When women read beauty magazines and get bludgeoned by endless images of skeletally thin models sporting bikinis in subzero sizes, they quite naturally feel bad about their own bodies. Men are no different. When they look through so-called "lad mags"—magazines like Maxim, FHM, and Stuff, devoted to the exaltation of beer, gear, and hemorrhoid jokes—they wind up feeling similarly inadequate about the way they look. No surprise there—the male models in men's magazines represent an impossible standard of sculpted muscularity most mortal men know they'll never meet.
But it's not seeing statuesque hunks swaggering around in Italian suits that lets the air out of the male ego, according to research by Jennifer Aubrey and Laramie Taylor, communications researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia and the University of California at Davis. The photos that erode male body image the fastest are the ones of women in wet T-shirts. "The male models are generally covered, and because their muscles aren't blatant, male readers don't feel jealous," Aubrey says. "But when looking at objectified women, they may be imagining what those women want, thinking if they were more muscular, these women would like them."
