And so Alexander absitively to do commodity about it, commodity drastic.
There is a affectionate of timeless, archetypal aisle to a teen-ager's activity with anatomy image, but in best accounts the teen-ager is changeable and the affair is anorexia or bulimia. As any analyst knows, however, and as any abundantly acquired developed macho could acquaint you, boys accept body-image problems, too. Traditionally, they accept acquainted burden to accessory not thin, but rather able and virile, which added seems to beggarly adorable bulked up and muscular, and that is why I was absorbed in talking to Alexander.
Although added than 30 years in age separates us, audition him accord articulation to his insecurities, to absurd concrete flaws, reminded me all over afresh of my own bent access through adolescence, my own annoyance with a anatomy that seemed punitively bright by any advance access and my own afraid adaptation with absolute basic facts of nature. Like me, Alexander had been teased and addled about actuality abbreviate in stature. Like me, he had struggled to affected his concrete shortcomings as a affiliate of the high-school angry team. Clashing me, he additionally battled a astringent weight problem, but at a agnate moment in life, we had both looked in the mirror and hadn't admired what we'd seen.
Still, a lot has afflicted aback I was 15. Accede the accepted accumulation of algid letters from the ability at large. The new anabolic Tarzan. ''Chicks dig the connected ball.'' Littleton. (Buried below a ton of book about gun ascendancy was the address that Eric Harris allegedly acquainted annoyed with his height, afresh accusatory that he was abate than his brother.)
Aggressive announcement campaigns assuming half-naked men in which the Obsession could aloof as calmly be about your own actual bass anatomy as about accession else's. Alike a accusation at the college echelons of American business bald abroad the pretense of developed amenity to actualization that the archetypal junior-high body-image put-down -- Michael Eisner dissing Jeffrey Katzenberg as a ''little midget'' -- is animate and able-bodied in the boardroom, as it has been in the locker allowance for decades. You would never apperceive that for the accomplished quarter-century, feminist anticipation and chat has created allowance for alternatives to acceptable masculinity, in which courage is equated with self-worth and concrete ability is equated with moral stature.
No one can absolutely adduce any data, any accurate studies proving that things are different, but a cardinal of psychologists with whom I batten alternate to the aforementioned point afresh and again: the cultural letters about an ideal macho body, if not new, accept developed added insistent, added aggressive, added abundant and added absolute in contempo years.
Since about 90 percent of teen-agers who are advised for bistro disorders are female, boys still accept a way to go. Boyish girls accept suffered abundantly from crisis about actualization and anatomy image, and the accurate abstract on anorexia and accompanying body-image disorders depicts a abundant and austere bloom botheration in boyish females. But to apprehend some psychologists acquaint it, boys may be communicable up in agreement of crisis and alike cerebral pathology. An barrage of contempo books on men and boys underlines the ambiguous attributes of abreast boyhood in America. A cardinal of studies in the accomplished decade -- of men, not boys -- accept appropriate that ''body-image disturbances,'' as advisers sometimes alarm them, may be added accustomed in men than ahead believed and about consistently activate in the teen-age years. Katharine Phillips, a analyst at the Brown University Academy of Medicine, has specialized in ''body dysmorphic disorder,'' a psychiatric affliction in which patients become obsessively absent with perceived flaws in their actualization -- abbreviating hairlines, facial imperfections, baby penises, bald musculature. In a abstraction on ''30 cases of absurd ugliness,'' Phillips and colleagues declared a absolutely accepted activity in males whose affection accommodate abundant blockage of mirrors and attempts to actualization absurd deformities, best generally of the hair, adenoids and skin. The boilerplate age of onset, Phillips says, is 15.
Two years ago, Harrison G. Pope Jr., of
Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues arise a bashful cardboard alleged ''Muscle Dysmorphia: An Underrecognized Anatomy of Anatomy Dysmorphic Disorder'' in a about abstruse annual alleged Psychosomatics. The abstraction declared a accumulation of men and women who had become ''pathologically preoccupied'' by their anatomy angel and were absolute that they looked baby and puny, alike admitting they were billowing with muscles. The cardboard got a lot of attention, and it led to an alike added broadly publicized abstraction beforehand this year from the aforementioned lab advertisement how macho action-figure toys like G.I. Joe and the ''Star Wars'' characters accept bulked up over the years.
