Muscles and the Media: A Natural Experiment Across Cultures in Men's Body Image.

Tracey Thornborrow,Lynda G Boothroyd,Sophie Mohamed,Tochukwu Onwuegbusi,Martin J Tovée

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00495

Tracey Thornborrow, Lynda G Boothroyd + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00495

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Abstract

An increasing number of studies are evidencing relationships between the drive for muscularity and potentially harmful behavioral strategies, such as unhealthy dieting and steroid use amongst men in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations. As such Western appearance standards proliferate around the world via the media, men who live in other cultural contexts are also at risk of potentially negative effects from aspiring to the “muscular ideal.” However, few studies have explored these relationships in non-WEIRD populations. We investigated men’s body ideals and body image in two non-WEIRD, non-White populations, Uganda (Africa) and Nicaragua (Central America), and compared them with an ethnically diverse sample of men in the United Kingdom. We also examined whether socio-cultural factors including media and ethnicity, predicted the drive for muscularity and body change behaviors among our participants. Results showed that Ugandan men had the least desire for muscularity relative to men in the United Kingdom. Supporting the Tripartite model we found that media and peer influences significantly predicted the drive for muscularity, particularly among men from White British and Nicaraguan Miskitu ethnic groups. By contrast, Creole / Garifuna and Mestizo men from Nicaragua were more likely to want to increase muscularity relative to Black African men from Uganda. Overall, our findings support previous research in demonstrating that there are cultural differences in the kind of body men desire, and that men from WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations may experience similar pressures to aspire to and attain a muscular body type.

Highlights

The often unrealistic appearance standards that proliferate Western media are believed to influence people’s body ideals
As we were interested to ascertain men’s perceptions relating to muscularity rather than body size, scoring for participants’ ideal and perceived muscular body selected from the Male Adiposity and Muscularity Scale (MAMS) images was as follows
Item scores for each questionnaire were averaged to obtain a mean score for each participant for body appreciation (BAS-2), media belief (SATAQ), and drive for muscularity (DMS)

Summary

Introduction

The often unrealistic appearance standards that proliferate Western media are believed to influence people’s body ideals. “Ideal” women are portrayed as “curvaceously thin,” with a low body weight but full breasts (Harrison, 2003), while “ideal” men have bodies with “worked-out” muscles and v-shaped torsos (Edwards et al, 2014). Both correlational and experimental studies have shown that even relatively short durations of exposure to the media’s body ideals can have a detrimental effect on women’s body image (Grabe et al, 2008). While few studies have investigated media influence on men’s body image outside of a WEIRD demographic (Edwards et al, 2014), scant evidence suggests that men in non-WEIRD populations are beginning to aspire to the muscular ideal body type (Holmqvist and Frisén, 2010) and experience body image concerns (Ricciardelli et al, 2007a; Xu et al, 2010)

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