It isn’t the same for men though. If a man puts on weight then the thought of the nation is that he has just given up on life. Almost every advertisement for a male product is fronted by the ‘ideal man’. He has washboard abs, a jaw that could cut glass and the perfect quaffed hair. Nothing is said about this. The only advertisements that feature slightly chubby men are adverts that are trying to be funny, like beer or pasty advertisements. Even an advert that advertises clothes for the ‘larger’ man feature a sports star who only fits the criteria because he is tall. Men that don’t meet the male beauty standard are always cast as the best friend or the man with unrequited love in film and TV, when they do eventually find love in these shows/films it is applauded because he beat the odds, not because the guy got the girl.
In recent years eating disorders amongst boys and men has sky rocketed, but not much is said about it - instead they will use it as shock statistic when they are doing a piece about eating disorders in a general way. I read somewhere that boys were killing themselves to look like the guys in ‘300’. It’s disturbing that this wasn’t talked about as much. I am not blaming the creators of ‘300’ for perpetrating this myth that men should look like this because in this story these warriors would look like this. It isn’t just that film that shows off men’s bodies this way that was purely just an example of something I found. Almost every leading man in a film or a TV show is a good looking man, a thin/buff man.
I am not going to get out my soap box and demand that all men should be represented, because no doubt someone will come along and push me off it with facts that argue mine. This is just something I have noticed. I don’t want overweight men to become a norm because that would just highlight an unhealthy lifestyle, what I do want is for it to become more freeing for men to get the help they need. When they see these men in media they need to know that it would have taken months of intense training to look this way and a very strict diet, it isn’t something that is achievable for all men. There are so many images out there of these men that all look great, like they never stepped out of a gym, we can’t all live in a gym - some of us would prefer to be at home and putting the dinner on.
This comes from a personal view because I spend too much time obsessing over men that I will never look like. It takes up much more time then it should, sometimes I even get thoughts that I will need to look a certain way to achieve certain things in life, like love or a career - and isn’t that just sad. I should be happy with what I was given but I am not. I see Zac Efron and Harry Styles (not blaming them for anything) and I want to look more like them. I want to be able wear a t shirt and not be pre-occupied with how my boobs will look in it. I want to be able to wear any clothes and feel comfortable enough to go outside in them, I think my family will agree that I dress a lot differently in the house then I do outside.
We are all celebrating the slow changes in media for representation of women, I would just like the same to happen for men. Abs do not equal beauty, the perfect tan does not equal beauty, the perfect hairline does not equal beauty. Men come in all shapes and sizes and as we age our shapes and sizes all change. I would like to see a wider range of healthy men to be represented in media, we need the pressure taken off us just like our female counterparts.
'Skinny guys are seen as weak. Bald guys are emasculated and impotent. And so it goes, men chase the unattainable standard of beauty portrayed in the media as well. We spend billions of dollars with the hope that we will be desirable and accepted by society, only to find out it’s never good enough.’ - V Pauni