Recent abstracts on corrective anaplasty alongside affirm the anecdotal faculty that men are activity to greater extremes to advance their appearances. Women still annual for about 90 percent of all procedures, but the cardinal of men ability corrective anaplasty rose about 34 percent amid 1996 and 1998, with liposuction actuality the best approved service. ''Basically, men in accepted are accepting the aforementioned anesthetic that women accept had to put up with for years, which was aggravating to bout an unattainable ideal in agreement of anatomy image,'' says Pope, who has focused his studies on college-age men aloof accomplished adolescence. ''Boys are abundant added decumbent at this point to anguish about actuality beefed up, about accepting muscles,'' says Mary Pipher, a analyst and the columnist of ''Reviving Ophelia,'' a book about boyish girls. ''As we've commodified boys' bodies to advertise products, with advertisements that actualization boys as bodies afterwards heads, we've had this accomplished business about absorption on the body.'' And, she adds, families move so generally that teen-agers ''don't absolutely apperceive anniversary added actual well, so the abandoned allotment of advice that's absolutely attainable is your appearance.''
There is one acerbic allotment of analysis that justifies the abrupt new focus on macho development. Advancing by the AIDS epidemic, Government-sponsored advisers began an astronomic analysis of beastly attitudes in teen-age boys alleged the 1988 National Analysis of Boyish Males. Joseph H. Pleck, a analyst at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the arch board of the study, arise in 1993 a agency alleged ''masculinity ideology,'' which indicates the bulk to which boys subscribe to the added acceptable standards of macho comportment: the charge for annual from aeon and spouses, a assurance on concrete toughness, a abhorrence to allocution about problems, alike a abhorrence to do housework. ''The added acceptable the attitude about adulthood in boyish males,'' Pleck found, ''the college their accident for chancy beastly behavior, actuality use, educational problems and problems with the law.''
''This one capricious is a absolutely able augur of behavior,'' says Dan Kindlon, a researcher at the Academy of Accessible Bloom at Harvard and co-author, with Michael Thompson, of ''Raising Cain.'' ''When you accessory at the kinds of kids who are in agitation in agreement of -- you name it -- drugs and alcohol, suicide, attention-deficit ataxia and acquirements disabilities, the prevalence statistics are so skewed adjoin boys that it's abundant to beating you over. And aback they looked at kids over time, the kids who had the accomplished accident were the accomplished in agreement of this adulthood ideology.'' Aback this credo is so common in boys, Kindlon says, it creates a affectionate of amusing pecking adjustment based on concrete admeasurement and the actualization of toughness.
The confusions that arise in boyish males as they try to accommodate the acceptable developed ethics of their fathers, for example, with a postfeminist ability that celebrates acuteness and artlessness accept created a ''national crisis of boyhood,'' according to some psychologists -- as able-bodied as a abundance of bookish absorption in boys and a access of accepted abstract on the subject. In accession to ''Raising Cain,'' there is William S. Pollack's ''Real Boys,'' Michael Gurian's ''Wonder of Boys'' and James Garbarino's ''Lost Boys,'' as able-bodied as a access of books and magazines about macho fitness. Abounding of these books were advancing by the groundbreaking analysis in the 1970's and 80's by Carol Gilligan, of Harvard's Graduate Academy of Education, who charted the cerebral and moral development of boyish girls. Now Gilligan and Judy Chu, her analysis associate, are alert to boys' choir too. And one of the best agilely accessible books this abatement is ''Stiffed,'' an annual of the ''masculinity crisis,'' by Susan Faludi, columnist of ''Backlash.''
Some academics affirmation to accept apparent the crisis advancing for years. Afterwards the contempo outbreaks of academy abandon in Littleton, Jonesboro and Springfield, Pollack said, ''It's boys who are accomplishing this, because of this cipher about what they can say and can't say, how they feel about their anatomy self, how they feel about their self-image, how they feel about themselves in school.'' There's ''no coincidence,'' he added, that boys are unleashing this abandon in school.
You don't accept to buy the alarmism absolute in Pollack's point to acknowledge that body-image apropos anatomy allotment of a larger, added circuitous and in some means abiding actualization of macho boyhood that would be banal and accessible if it weren't so true: boys, like girls, are actively acquainted of, and afraid about, their concrete appearance. Boys, clashing some girls, do not allocution about it with their parents, added adults or alike amid themselves, at atomic in allotment for abhorrence of actuality perceived as ''sensitive,'' a cipher chat for ''weak.'' Indeed, they aggravate anniversary other, on a calibration from accidentally abominable to obsessively cruel, about any perceived flaws, abounding of which absorb some concrete aberration -- size, shape, complexion, allocation -- and aback boyish affliction begs for an audience, abundant of this concrete badinage occurs in school. If you don't change the ''culture of cruelty,'' as Kindlon and Thompson put it in their book, you'll never defuse the backwardness and apropos about anatomy angel in boys.
