Men Feel the Pressure

This image, posted on the popular website postsecret.com, really got me thinking about our relationship to the definition of beauty and body image. Our class, comprised solely of women, may be forgetting the pressures that men are constantly feeling as well. With the increasing success of bridging the gender gap due to advancing efforts of the feminist movement, perhaps we should consider that men also embody a certain beauty that women wish to possess. As mentioned by Karen Dill in her book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence, the idealized man is one who is white, heterosexual, young, strong, and Christian (Dill, 101). All of these characterizations are part of a constructed identity of a man. Women desire a man who possess these features. They connote some other stereotyped qualities, such as virtue and the ability to protect others. Dill defines images in the media as those that "breed stereotypical thinking," which in turn shapes the expectations people have of the every day (Dill, 96). An unrealistic standard has been set by what we see in the media, and those expectations apply to both sexes.

Dill, herself, puts her argument in conversation with Naomi Wolf's theories presented through her book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. Dill synthesizes Wolf's understanding of the beauty myth, defining the beauty myth as "the media ideal of beauty is an attainable goal and that women should do what it takes to meet that goal" (Dill, 135). But women are not the only victims of this beauty myth that has largely been accepted by society. There are just as many men who join gyms, watch what they eat, and desire an "ideal" body, as dictated by the media images. Moreover, Wolf mentions this increasing pressure on men by including the shocking statistic that 10% of college students suffering from eating disorders are male (Wolf, 8). Men wish to embody a certain beauty, and I think it's unfair to deny that women have come to characterize different looks possessed by men as "attractive" or "unattractive" based on media standards. There may seem to be a greater breadth of "attractiveness" available to men by the media, but a bar of expectation has undeniably still been set.

As Wolf poses the question, I too am curious: Is the bridging of the gender gap really encouraging to our society? Or have men actually similarly fallen victim to the beauty industry that increasingly wields power of insecurity over media audiences? It's interesting to considering that all the problems the readings discuss came around the same as Barbie and Ken in the 1960s. As I've asked before, when will the pendulum swing back? When will we, as consumers, stop accepting unfair pressures and start demanding liberation from all these pressures, affecting both women AND men?


Works Cited:
Akbari, Anna. Race, Gender, Body Image and the Media, Beauty and the Body in an Image Society. 194 Mercer Street 210, New York University, New York, NY. 13 October 2010.

Dill, Karen E. How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 88-140.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: Perennial, 2002. 1-19.