Although there are some universal characteristics of attractiveness, the standards vary for beauty per culture and even per time period within the same culture. If you watch films and TV programs from the fifties and sixties, you will see that the ideal female form was the so-called ‘full-bodied’ woman, while the ideal male form was the hefty man.
As an example of how beauty standards can change over time, I think back to the original Starter Series, in which a tough William Shatner as Captain Kirk would seduce some well -shaped space lady on what planet he happened to have blasted that week. Compare that with the slimmer and muscular Chris Pine as Captain Kirk in the twenty -first century Starter Restart series. The space ladies are also athletic and slim in the reboot.
So which beauty standard is more attractive and which is more reasonable: the chubby from the mid -20th century or the fragmented from the beginning of the 21st century? Because you live in the 21st century, you will find the lean, muscular man and the slender, athletic woman probably more attractive than the rather plump bodies of the last century. And yet, which standard of attractiveness is more realistic?
Unrealistic standards for body shape
Psychologists have pointed out for decades that beauty standards that are portrayed in the media are unrealistic. The beautiful people who fill our screens and social media pages have only reached their extremely good appearance through a combination of genetic happiness, extreme exercise and food, and, in many cases, performance -promoting medicines. They do not represent normal levels of attractiveness. They are rather outliers on the beauty clock curve, so far away from the average that a few of us can ever hope to match them.
And yet we are led to believe that it is a personal failure on our part if we cannot meet the beauty standards that the media hold out. It is therefore no wonder that so many people feel dissatisfied with their bodies. This dissatisfaction with the body that botheres us from us is even worse by the obesity epidemic due to changes in the diet and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. We are not only thicker than people half a century ago, but we are also expected to be leaner than they do.
The harmful effects of beautifier on women have been studied for decades and are now being generally recognized. Many women struggle with problems with their body image, because they think their physique is so far away from what they think they should be. But as the Canadian psychologist Sean Devine and colleagues notice in an article that they recently published in the magazine Psychology of men and masculinityMen are also bombed with unrealistic images of male body ideals and also suffer from body dissatisfaction.
Women concentrate on weight
Earlier research has shown that women mainly concentrate on weight in assessing the attractiveness of the bodies of other women and theirs. Of course men fight the battle for the Ardennes just like women. At the same time, the media portray the ideal male form and both slim and muscular. Is the dissatisfaction about the body in men more from not complying with the ideal of leanness – that is: do they feel too fat? Or is it because they feel that they are not muscular enough? This is the question that Devine and colleagues have investigated in the investigation they reported in their article.
For this study, the researchers recruited 164 young men to evaluate line drawings of different male physique, ranging on two dimensions: leanness and muscularity. In the first round they selected the line drawing that they thought they represented their own degree of body fat, from very lean to very obese. Then they viewed a series of similar line drawings, on which it was always indicated whether there was overweight or not. This procedure was intended to resemble browsing through images of male models on social media.
Initially there was an equal distribution of low -fat, normal and fat men. But as the series progressed, images of lean men were much more common. The question was whether this would influence the judgments of the participants, so that they would assess more of the normal images as overweight.
When this experiment is conducted with female participants and female images, the answer is yes. As women see more lean women, they tend to consider women with a normal weight to be overweight. The researchers assumed that this would also apply to the men in this study, but that is not what they found. Instead, these men maintained their standards of lean, normal weight and overweight throughout the series.
Men concentrate on muscles
The procedure was the same in the second round, but the images varied from non -muscular, via somewhat muscular to very muscular. But this time, when the very muscular images increased in frequency, the men began to judge the somewhat muscular images as not muscular. In other words: the men responded in the same way to the muscle system as women on weight.
The researchers also compared the average reaction times in the two circumstances and discovered that the men reacted much faster to the muscle system than to the weight. It is possible that the participants concentrated on rapid instructions for the power of the upper body, namely wide shoulders and a narrow waist, which illustrate the slender, muscular ideal that is brought forward by the media.
Ultimately, this study shows us that men, just like women, are influenced by the beauty standards that the media tell us. Remember that the men first selected the body image that suited them. At the end of the experiment, however, they assessed their own body type as less muscular than at the beginning. If we can influence people in this way in just a few minutes, imagine what the long -term influence of stereotypes should be in the media.
So how do you maintain reasonable body images in an era of social media? Apart from switching off all media, the best advice to continue to remind yourself that what you see on TV or social media is not really. If you want a dose of reality, look around you. The people with whom you handle every day are ‘normal’, so gauge your beauty standards. You will also feel better about your own body, and you will have more reasonable expectations about what you can do to improve your appearance.
