This neat article article was posted in r/menslib and got good reception there. The reason I put male in the title is because this article clearly aimed at men and is coupled with The millennial...
This neat article article was posted in r/menslib and got good reception there. The reason I put male in the title is because this article clearly aimed at men and is coupled with The millennial vernacular of fatphobia, which is similarly clearly aimed at women. As said in the title, this is focused on millennials, so if you're under 25 or so like me, a lot of this probably will be foreign.
I observed these oddities up close in college, when my boyfriend (now husband) trained to compete in the 2004 Mr. Oklahoma competition. He won the lightweight class, a notable achievement — but it only compounded the body issues that plagued him as a millennial man.
As Anne wrote, “a vernacular of deprivation, control, and aspirational containment” molded young Gen-X and millennial women’s strained body experiences into unquestioned norms. There was a similar but inverted vernacular for men, marked by frenzied protein consumption and frantic muscle growth. And while postfeminism was a complicated lie, things were messy for men coming of age in this era, too. They didn’t suffer from the same patriarchal oppression as women, but they weren’t free from it either, and it wasn’t considered “manly” to ever talk about it.
Anne reminded us of SlimFast, whose commercials really were everywhere, encouraging (mostly) women to replace their meals with sad canned shakes. The product name is transparent, promising to help you become thin, and quickly. The gendered counterpart to SlimFast was Muscle Milk; I remember an ad that read “from tailgater to tail getter.”
One interesting paragraph is this one:
Teen girlhood is a site of constant contradictions. It’s celebrated and derided, sexualized and overprotected. But teen boyhood barely exists. It’s viewed as a life chapter to rush through in order to reach manhood, the stage that matters. [...]
In the menslib post the guy who posted this talks briefly about how true this is and how there are basically no desirable traits presented in the teen boy/dude/man and you are encouraged to basically just get through adolescence and leave and how this ties into the toxic aspects of masculinity. While I agree, I can't help but wonder how much of this can be dealt with from the POV of "It shouldn't be something you need to rush through and leave", and I personally feel. A lot of people talked in that thread about how they don't really miss their teenage years and how awkward they were, and a lot of the content on r/teenagers was when I used it and probably still is "tfw no gf" content. Someone asked what the value of teen boyhood was and the answer with 300% of the upvotes was free time alongside freedom to explore and others, which is fair but it doesn't make me like being a teenager more, especially given the lack of free time of adults is probably better seen as an employment and capitalism issue and none of the other things mentioned should be blocked to adults.
I don't agree with this at all (though I'm not a millennial, so maybe that's the difference?). There were tons of movies about being a teen boy when I was one, so society seemed to deem it a...
One interesting paragraph is this one:
Teen girlhood is a site of constant contradictions. It’s celebrated and derided, sexualized and overprotected. But teen boyhood barely exists. It’s viewed as a life chapter to rush through in order to reach manhood, the stage that matters. [...]
In the menslib post the guy who posted this talks briefly about how true this is and how there are basically no desirable traits presented in the teen boy/dude/man and you are encouraged to basically just get through adolescence and leave and how this ties into the toxic aspects of masculinity.
I don't agree with this at all (though I'm not a millennial, so maybe that's the difference?). There were tons of movies about being a teen boy when I was one, so society seemed to deem it a worthwhile thing. Teenage boyhood's main feature was, as they say in the comments, exploration. That is, exploration of your physical world, your sexuality, your emotions, your community, your beliefs, etc. I started out my teenage years as a church going virgin who had moderately conservative values, didn't really know much about the world beyond where I lived, and didn't think much about who I was or what I wanted or believed in life. I left them as an agnostic, non-virgin, strongly liberal person who had done some traveling and met a larger set of people, and was pretty sure that I wanted to do something tech and art related for the rest of my life.
People in the comments you linked to phrased it as "it was about getting to adulthood as fast as possible," but it wasn't like that for me. (Which isn't to say I enjoyed every minute of it, or that I didn't wish I were an adult already at times.) It's about learning what type of adult you want to be and figuring out how to get there. It's about a seemingly endless ability to try out different things. Prior to my generation (GenX), children and teenagers were not really considered fully human or deserving of their own thoughts. You didn't let your kid decide what they wanted to be, you told them what they were going to be. You didn't let them make decisions about what clothes they wanted, or what toys, or whatever. You got them what you deemed was right for them based on some arbitrary moral code that only you knew. It was rather different that my generation suddenly had teams of people creating advertisements aimed directly at us, not our parents, for example.
In addition to creating movies aimed specifically at teenage boys, we had video arcades and home systems that catered largely to teenage boys, an endless stream of YA fiction about smart young boys getting into harmless trouble, cable TV channels, and numerous other things.
