventional beauty in general is strongly tied to ideas of femininity and masculinity. Roughly speaking, the collective mind believes that the most beautiful women are the most feminine women, and the most beautiful men are the most courageous men. Of course, centuries-old judgments about "femininity" and "masculinity" also did not come from the ceiling.
Ideas about male appearance are heteronormative by default and are very strongly tied to the idea of strength and power. A man must be taller than a woman, bigger than a woman and physically stronger. In patriarchal cultures, the stereotype that a man should be “mighty, smelly and hairy” clearly describes the requirements for men: a beard is perceived as a definite symbol of masculinity, adolescents who do not grow mustaches hide it from their peers, and men who take care of themselves are suspected of homosexual "inclinations." The society as a whole is much more tolerant to the same hairy male armpits than to the female, and the conservative society is likely to look askance at a man with smooth legs.
Double standards are particularly noticeable in all that relates to the visual manifestations of age: wrinkles, like scars, “paint a man,” being a marker of experience, wisdom and the next power, that a woman, of course, from the point of view of patriarchal discourse is not at all . Evidence can be found not only on the notorious Star Wars poster, but also in thousands of movie plots about a man in years and a girl two times younger. However, advertising and gloss often insist that a man must be clean-shaven and have a smooth-torso, and thus form a new ideal, in many ways more severe. Lack of hair on the body is the first requirement, hypertrophied muscles are the second.
It is not surprising that the most common problem of perception of the body in men is dysmorphophobia, in particular, muscular dysmorphia, inadequate perception of one’s own body and an obsession with some of its deficiencies, which are actually absent. For example, the obsessive desire for thinness leads a person to the idea that he weighs much more than it actually is. This can lead to complete exhaustion - suffering from this mental disorder lost weight until they needed medical intervention, and it is good if they received it on time.
For the first time about this disease started talking at the end of the XIX century, but the modern amount of information and the speed of its distribution make it much more frequent. Researchers and authors of the popular-science book Adonis Effect claim that “muscle dysmorphia is a new syndrome in which boys and men believe that they are not sufficiently pumped up. They don’t see what they really look like. When these men look in the mirror , they think that they look small and brittle, despite the fact that they are actually big - it looks like anorexia nervosa on the contrary. "
Muscular dysmorphy in men rarely leads to death, but often causes them to exhaust themselves in the gym, take steroids and other drugs of not always proven quality and origin - all in order to meet the standards of male beauty. Naturally, this can lead to a whole set of problems, from psychological to physical. Drugs taken without control by the doctor beat on internal organs, excessive loads lead to exhaustion, and unhealthy self-perception and obsessional attempts to “correct the shortcomings” result in depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies.
It would be sad to think that nothing can be done about it or that the situation does not change for the better. Fortunately, there is hope. Beauty standards on all sides are being criticized more and more. More companies refuse to retouch, and brands choose to show "ordinary" people. Last year, the so-called dad bod (literally, "daddy's body") was actively discussed in the context of the male body image. And although the argument “not all girls like pitching” has the same flaws as the proverb “men are not dogs, they don’t throw themselves at the bone,” any public discussion is better than not.
Moreover, social networks, which have long been no longer just a means of communication with old acquaintances, provide a platform for those who have no place in traditional media yet. There are more and more men who in various ways put the ideas of traditional masculinity into question: they do not hesitate to love fashion and cosmetics and openly refuse to strive for the hypertrophied masculine ideal.
Any constructive new idea, including a bodipositive, initially meets with mistrust and a lot of counter-arguments based on outdated logic or delusions. The ingrained bundle of “thinness = beauty = health” leads to the idea that body-positive for all genders glorifies laziness and contradicts the very idea of working on oneself. According to many, to condemn complete, unsportsmanlike and just "not so" good and right, because it supposedly motivates them to develop and / or monitor their health.
The extreme degree of this logic is that everyone who preaches a variety of beauty is simply weak and unable to force himself. But, first of all, shame and self-hatred are not effective - in most cases it is destructive experiences. People who lose weight with such motivation are more inclined to choose unhealthy ways to achieve the desired weight and hold it worse. Secondly, in addition to physical health, there is still a mental one, and the chance in pursuit of six dice to get a nervous orthorexia is a very dubious prospect.
The more and louder we say that reality is different from what we see in movies and glossy magazines, that everyone has folds, places that shake while running, and second chins, that people are not perfect at all and there is nothing it’s terrible that men are not made of “real” men, but women are not waspine waist, the easier it will be for us to accept ourselves and each other, and, eventually, to create a society in which people of all genders can look and live as comfortable
Photo: Calvin Klein, DSQUARED2, Phaidon, Baldessarini, Rag & Bone, Bytom, Acne, Andrew Coimbra, Opening Ceremony, Pigalle Paris
