Cultural messages have a strong effect on young people - these effects carry on throughout their lives. Negative #stereotypes about gender, race etc. can lead people to focus on the negative (sometimes cultural myths created to take away power from some members of society) this eventually leads them into depression.
A new study focusing on gender, looks at how young men's #selfimage is affected by the strong cultural messages sent out to in the media, and strongly interwoven within our culture today.
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While so many girls are busy striving for #skinniness, some teen boys are fearfully trying to avoid it — to the point of being driven to depression and dangerous steroid use if they believe that they are too underweight. That’s according to a pair of new studies by Harvard Medical School researcher Aaron Blashill, who says that notions of masculinity are partly to blame.
The studies, both published online in late December in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychology of Men & Masculinity (but publicized by the APA on Monday), looked at the risks faced by boys who inaccurately see themselves as being too skinny — as compared with those who inaccurately see themselves as overweight and those who accurately see themselves as too thin, heavy or average. They found that while all teen boys who see themselves unclearly are more susceptible to depression and other issues than those who don't, those who see themselves as too skinny fare the worst of all.
"There has certainly been a traumatic increase in the emphasis on male body image over the last 30 to 40 years," Dr. Harrison Pope, director of the Biological Psychological Laboratory at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, tells Yahoo Shine. "I can't remember anyone worrying if they had a six-pack of abdominal muscles when I was in high school. Now it's reflected by many aspects of culture, and why that has happened is less clear. But a somewhat cynical theory is that advertisers for body-related products thought they had already saturated the female market, and if they could only succeed in making men feel insecure about their image, they would get that other half of the population, too."
It’s sadly not surprising, Blashill notes; the phenomenon is just like #anorexia among women. “The sociocultural messages we are all susceptible to are very gendered,” he says. “Women tend to internalize an ideal of thinness. For men, it’s what’s called a #mesomorphic physique — highly muscular and lean, with low fat content,” rather than just huge and brawny, he explains. “So boys’ and girls’ messages are different but equally unattainable.”
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