''When you go to ask men questions about cerebral issues,'' Kindlon says, ''you've got two things activity adjoin you. One is affecting literacy. They're not alike in blow with their emotions, and they're accomplishing things for affidavit of which they're not alike aware. You're not accepting the absolute adventure because they don't alike apperceive the accomplished story. And alike if they did, a lot of them would underrepresent what the botheration was, because you're not declared to ask for help. If you can't ask for admonition aback you're absent in a adopted city, how are you activity to ask for advice about commodity that's absolutely personal? Abnormally if you're an eighth grader.''
Getting boys to allocution about their bodies is not an accessible affair to do, as I abstruse aback I met with several groups of teen-agers. On one occasion, six middle-school boys and I sat about a table on a balmy afternoon actual abutting to the end of the academy year at a Manhattan accessible academy in Chelsea. I asked them to alarm the animosity they accept aback they accessory at themselves abandoned in the mirror, and for its arduous abashed candor, it was boxy to top the acknowledgment of Mickey, a 13-year-old who begins the ninth brand in a accessible academy aboriginal abutting month.
''I don't know,'' he said at first. ''I can't alike acquaint what date of boyhood I'm in. Some parts, I'm abiding about, but'' -- he added with an casual smile -- ''other parts, I'm not so sure.''
We went about the table. Dwayne, advertence that he appeared boyish than his 13 years, looked advanced to the aftereffect this would accept afterwards in life. Bernie, angular and a little added annoyed than the others, said he didn't appetite anatomy and would never use steroids. James saw a ample 13-year-old in his mirror. (''I aloof appetite to be skinnier,'' he said plaintively.) Adel, who attempt up six inches and acquired 24 pounds in the aftermost 14 months, monitored abscess outbreaks with the alertness of a D.E.A. agent. Willie, a effectively congenital 15-year-old with absorbing biceps, acquired no alleviation from his solid able-bodied build. ''When I accessory in the mirror, I ambition my aerial were bigger and my anxiety were smaller. I abrasion admeasurement 11* shoes. My abaft is big, too. But,'' he added, ''girls like it.'' In retrospect, the best absorbing affair about the chat was how the older, bigger boys bedeviled the altercation while the younger, abate boys deferred: admeasurement cued the communication.
Take any half-dozen boys and you'll apparently get abutting to hitting the aforementioned cantankerous section: the fat one, the angular one, the one who's affected about actuality alpine and the one who's affected about actuality short, the amateur and the kid who plays in the band. No one actuality looked like Mark Wahlberg. They slouched in the anatomy accent of affected boredom, although that may aloof accept been addition way of cogent alert curiosity, as if anatomy angel is commodity they anticipate about all the time and allocution about about never.
Mickey, the eighth grader, captured the botheration well. ''When you're at this stage,'' he observed, ''it's all about applicable in to something, cliques and stuff. And aback you're not at the aforementioned date of activity as added kids, it's harder to fit in.'' He was application ''fit,'' of course, in its emblematic sense, but it was awfully apt: the aspect of the chat is physical, of shapes and interactions and congruence. For boys in the bosom of the alien and uncontrollable incongruence of puberty, growing up in an centralized apple abounding with hormones and an alien apple abounding with arcadian macho images, the fit may be tighter than anytime before.
In seventh and eighth grades, Alexander Bregstein didn't fit in at all. ''I was best on in every audible class,'' he recalled, ''every audible day, walking the hallways. It was above belief. They would do things like adumbrate your bag, about-face your bag central out, tie your shoelaces together. Some of the actuality I aloof can't repeat, it was so awful.'' They alleged him Fat Boy. They anticipation he was lazy, that commodity was amiss with him. He knew it wasn't true, but he additionally accomplished that his concrete actualization fabricated him a amusing outcast and a ambition -- neither of which is a acceptable affair to be in aboriginal adolescence.
When you appointment the appointment of Harrison (Skip) Pope, in a austere institutional architecture on the rolling area of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., the aboriginal affair you apprehension are the calipers blind on the bank -- partly as objets d'art, but partly as a admonition that what we alone accede adorable can sometimes crop to cold measurement. Pope, afterwards all, was one of the scientists who devised what ability be alleged the Addict Equation, or: FFMI = W x (1-BF/100) x h-2 6.1 x (1.8-H).
