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Body image gay men

Understanding how to improve body image in queer men

Gay, bisexual, and queer men have worse body image than our heterosexual counterparts – a finding I, as a gay guy, can personally attest to.

By body image, I imply our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward our bodies and appearance, for superior or worse.

There have been lots of studies on how women can enhance their body image but there have been almost no evidence-based interventions for queer men’s body image.

So, in my honours year, supervised by Dr Emily Harris and Dr Scott Griffith from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, I tested whether a short self-compassion writing task could improve queer men’s body image.

The results, published in the journal Body Image, suggest that if gay and bi men can feel more self-compassionate, their relationship with their bodies can improve.

The difficulty lies in how to help them be self-compassionate.

Self-compassion has its roots in Buddhist philosophy. In Western psychology, it’s been defined as treating ourselves with kindness, recognising our flaws and mistakes as part of a shared human experience (“No one’s perfect!”), and being aware of our present feeli

Gay Men and Eating Disorders: What You Need to Know

Gay men experience eating disorders and body dysmorphia more than any other population except for heterosexual women.

Why do gay men have higher rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia?

To help understand the link between gay society and negative body image, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, we spoke to Carl Hovey, a psychologist and researcher at the Soho and Fidi locations of the Gay Therapy Center in New York.

Carl’s research took the build of a qualitative investigate. He interviewed a collection of gay men in New York City, asking open ended questions love, “Can you talk to me a little about how you experience your body, both now and in the past?”

“I wanted to try and receive a narrative going of how ideas about the body are formed by messages from family, society and society, and whether that was stable or unstable over time,” he explained.

“In speaking directly to the population, rather than trying to extrapolate interpretation from person-less data, you get to hear nuanced explanations from the population you’re trying to understand.”

Eating disorders are “illnesses in which people experience grave disturbances in their

Gay men have body image issues

Approximately 84 percent of gay men say they feel under intense pressure to have a excellent body. They are three times more likely than straight men to possess body image issues. Only one percent stated they were “very happy” with their appearance, and they continue to struggle even more as they develop older. 

Why are gay men hyper-focused on body image and looking and feeling young? 

It may involve a social philosophy called objectification, which is the behave of treating persons as objects or things, dehumanizing them, and making them sexual “objects” instead of real people. Gay men, more so than heterosexual men, tend to self-objectify and place higher importance on physical attractiveness. 

Grindr, the dating app, is one example of objectification. Profiles on Grindr often employ descriptors such as “no fat,” or “no femmes,” or “in shape only.” 

I’ve had the experience. Even though I was a model as a teenager, I never felt I looked good enough. Older gay men would reveal me to lie about my age. I observe back on those days and see how mistaken this was. You would think gay men would be natural allies for each other and elevate each other up, but this is not occur

body image gay men

Body Dysmorphia Continues to Be a Serious Issue Among Gay Men

Reasons Why Body Dysmorphia Is Prevalent

While a growing body of explore and experts point to the minority stress model as a key culprit in the scourge of BDD among gay men, there are other causes.

The Media Sets the Block Too High

Gay men often find themselves with an Adonis complex, explains Dr. Whitesel, believing what the media says a same-sex attracted man should look like.

“Weight stigma is so baked into our society that we don’t even register,” says Lacie Parker, PsyD, a therapist in Seattle, Washington, who has published research on eating disorders in the LGBTQ+ collective. “Media representation of gender non-conforming folks, which is lacking in general, certainly doesn’t portray larger bodies. Instead, we see thinness and muscularity allotted as the ideal, while fatness is the butt of the jokes. That’s extremely challenging to deal with when you’re trying to generate sense of the society and attract a spouse in that community.”

In reality, a review published in in the Journal of Eating Disorders, and authored by Dr. Parker, found that men who internalize media images of beauty that glorify thin bodies were at greater risk of feeling dissat

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