Day 47 – The Gender Gap Part III

“Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much.
Such men are dangerous”

~ William Shakespeare

200.8 lbs.

So close. I’m creeping up on the 200 lb. barrier while trying to not get my hopes up, since the weight loss has been more up & down than a linear drop.

I cal this article “The Gender Gap part III” for consistency’s sake, but really this is more about the gap narrowing.

An interesting attitude I’ve encountered is that eating disorders are a “women’s problem” so how could I, a male, possibly understand? After all, women are confronted with skinny models, clothes designed for unrealistic body shapes, pressures at work, etc. which all feed an increase in eating disorders and body anxiety, and as a rise in demand for cosmetic surgery, right?

Meh – not so much. Even though there are commercials now showing young girls bombarded with images if “perfect female figures” and perpetuating the “beauty myth” – as dramatic as any anti-drug or M.A.D.D. commercial – there has been no significant increase in the number of women with eating disorders.

However, even as sitcoms still portray fat, oafish husbands with skinny hot wives à la “The Honeymooners” template (and still show “happy housewives” doing all the dishes, laundry, and household scrubbing in the commercials in between – ugh) in the real world we’re doing a good job of catching up to women when it comes to problems with food and body image. 40% of binge eaters and 25% of anorexia and bulimia sufferers are male, compared to 10% just a decade ago.

The main ones that men fall victim to are “manorexia” (all the health problems of anorexia, and really the exact same thing, but often dismissed by society and doctors as ‘merely depression’), bulimia, and muscle dysmorphia a.k.a. “bigorexia” – people who become obsessed with building muscle. This last one is a category of eating disorder in which men far outnumber women.

It’s at the point now where there’s a shift in men’s sizing in fashion, and a British mannequin manufacturer has come under some fire for its latest ultra-skinny male model with a 35in chest and a 27in waist – 12in smaller than the average British man. Eating disorder activists say things like this new mannequin could encourage vulnerable boys and men to starve themselves – a repeat of the “size zero” trend that encouraged women to endanger their health including Bif Naked who, overachiever that she is, reached a size -1 before realizing how unhealthy it all was.

The mannequin manufacturer protests that it’s just reflecting demand and a shift to “gender-blending fashion” touted by Mark Ronson, Russell Brand, and designer Hedi Slimane, to name a few. Modern male models, like Calvin Klein’s Tomek Szmulewicz (pictured) and Top Man’s Sam Bennett, are as slim as their female counterparts (who are 5 times slimmer than they were in the nineteen sixties, when compared to ‘regular’ women).

The firm, not knowing when to shut up, spoke of allowing “the boys a little of what the girls were getting with a beautifully angular physique that’s all about the youthful thrill of life on the edge”.

It’s not a conspiracy on the part of one mannequin designer; the doll would look ridiculous if fitted with a traditional boxy Hugo Boss suit, for example. But its designer, Kevin Arpino, points out that modern men’s fashions have made a demand for smaller models. “It is a collection dictated by current fashion trends for skinny jeans and very tight tailoring, as seen everywhere from Topman to Gucci and in the edgier fashion magazines like Numéro. It’s a trend which you can see in celebrities and rock stars – Russell Brand has a little bit to do with it. But I am sure that muscle boys will have their time again.”

Rob Richman, a 35 year old recovering anorexic from London, has a different perspective: “I’m staggered, shocked, at what the fashion industry is doing now, trying to mould men to aspire to a different shape than one that is natural, the same as they did with women. Between the tiny sizes and the six-pack look, the pressure on men just seems to have escalated,” he said.

“In my early 30s I couldn’t get clothes to fit me and I would have to buy girls’ jeans; now I can get tiny sizes on the High Street. You’re telling teenage boys to reach unrealistic and unhealthy sizes. Of course you get guys like Pete Doherty and Stephen Merchant who are naturally tall and thin, but this is about pressure to conform to a false ideal. We should allow men and women to be the different shapes and sizes they naturally are.”

Rob developed his anorexia when he was just 12 after years of vicious bullying at his school. He says he used to be the only male at treatment clinics or hospitals who was there with a diagnosis of anorexia. “Now I’m never the only guy. Ten years ago if a guy went to his GP it’s unlikely they would think of him having anorexia. GP’s tend to diagnose eating disorders in males when they are at a chronic level.”

Whether “excessively muscular or excessively skeletal” in shape, said leading eating order specialist Dr. John Morgan, the risks are high. That means bigorexics and anorexics, visibly at different ends of the physical spectrum, are actually both putting themselves in danger. Ironically the government’s anti-obesity campaign has had a flip effect of making perhaps slightly overweight boys more likely to be picked on and bullied. Interesting that, while one in four children are overweight, two in three think they are,” said Dr Morgan.

“The rates of body image disparities are indeed rising among men. Ten years ago a young woman and a gay man suffered similar rates of risk while the attitude of the heterosexual male was much more ‘we’ve got beer bellies because we’re men and we don’t care’, but now that’s changed quite significantly. There’s a broader crisis of masculinity in our society and men are facing the same growing pains that women went through in the 50s and 60s.

“For many young men they struggle through and there remains a lot of stigma attached to them admitting weakness; it’s such a threat to the male identity.

“The difference between men and women,” Dr Morgan went on, “tends to be that men focus on shape more than weight, and also men have the extra issue of being expected to be an ideal which is not incompatible with health, so George Clooney might have a great body but we’d also expect him to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, whereas Keira Knightley would struggle with the mountain, but that would be expected.”

Ironic that the good Dr. should use George Clooney as an example. I hold George in high regard, as he’s willing to look less-than-glamorous as a pudgy government operative in movies like Syriana. At the same time he had to slim down to be hunky for Ocean’s 13, and such yo-yo dieting, which gets a lot of press when women like Renée Zellweger or Charlise Theron do it, is equally unhealthy for male actors and men in general.

As a binge eater, the famous Lord Byron had his own issues with food. Dr David Veale, consultant psychiatrist and co-author of Overcoming Body Image Problems, says Lord Byron would not recognize the expectations placed on modern men.

“There is still greater pressure on women than men,” said Veale. “But undoubtedly some men are more vulnerable – they put all their worth and identity into their appearance. At the severer end of the spectrum it is just as common to have a male sufferer as a woman.

“Eating disorders in women may well be more biologically driven with genetic links, but for men it seems to have a more sociological aspect. An individual who is teased or bullied or humiliated or suffers emotional neglect at a crucial stage of their life obviously is going to feel that impact.

“Generally human beings go around thinking we are a lot more attractive than we actually are, and the greatest paradox is that men with eating disorders are actually more unattractive the harder they try to sculpt themselves into the perfect aesthetic, not because of their bodies but because of the behaviours and their obsessions.”

Whether male or female, here’s something you should keep in mind: eating disorders have the highest morbidity and mortality rates of all psychiatric illnesses. I get pro-ana girls writing to me saying I “just don’t understand”, and that it’s about self control but doesn’t really hurt them.

They’re wrong.

Update: When I went to share this article on Facebook, the CAPTCHA codes (those words or letters & numbers that pop up for you to type in to confirm that you’re human, not a robot) were “weigh better”. Heh.