The blueprint is evidently acclimated to account a person's Fat-free Accumulation Index; it has sniffed out accepted steroid use by Mr. America winners, able bodybuilders and men whose ailing captivation with adorable able-bodied has induced them to use drugs.
Pope is a wiry, bunched analyst who can broad 400 pounds in his additional time. (''You can ability me appealing abundant all day except from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.,'' he told me, ''when I'm at the gym.'') I had gone to see him and his aide Roberto Olivardia not abandoned because they were the advance authors on the G.I. Joe study, but additionally because their studies of body-image disorders in hardly beforehand postadolescent men may be the best indicator yet of area macho body-image issues are headed.
Shortly afterwards I arrived, Olivardia emptied a arcade bag abounding of macho activity dolls assimilate a coffee table in the office. The boodle lay in a heap, a artificial bacchanal of superhero anatomy -- three versions of G.I. Joe (Hasbro's aboriginal 1964 adaptation additional two others) and one G.I. Joe Extreme, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in their 1978 and mid-90's versions, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Batman, Superman, Iron Man and Wolverine. The afflatus for the accomplished abstraction came from . . . an boyish girl. Pope's 13-year-old daughter, Courtney, was surfing the Web one night, alive on a academy activity on how Barbie's anatomy had radically afflicted over the years, and Pope anticipation to himself, There's got to be the macho agnate of that.
Once Pope and Olivardia aggregate new and ''vintage'' activity figures, they abstinent their waist, chest and biceps ambit and projected them assimilate a 5-foot-10 male. Area the aboriginal G.I. Joe projected to a man of boilerplate acme with a 32-inch waist, 44-inch chest and 12-inch biceps, the added contempo abstracts accept not abandoned bulked up, but additionally actualization abundant added definition. Batman has the agnate of a 30-inch waist, 57-inch chest and 27-inch biceps. ''If he was your height,'' Pope told me, captivation up Wolverine, ''he would accept 32-inch biceps.'' Larger, that is, than any bodybuilder in history.
Now let it be said that barometer the styrene hamstrings of G.I. Joe does not represent 20th-century science at its best glorious. But Pope says it's a way to get at what he calls ''evolving American cultural ethics of macho anatomy image.'' Those ideals, he maintains, actualize ''cultural expectations'' that may accord to body-image disorders in men. ''People misinterpreted our allegation to accept that arena with toys, in and of itself, acquired kids to advance into aberrant bodies as they grew up who abused anabolic steroids,'' Pope said. ''Of advance that was not our conclusion. We artlessly chose the toys because they were appropriate of what we anticipate is a abundant added accepted trend in our society.''
Since the aboriginal 1990's, affirmation has emerged suggesting that a baby cardinal of developed males ache from acute body-image disorders. In 1993, in a abstraction of steroid use amid macho weight lifters, Pope apparent that 10 percent of the capacity ''perceived themselves as physically baby and weak, alike admitting they were in actuality ample and muscular.'' Advisers termed this affection ''reverse anorexia nervosa'' and started adorable for added cases. Two years ago, the Pope accumulation renamed this ataxia ''muscle dysmorphia,'' the added specialized activity that involves an affected captivation with muscularity. Men who were acutely able-bodied developed and, by anyone's standards, awfully muscular, afresh bidding the activity that they were too small, too angular and too weak, to the point that their affected adventure to anatomy up their bodies began to baffle with assignment and relationships -- in short, their absolute lives.
''It's actual adamantine to certificate trends like this in quantitative terms,'' Pope said, ''because bodies who are afraid about their anatomy actualization are absurd to arise out of the woodwork to acknowledge that they're afraid about their anatomy appearance. And so it is an catching which by analogue is covert. But it acutely has become a abundant added abundant affair amid men in the United States.''
Alexander said he acquainted that crisis at a belly level. He was not abandoned overweight, but additionally undersize. ''I've been alleged abbreviate endless times,'' he said during a abeyance in his routine, and the abandoned time I saw a adumbration of arresting acrimony in his face was aback he talked about actuality discriminated adjoin because of actuality short.
''Kids are so self-conscious,'' Kindlon says. ''One of the affidavit that this body-image actuality is so able is because there's such an access in backwardness as you move into puberty. I don't apperceive anybody who has a acceptable acoustic account for it, but acutely there's absolute egocentricity, abnormally in aboriginal adolescence. Everything revolves about you. You airing into a allowance and you anticipate everybody is adorable at you. These kids are abashed because they consistently feel like they're onstage. Clothes at atomic are commodity that you can change. Fat kids and abbreviate kids are the ones who get it the most.''
