How the ideal physique is changing...

[Pseudonym]

Studies show society's ideal physique is changing. We now want our women slimmer, and our men more muscular. Even our toys reflect this shift - GI Joe now looks like a bodybuilder.

Vital statistics

New Scientist vol 184 issue 2471 - 30 October 2004, page 40

Perfect hips, breasts, pecs and abs are more elusive than ever. Claire Ainsworth discovers why

WATCH a film from 50 years ago and you will notice how different yesterday's Hollywood icons look. Imagine how out of place a curvy star like Marilyn Monroe or a slim leading man like Humphrey Bogart would look in a modern blockbuster. It seems that, even as we have got fatter and flabbier, western notions of the ideal body have got thinner for women and beefier for men. It is a trend that scientists have confirmed by studying male and female bodies in soft porn magazines. The idea is that such magazines act as a barometer of what is considered to be the ideal body of the time.

In a famous paper, David Garner, then at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, Canada, and his colleagues showed that while the average weight of ordinary women increased between 1950 and 1978, the average weight of Playboy centrefolds decreased. A second study confirmed that models had become less curvaceous between 1950 and 1980. More recently, Martin Voracek at the University of Vienna Medical School in Austria and Maryanne Fisher of York University in Toronto analysed the centrefolds of 577 issues of Playboy - from the very first issue in December 1953 up to 2001 (British Medical Journal, vol 325, p 1447). They looked at the body statistics of models and found that over time, bust size and hip size decreased, while waist size increased. In other words, Playmates are not as shapely as they once were and have become more androgynous. They also found that the body-mass index of centrefolds had dropped compared with that of the general population, showing that the gap between the idealised woman and the real woman was widening.

Although women have traditionally been the focus of media attention over body image, men are starting to feel the squeeze too. In 2001 Richard Leit, a psychologist at American University, Washington DC, published a paper looking at how Playgirl centrefolds had changed between 1973 and 1997 (International Journal of Eating Disorders, vol 29, p 90). Like their female counterparts, male centrefolds are getting leaner. But they are also getting much more muscular, a trend also reflected in beefier Hollywood stars. "The marketability of the body is much more significant these days among male actors than ever before," says Roberto Olivardia, a psychologist at McLean Hospital, University of Massachusetts and co-author of The Adonis Complex, a book that describes the rise of body-image disorders in men.

This trend may be down to men's changing roles in society, says Olivardia. The economic and sexual emancipation of women, although clearly a change for the better, left men wondering what their role should be. No longer the sole family provider, men may have turned to building muscle - one thing women cannot do to the same extent. "More and more men are expressing their masculinity through their bodies, whereas before they may have expressed it through being in the military, being in politics or making money. But now those roles are, fortunately, shared more and more by women," says Olivardia. Gay men, too, tend to prefer to have a muscular physique, he says, perhaps as a reaction to the undercurrent of homophobia in the west. "It asserts a certain degree of masculinity in a culture that doesn't believe gay men can be masculine."

Even dolls are not immune from the pressures of our ideals. In 1995, Kelly Brownell and Melissa Napolitano at Yale University famously scaled the physical proportions of Ken and Barbie dolls up to life size to highlight how unrealistic they were (International Journal of Eating Disorders, vol 18, p 295). To become a life-sized Barbie, an ordinary woman would have to grow 50 centimetres taller, add 13 centimetres to her bust and lose 15 centimetres from her waist. Olivardia and his team decided to see whether the same were true of boys' action toys, and whether their shapes had changed over time.

Barbie is not alone. GI Joe has muscled up considerably since he was introduced in 1964. Today's doll has the muscle dimensions and definition of a bodybuilder, with pronounced biceps and a six-pack. One GI Joe character, GI Joe Extreme, would sport biceps bigger than any bodybuilder in history if he were life size. Even dolls based on real people haven't escaped. The 1978 Star Wars figures of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo resembled the bodies of actors Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford quite closely. By 1997, they had acquired the physiques of bodybuilders. And over the same period, Princess Leia's breast size tripled.

You could argue that such dolls are merely caricatures of cultural ideals. But, says Olivardia, even if this is true, the caricature eventually becomes fixed as the ideal image. And although the link between popular images of bodies and body-image problems remains unproven and controversial, Olivardia advocates educating children about the potential dangers. "Clinically, we are seeing more and more boys with eating disorders, younger and younger boys starting to abuse steroids, who are compulsively lifting weights," he says. "These are issues we didn't see as much in the past, so we can't help but wonder whether these images have an effect."

[jono]

its true we live in an incredibly shallow world these days,imagine what it might of been like today with no hollywood.

[Pseudonym]

But without Hollywood, we bodybuilders might not have the "ideal physique"!

/makes mental note never to diss Hollywood again.