Has it changed so much since then? I don't interact with too many teenagers, so I can totally believe it has. But it certainly seems like a lot of the things I see in my day-to-day life that are geared toward that demographic are similar to what I experienced (but, you know, on the internet instead).
(This came out a bit like a ramble.) While this is fine as a positive, a lot of people have also talked about how this can come at the cost of such exploration being disliked when you're an adult,...
(This came out a bit like a ramble.)
Teenage boyhood's main feature was, as they say in the comments, exploration. That is, exploration of your physical world, your sexuality, your emotions, your community, your beliefs, etc.
While this is fine as a positive, a lot of people have also talked about how this can come at the cost of such exploration being disliked when you're an adult, and that adults would benefit from not being discouraged from doing it. However, my main concern and potential objection is that I think we have a lot more insecurity than I assume we did in the past, since a lot of teenagers (and also adults) are concerned that the process of making friends and or romantic relationships is basically getting others to see things they like in you so you can connect over something, which is more conducive to the idea of trying to go with the flow than the more exploratory mood you describe. (Although the part about going with the flow probably hasn't changed a lot for a pretty long time, and it doesn't apply to everything.)
Has it changed so much since then? I don't interact with too many teenagers, so I can totally believe it has. But it certainly seems like a lot of the things I see in my day-to-day life that are geared toward that demographic are similar to what I experienced (but, you know, on the internet instead).
Personally, I feel things are generally similar, but with a pervasive atmosphere of self-deprecation that I like to believe didn't exist 20 or so years ago (although this atmosphere encompasses many more people than just teens age-wise of course), and my aforementioned insecurity and worrying about socializing with others being easier if you are similar to them. Of course, people still worried how their peers 'really felt about them, I'd imagine that's very common throughout time, but I imagine a lot more of socializing was done in the childhood stage, which meant teenage years were more focused on just romantic stuff, which I imagine seemed less daunting than today.
Yeah, my fellow Brazilian, as pointed out in another comment, the 90s and early 2000s where not any better than today in that regard. If anything, things improved for a lot of people. For example:...
Personally, I feel things are generally similar, but with a pervasive atmosphere of self-deprecation that I like to believe didn't exist 20 or so years ago (although this atmosphere encompasses many more people than just teens age-wise of course), and
Yeah, my fellow Brazilian, as pointed out in another comment, the 90s and early 2000s where not any better than today in that regard. If anything, things improved for a lot of people.
For example: think it's hard being LGBT now? Even though that is not as commonplace as we'd hope, a lot more adolescents come out to their parents and classmates nowadays. Back in the 90s/00s you got beat up just by looking like one, regardless of sexual orientation. No one would protect you. Coming out was a social death sentence. There was no recourse, adults were completely useless in addressing bullying, and it was RAMPANT.
As you very well known, we didn't even had a word for bullying in Portuguese, and now we just use the English word. That's quite revealing, for a lot of time this wasn't even viewed as problem. Today things are not perfect, but at least bullying is a bit harder to ignore.
For many, the 90s were a time of deep insecurity, loneliness, frustration, hopelessness, self-hate, addiction, and suicide. Wanna get the feeling? Just listen some Nirvana.
I doubt that very much. Insecurities have likely always existed in abundance, IMO. It's just the forms those insecurities took that have changed due to ever changing social, economic, gender,...
I think we have a lot more insecurity than I assume we did in the past
I doubt that very much. Insecurities have likely always existed in abundance, IMO. It's just the forms those insecurities took that have changed due to ever changing social, economic, gender, religious and political norms. But if anything, I suspect insecurity probably peaked in the 40-50s (in the West, at least), thanks to the meteoric rise of mass-market media, aspirational advertising, rigidly enforced norms, and all forms of media pushing the myth of the "rugged individual man" and "subservient wife". And I even suspect that's why so many boomers egos tend to be so damn fragile too, which is being revealed en masse as their carefully constructed self-images have slowly begun revealing themselves as being based on complete fabrications.
Whereas at least most of us Gen-X and younger grew up already inundated with that shit, so we seem to be rather cynical and skeptical of the narratives and norms being sold by mass-market media and advertising. Admittedly though, a new thing all us younger-than-boomer generations have had to contend with that the boomers didn't is the internet and social media, which applies all sorts of powerful social pressures on us all.
I would love to see some sociology studies to prove me right or wrong though... since that's all just based on my intuition and personal observation.