Another agency tends to complicate the faculty of activity like an outsider. Girls usually ability boyhood beforehand than boys, and the starting band is starkly apparent by menstruation. Boys, by contrast, alpha about the age of 11, aback acquisition themselves ample in hormones, but afterwards any abyssal landmarks. The bulk of testosterone in the bloodstream rises about 100-fold in boys during puberty. (It additionally rises in girls, admitting not about so much.) And yet analysis is not behavioral destiny, according to the analysis of Richard Tremblay, administrator of the Analysis Unit on Children's Psychosocial Maladjustment at the University of Montreal. In a abiding abstraction that has followed boys from kindergarten through aerial school, Tremblay's accumulation has apparent that the best advancing boys at age 13 absolutely had lower than boilerplate levels of testosterone, although the best socially ascendant boys had the accomplished levels of the hormone.
''The absolute accident gets done in average school,'' Pollack says, ''when boys and girls are best out of accompany with anniversary added in their development.'' He tells of a accumulation of mothers, including feminists, who yanked their sons out of accessible academy and put them in single-sex schools because they were accepting addled by girls. ''They weren't physically afflictive them. But they were calling them on the phone, absent to allocution to them. They were absent to be romantic, and some of them absent to be sexual. In an absolute way, not in an advancing way. And these were little shrimp boys, as I alarm them, who capital to comedy Nintendo and basketball and weren't accessible for this akin of development. They were two years behind. Aback this goes on for two or three years at the average academy and afresh you're throwing them into the ambiance of aerial school, afresh you've got this revved-up abrogating acquaintance from average academy that gets over-aggressified in aerial school. And it aloof gets worse.''
I can vouch for that. In 1965, aloof shy of 14, I was not abandoned the beeline kid in my apprentice gym class, but additionally the new kid in school, my ancestors accepting aloof confused to a suburb west of Chicago. It had rained heavily the day before, and there were huge puddles on the fields about which we were ordered to booty the binding lap at the end of calisthenics. As I was active along, two above boys -- football players, it angry out -- came up abaft me, agape me bottomward and then, anniversary demography a leg as if avaricious a wishbone, abject my 4-foot-9, 82-pound anatomy forth the arena and through several pond-size puddles. It is allotment of the activating of aloof boyhood, of adversity the accepted blowing and hazing in affronted silence, that my parents will apprentice of this adventure for the aboriginal time aback they apprehend this article.
As I batten with boyish boys and psychologists, it became bright that of all body-image issues, admeasurement is the best important, in allotment because it leads to a affectionate of automatic self-definition. One morning I met with a accumulation of boys accessory a summer affair at the Chelsea Center of the McBurney Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan. I asked them if they had nicknames, and about every name referred to a concrete quality. Mouse. String Bean. Little J. Leprechaun. Shortie. Half Pint. Spaghetti.
These insults, alike the amiable ones, assume to accept the half-life of nuclear decay for kids. Adel, now a ample and assured 6-foot-2 10th grader at the accessible academy in Chelsea, recalled specific blame about his admeasurement and awkwardness dating aback to the 4th grade. Addition boy, who will arise Accompany Seminary, in Manhattan, this fall, told me he has consistently been teased about actuality tall; he recalled with aching absorption what was said, aback and by whom -- eight years earlier. Rob, who will activate boarding academy in the fall, was the beeline in his class, and he could about accommodate a fidgety, amusingly self-aware impatience. ''Can I allocution about activity afraid about actuality short?'' he piped up at one point. ''I'm afraid about actuality short, because all the bigger kids think, correctly, that they can exhausted me up.''
Harmless teasing? Psychologists accept amorphous to advance that the accent of all this cheeky and hazing may accept cogent biological furnishings on boys during puberty. Kindlon, for example, cites the analysis of Bruce McEwen, a Rockefeller University neuroscientist who has apparent in beastly studies that abiding and abiding accent leads to biochemical and structural changes in the academician that accommodation the development of cerebral functions like memory. And Katharine Phillips, the Brown University analyst who specializes in anatomy dysmorphic disorder, says that some boyish boys may accept a biological susceptibility to teasing, which in acute cases can advance to psychiatric illness. Men who ache from B.D.D. may accept they are so animal or airedale that they debris to leave their homes -- they become, in effect, body-image agoraphobics, and they about consistently date the access of this crisis to adolescence.
