Media
How Social Media Affects Body Dissatisfaction in Men
Learning how to have reasonable expectations about your body form.
Posted January 23, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- The media presents both women and men with unrealistic standards of body form.
- Women’s body dissatisfaction stems mostly from concerns about weight.
- Men’s body dissatisfaction stems mostly from concerns about muscles.
While there are some universal features of attractiveness, standards of beauty vary by culture, and even by time period within the same culture. If you watch movies and TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s, you’ll see that the ideal female form was the so-called “full-figured” woman, while the ideal male form was the burly man.
As an example of how beauty standards can change over time, I think back to the original Star Trek series, in which a burly William Shatner as Captain Kirk would seduce some curvy space lady on whatever planet he happened to have beamed down to that week. Contrast that with the leaner and more muscular Chris Pine as Captain Kirk in the twenty-first-century Star Trek reboot series. The space ladies are athletic and slender in the reboot as well.
So, which standard of beauty is more appealing, and which is more reasonable—the pudgy one from the mid-20th century or the shredded one from the early 21st? Since you live in the 21st century, you probably find the lean, muscular man and the slender, athletic woman more attractive than the rather pudgy bodies of the last century. And yet, which standard of attractiveness is more realistic?
Unrealistic Standards of Body Form
Psychologists have been pointing out for decades now that standards of beauty portrayed in the media are unrealistic. The beautiful people that fill our screens and social media pages have only achieved their extraordinarily good looks through a combination of genetic luck, extreme exercise and diet, and, in many cases, performance-enhancing drugs. They don’t represent normal levels of attractiveness. Rather, they’re outliers on the beauty bell curve, so far from average that few of us can ever hope to emulate them.
And yet, we’re led to believe that it’s a personal failure on our part if we can’t live up to the standards of beauty that the media present to us. It’s no wonder, then, that so many people feel dissatisfied with their bodies. This body dissatisfaction that plagues so many of us is further exacerbated by the obesity epidemic due to changes in diet and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Not only are we fatter than people were half a century ago, but we’re also expected to be leaner than they were.
The pernicious effects of beauty stereotypes on women have been studied for decades and are now well-recognized. Many women struggle with body-image issues because they see their physiques as being so far off from what they think they should be. However, as Canadian psychologist Sean Devine and colleagues point out in an article that they recently published in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, men are also bombarded by unrealistic images of masculine body ideals and suffer from body dissatisfaction as well.
Women Focus on Weight
Previous research has found that women focus primarily on weight when judging the attractiveness of other women’s bodies and their own. Of course, men fight the battle of the bulge just as women do. At the same time, the media portray the ideal masculine form as both lean and muscular. So, does body dissatisfaction in men stem more from not meeting the ideal for leanness—that is, do they feel too fat? Or does it come from feeling that they’re not muscular enough? This is the question Devine and colleagues explored in the study they reported in their article.
For this study, the researchers recruited 164 young men to evaluate line drawings of various masculine physiques, varying on two dimensions, leanness and muscularity. In the first round, they selected the line drawing that they believed represented their own degree of body fat, from very lean to very obese. After that, they viewed a series of similar line drawings, indicating each time whether it was overweight or not. This procedure was intended to resemble the act of flipping through images of male models on social media.
At first, there was an equal distribution of thin, normal, and overweight males. But as the series progressed, images of thin males became far more frequent. The question was whether this would influence the participants’ judgments, leading them to judge more of the normal-range images as overweight.
When this experiment is done with women participants and female images, the answer is yes. As women see more thin female examples, they tend to judge the normal-weight females as overweight. The researchers assumed this would be true for the men in this study as well, but that’s not what they found. Instead, these men maintained their standards of thin, normal-weight, and overweight throughout the sequence.
Men Focus on Muscles
In the second round, the procedure was the same, but the images varied on the range from not muscular to somewhat muscular to very muscular. This time, though, as the very muscular images increased in frequency, the men began rating the somewhat muscular images as not muscular. In other words, the men responded to musculature in the same way that women responded to weight.
The researchers also compared average reaction times in the two conditions and found that the men were much faster at responding to musculature than they were to weight. It could be that the participants were focusing on fast cues to upper-body strength, namely wide shoulders and narrow waist, that exemplify the lean, muscular ideal put out by the media.
In the end, this study shows us that men, like women, are influenced by the standards of beauty that the media present to us. Recall that the men first selected the body image that fit themselves. By the end of the experiment, however, they were rating their own body type as less muscular than they were at the beginning. If we can influence people’s body judgments like this in just a few minutes, imagine what the long-term influence of media stereotypes must be.
So, how do you maintain reasonable body images in an era of social media? Apart from tuning out all media, the best advice is to keep reminding yourself that what you see on TV or social media is not real. Instead, if you want a dose of reality, look around you. The people you interact with on a daily basis are “normal,” so gauge your standards of beauty on them. You’ll also feel better about your own body, and you’ll have more reasonable expectations about what you can do to improve your looks.
References
Devine, S., Germaine, N., Kaprzyk, A., & Eppinger, B. (2024) Changes in the prevalence of muscular, but not thin, bodies bias young men’s judgments about body size. Psychology of Men & Masculinities. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000478