Men have body image angst but it is different to that of women’s and here is why

Let’s take the example of the incident with the blue suit

In 2015, Karl Stefanovic, a morning TV presenter on the Today Show in Australia, did an interesting experiment to see if there was any bias between the expectations on him and his female co-host. For a full year, Stefanovic wore the same blue suit and not a single audience member noticed.

 

His co-host did not lack such attention

Meanwhile, his co-host Lisa Wilkinson whose outfits changed and varied as normal, received regular, unsolicited fashion appraisals such as, “Today’s outfit is particularly jarring and awful. Get some style.” Now, we don’t know if those comments came from other women or men, but the expectations were clearly different. As all the while that Lisa was being judged, the man sitting next to her was in the same outfit day in and day out.
(Reference: Sydney Morning Herald, November 15, 2014.) Read about Karl here.

Karl said: “No one has noticed; no one gives a shit. But women, they wear the wrong colour and they get pulled up. They say the wrong thing and there’s thousands of tweets written about them. Women are judged much more harshly and keenly for what they do, what they say and what they wear.

 

Women in the spotlight cop-it

This, is a reality for women in the spotlight. But it is also a reality for all of us. We get judged more harshly than our male counterparts on our looks, our bodies and our wardrobes. This is what I call the ‘beauty load‘.

You’ve probably heard of the ‘mental load’, the term to describe all the invisible labour involved in
managing a household and family, which typically falls to the women, well, I believe that we also have a ‘beauty load’ resting on our over burdened shoulders.

 

Men feel body image angst

Body image angst is definitely felt by men and not just women. For men, the pressure is growing and this is reflected in the level of anxiety felt by young boys (in the UK, but stats are similar here in Australia), with 25% of boys saying their body image causes them to feel anxious. For girls, this is as high as 46% according to this great UK article.

 

What is the Beauty Load?

The ‘Beauty Load’ is a load that is felt by everyone in our society due to the consumerist and body ideal messaging that we are all exposed to, but in my book of the same name, I argue that it is felt more intensely and more damagingly by women and here are some reasons why;

For women, unlike for men, our sense of lack about our appearance seems to have a direct link to our self-worth.  This is not the case for men, due to their worth being sourced elsewhere for the past millenia.

Men, who have been the voices of knowledge, power and innovation in society, seem to be more protected from it being personal or a blight on their character. ‘The beauty load’ doesn’t seem to shame them or feel like it affects their value.

But it does us women. And the more women rise into places of power or celebrity and become visible to the public, the more we see ‘the beauty load’ being used against us in the form of shame. 

 

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