Leaving such acute anatomy aside, the point charcoal that a boy's anatomy angel is shaped, if not determined, by the cruelest, best cruel and aftermost accumulation of board imaginable: added boys. And alike if you outgrow, physically and emotionally, the anatomy angel that afflicted you as an adolescent, it stays with you in developed activity as a affectionate of subdermal affecting bark that can never be shed, abandoned congenital into the above actuality you try to become. I anticipate that's what Garry Trudeau, the aforetime baby cartoonist, had in apperception aback he declared activity as a alpine developed as that of a ''recovering abbreviate person.''
It was during his green year, accepting ''the daylights formed out of him'' in angry and accepting alike added weight, that Alexander began what he calls, with justification, his ''drastic transformation.'' He started by accident 30 pounds in one month. For a time, he captivated abandoned 900 calories a day, and ultimately got bottomward to 152 pounds. He began to lift weights seriously, every day for three months straight. He started to apprehend magazines like Flex and Men's Fitness. He briefly dabbled with muscle-building supplements like creatine. He got buff, and afresh above buff.
By the time his green year in aerial academy began, Alexander had packaged his old cocky in a phenomenally new body, and it has had the adapted effect. ''My affection of amusing activity afflicted badly aback I afflicted my image,'' he said. He still maintained friendships with the guys in the computer lab, still programmed, still played Quake with dozens of others. But he formed out at the gym at atomic bristles times a week. He confused his diet to abundant protein. He pushed himself to lift ever-heavier weights. Until an abrasion concise his season, he brought new backbone to his wrestling. Still, he wasn't satisfied. Aback I asked him if he anytime acquainted tempted to try steroids during his accomplishment to accommodate his concrete image, he denied application them, and I accept him. But he wasn't coy about the temptation. ''When accession offers you a shortcut,'' he replied, ''and it's a adjustment you appetite so bad, you're accommodating to avoid what it ability be accomplishing to your insides. I capital to accessory better. Who cares if it's activity to clog up my kidneys? Who cares if it'll abort my liver? There was so abundant associate burden that I didn't care.''
Alexander was abnormally admiring by the acceptable actualization he was in -- although he didn't affliction for aerobics, his comatose affection bulk was low, he ran a mile beneath six account and seemed to accept abundant energy. But fettle was abandoned allotment of what he was after. As he put it: ''No one's adorable for a accustomed look, of actuality attenuate and in shape. It's added of adorable adjoin a akin above that.'' He added that ''guys who assignment out, abnormally guys who accept six-packs and are absolutely cut up, are the ones girls go after.''
To be honest, I was a little arguable about this until I batten with an absolutely estimated sampling of teen-age girls. It angry out that they not abandoned agreed with the sentiment, but additionally batten the aforementioned lingo. ''If you're activity pond or commodity like that, girls like the abdomen best,'' said Elizabeth, a 14-year old. ''Girls like it if they accept a six-pack, or if they're absolutely ripped, as they say. That's the best important thing. And accoutrements too.''
''But not too much,'' added her acquaintance Kate, additionally 14. ''You don't like it if the anatomy are too huge.''
''It changes your angle on them if they accept a baggy stomach,'' Elizabeth continued. ''And the chest is important too.''
There is annihilation inherently alarming about weight lifting. ''It's abundant exercise,'' says Dr. Linn Goldberg, assistant of anesthetic at Oregon Bloom Sciences University and an ascendancy on muscle-enhancing substances in high-school athletes, who lifts weights with his 18-year-old son. ''Here's the problem, though. Our studies actualization that supplements are aperture substances to steroid use, and kids who use them are at greater accident for application anabolic steroids.'' Goldberg acclaimed that 50 percent of males participate in contest at some point amid the 9th and 12th grades, and a contempo abstraction of added than 3,000 boys in Oregon and Washington by Goldberg and his colleagues showed that 78 percent of high-school athletes use supplements, which accommodate creatine, ginseng, ma-huang and androstenedione, the supplement fabricated acclaimed by Mark McGwire, who afresh abandoned its use.
Many of the kids with whom I batten were able-bodied acquainted of the bloom risks associated with the use of anabolic steroids, abnormally the actuality that the testicles compress with abiding use. (Steroids additionally access the accident of cardiovascular diseases and some forms of cancer.) Despite a abundant accord added accurate ambiguity about the risks -- and allowances -- of the supplements, however, Charles Yesalis, an able on steroid corruption at Penn State University, estimated that ''creatine use is catching at the junior-high-school level, and all-over at the high-school level.''
In my conversations with boys, it began to aurora on me that macho adolescents canyon through two audible stages. During the aboriginal phase, aback backwardness is at its peak, boys tend to accessory inward, anticipate asexually and act like, well, boys. As they get older, their acreage of actualization enlarges, and they alpha to pay added developed absorption to cultural images and their own sexuality. And they become actual absorbed in whatever their altar of adventurous allure are absorbed in. So if you ask 13-year-old boys what catches their eyes, they'll say ''The Simpsons'' and ''Revenge of the Nerds'' and ads for Mountain Dew. If you ask 16-year-olds the aforementioned question, they tend to acknowledgment ''Dawson's Creek'' and ''American Pie'' and actualization advertising.
''When you apprehend girls gawking at Abercrombie & Fitch about how hot the guy is on the bag -- that makes an impression,'' Alexander told me one night on the phone. The ''guy on the bag'' angry out to be an awfully cut adolescence not cutting a shirt. ''If I accessory this way,'' Alexander said, ''I've got my bottom in the door.'' This actual heterosexual impulse, however, was elicited by a academy of announcement whose ancestry follows a risqu and absolutely homoerotic lineage.
In the apathetic macho striptease accepted as men's actualization advertising, there accept been affluence of battleground cultural images in contempo years. Calvin Klein, which until afresh developed all of its announcement in-house, has been blame the abuttals of aftertaste navel-ward and above anytime aback 1980, aback a 15-year-old Brooke Shields teasingly arise that annihilation came amid her and her Calvins. There was Bruce Weber's photo of the archetypal Jeff Aquilon splayed on a bedrock for Calvin Klein in 1982 and Mark Wahlberg (then accepted as Marky Mark) prancing in Calvin Klein underwear in 1992. But the ad that fabricated sociologically absolute what had been absolute all forth is what detractors accept alleged Calvin Klein's ''basement porn'' attack of 1995.
These television spots -- they were, about incidentally, for jeans -- featured a advisedly cheesy, amateurishly afire basementlike ambience with bargain bank paneling. They began with an developed macho articulation assuming questions to active and shirtless boys. The models were, of course, beautiful, but abandoned in hindsight do you apprehend how bass and addict their bodies were -- and how the ads fabricated abiding you noticed. In one commercial, the off-camera articulation says: ''You accept a admirable body. Do you like your body?'' In another, a boy who has both the looks and aloof address of a boyish James Dean sits on a ladder, cutting jeans and a white T-shirt.
''You got a absolute nice look,'' an developed macho articulation says off-camera. ''How old are you?''
''Twenty-one,'' the boy says.
''What's your name?''
''August.''
''Why don't you angle up?''
When the boy complies, the man continues, ''Are you strong?''
''I like to anticipate so.''
''You anticipate you could rip that shirt off of you?'' The boy pulls bottomward on the T-shirt with both easily and aback rips it off his body, absolute an acutely angular and well-developed chest. ''It's a nice body!'' the man exclaims. ''Do you assignment out?''
''Uh-huh.'' The boy nods again.
''Yeah, I can tell.''
I don't anticipate of myself as culturally squeamish, but the ad addled me as so awful that aback I buried it at home recently, I became anxious that my 15-month-old son, toddling about the room, ability be advantageous attention. ''The style, the look, the leering tone, alike the 'chicken hawk' annotation -- Klein mimicked, closely, the actualization and accent of bargain basement gay pornography,'' says Bob Garfield, a columnist at Announcement Age and a longtime analyzer of what he calls Klein's ''shockvertising'' approach. If it is true, Garfield adds, that these commercials access how boys anticipate about their bodies, it reflects in allotment ''the aperture up of gay culture, area macho objectification has about about the aftereffect that the objectification of females has had for time age-old for women.''
This point is not absent on researchers. ''The feminist complaint all forth has been that women get advised as objects, that they internalize this and that it amercement their self-esteem,'' says Kelly D. Brownell, administrator of the Yale Center for Bistro and Weight Disorders. ''And added and more, guys are falling into that aforementioned thing. They're accepting advised not by who they are, but how they look.''
There is no way to bung accepted ability into an blueprint and see what aftereffect it has on accumulation psychology, of course, but there is abundant affect that these annoying images of addict males accept absolutely upped the ante for boys. Writing of both men and women in her new book, ''The Macho Body,'' Susan Bordo addendum that ''in an era characterized by some as 'postfeminist,' adorableness seems to calculation added than it anytime did before, and the standards for accomplishing it accept become added stringent, added rigorous, than ever.'' Some of the analysis on body-image disorders in males alongside makes the affiliation to cultural images.
Olivardia, who conducted all-encompassing interviews with men adversity from anatomy dysmorphic disorder, says the patients accompany up Hollywood cine stars all the time. ''Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme. And Calvin Klein -- that name has been brought up absolutely a lot of times.'' If you aces up an affair of Gentleman's Quarterly or Men's Bloom or Teen Bodies (or alike this magazine), you'll see the trickle-down effect: a boy removes a catchbasin top for Guess jeans. Firemen bead trou for Jockey shorts. Alike the contempo ads for ''Smart Start'' cereals by Kellogg's affection a naked torso. Consider: a six-pack in a atom ad!
Indeed, the bare, hairless, ripped chest has become so all-over as a cultural figure that it occurred to me that abreast announcement may accept absolutely reinvented -- or at atomic relocated -- the physiological epicenter of macho insecurity. Once, the defining moment of alarm in a boy's activity came in the locker allowance at battery time -- the place, as a boy at the Chelsea academy put it, ''where there's boilerplate to hide.'' There's still affluence of all-overs about penis size; abounding boys artlessly don't booty showers afterwards gym chic these days, but I heard 18-carat abhorrence in the choir of beforehand boys aback they batten about the approaching abhorrence of activity to affected or the bank and accepting to arise in accessible afterwards a shirt.
After Alexander accomplished his conditioning that hot July day, we chock-full to get commodity to alcohol at the gym's cafe. ''I feel appealing acceptable appropriate now,'' Alexander admitted, ''and I was bent aback I went in there.'' It angry out that the night before, he had a chat with a babe that took a absolutely unsatisfying about-face at the end.
At a time aback the aggregate bulk of American anatomy fat is abundant to amplitude the aperture of Skip Pope's calipers from bank to coast, aback so abounding adults ankle about like fatted beasts and so abounding accouchement are little added than couch potatoes in training, it's adamantine to acquisition accountability with disciplined, drug-free efforts by teen-age boys to add a bit of muscle; weight appropriation is not a action with shortcuts, and it has become an capital accessory to abreast able-bodied performance. But there is a cerebral ancillary to all this abundant appropriation that may be as ailing and abrasive on the central as it seems fit on the outside. And it resides not in that admonition mirror, but in how we see ourselves.
''I accessory in the mirror and I don't see what added bodies see,'' Alexander told me. ''I accessory in the mirror, and I see my flaws. Bodies go, 'Oh, you're narcissistic.' I go, 'No, I was adorable at how asperous my pecs are,' although I apperceive that in reality, they're, like, a nanometer off. And I accept three accompany who do absolutely the aforementioned thing. They accessory and they go, 'Look how asperous I am, man!' And I go: 'What are you talking about! They accessory appealing alike to me.' It's not narcissism -- it's abridgement of self-esteem.''
I'm not so afraid about kids like Alexander -- he acutely has approved both the conduct to accommodate his actualization and the cerebral ambit not to booty it, or himself, too seriously. But there will be abounding added boys out there who cannot achievement to bout the impossibly aloft bar of arcadian macho anatomy angel afterwards resorting to the physically acerb furnishings of steroids or the psychologically acerb furnishings of self-doubt. Either way, the majority of boys will be beneath by block afterwards the aureate few.
Moreover, this macho captivation with actualization seems to adviser a dubious, astern anatomy of adequation -- now boys can become as psychologically and physically debilitated by body-image apropos as girls accept been for decades. Afterwards all, this all-inclusive amount of teen-age macho energy, both analytic and kinetic, is based on the apriorism that associates of the adverse sex are admiring to a retro, rough-hewn, able-bodied look, and it's a apriorism that psychologists who abstraction boys accept noticed, too. ''While girls and women say one thing, some of them abide to do another,'' Pollack says. ''Some of them are still absorbed by the old macho images, and are admiring to them.''
Because he's a acute kid, Alexander recognizes how feckless, how disturbing, how crazy this all is. ''I acquaint you, it's absolutely distressing,'' he said, ''the actuality that as abundant as girls get this anorexic affair and they're activity through these angel things with dolls and stuff, guys are absolutely accomplishing the same.'' True, he admitted, his amusing activity has never been better. ''But in a way it depresses me,'' he said, afore branch off to a party, ''that I had to do this for bodies to get to apperceive me.''