I feel things are generally similar, but with a pervasive atmosphere of self-deprecation that I like to believe didn't exist 20 or so years ago
I doubt that too. Have you seen what we dressed like in the 90s and 00s? We had to have a self-deprecating sense of humour about it or we all would have died of shame by now. :P
(I'm also going to respond to @mrbig and @joplin here. Also, I'm not really arguing for my own opinion anymore because I admittedly don't feel like I came to believe it in a way I would be happy...
(I'm also going to respond to @mrbig and @joplin here. Also, I'm not really arguing for my own opinion anymore because I admittedly don't feel like I came to believe it in a way I would be happy with. This comment is more me just taking about the assumptions I made.)
I doubt that very much. Insecurities have likely always existed in abundance, IMO. It's just the forms those insecurities took that have changed due to ever changing social, economic, gender, religious and political norms. But if anything, I suspect insecurity probably peaked in the 40-50s (in the West, at least), thanks to the meteoric rise of mass-market media, aspirational advertising, rigidly enforced norms, and all forms of media pushing the myth of the "rugged individual man" and "subservient wife".
That is a very interesting conjecture and makes some sense, since they would probably be some of the least prepared when it comes to dealing with that kind of message.
I doubt that too. Have you seen what we dressed like in the 90s and 00s? We had to have a self-deprecating sense of humour about it or we all would have died of shame by now :P
But a bit more seriously, I was always under the assumption that people actually didn't see anything wrong since there wouldn't be the anonymous commenters on the internet to 'point it out' for you, especially if it was something 'everyone' was doing, since your peers wouldn't be judging either.
For example: think it's hard being LGBT now? Even though that is not as commonplace as we'd hope, a lot more adolescents come out to their parents and classmates nowadays. Back in the 90s/00s you got beat up just by looking like one, regardless of sexual orientation. [...]
To be clear (and repeat myself), I have never believed people were less conservative or more tolerant in the past. I've just always assumed that people rarely grew up to be socially awkward and bad at making friends until in the last 10 years or so for whatever reasons we seemingly didn't bother to make common knowledge, and that a relatively large share of the population struggling to have relationships with others is a first in recent history.
While that is true, I’m not sure what it has to do with the article. For what it’s worth, it really depends a lot on where you live. [...]
I admit this is definitely more about how I feel about being told I can experiment more as a teenager the about whether it's correct or not. (It is.) I can't help but feel my concerns lie closer to if (some) people would really like me for who I am than anything exploratory (I have talked about it in the mental health threads). Discarding my personal reactions though, I agree with the reasons why teenagehood would be seen as more exploratory though (you explained it well), I just think that fundamentally speaking, this should be available to everyone. Someone mentioned in the menslib thread I linked about that adults doing that are frowned upon and it seems I found it a lot more salient than others here seemingly.
What makes you think that? I can tell you that the 80s in the US were a very conservative time and teenagers were very concerned with going with the flow and getting other kids to like them. [...] I think of shows like Square Pegs where each week was another episode where the nerdy kids were trying desperately to be liked by the popular kids.
I guess the main difference is that, as I said earlier, I generally assumed that the amount of "nerdy kids" who would need to be like this would be massively smaller while everyone else either managed to fit in easily or they really were that 'normal'. (I mean, how did people find niche things before the internet?).
I can't really say if the 90s and early 2000s where that much worse from what came before, but I can tell you for sure that this phenomenon was very prevalent when I was growing up. In fact, I...
To be clear (and repeat myself), I have never believed people were less conservative or more tolerant in the past. I've just always assumed that people rarely grew up to be socially awkward and bad at making friends until in the last 10 years or so for whatever reasons we seemingly didn't bother to make common knowledge, and that a relatively large share of the population struggling to have relationships with others is a first in recent history
I can't really say if the 90s and early 2000s where that much worse from what came before, but I can tell you for sure that this phenomenon was very prevalent when I was growing up. In fact, I doubt there was any time in the history of civilization in which that was not an extremely common and prevalent issue. It's in our nature for better or worse. This is definitely not a localized thing.
While that is true, I’m not sure what it has to do with the article. For what it’s worth, it really depends a lot on where you live. When I lived in the Southern US, anything out of the norm...
While this is fine as a positive, a lot of people have also talked about how this can come at the cost of such exploration being disliked when you're an adult, and that adults would benefit from not being discouraged from doing it.
While that is true, I’m not sure what it has to do with the article. For what it’s worth, it really depends a lot on where you live. When I lived in the Southern US, anything out of the norm caused great discomfort for many of the people who lived there and they were very vocal about it. Meanwhile in Southern California, people don’t really seem to mind other adults trying stuff out. I have 50+ year old coworkers who sometimes dye their hair purple, and nobody bats an eye. When I was in the South in my 20s, I regularly had to deal with violent assholes who didn’t like the length of my hair and who needed to make sure that I knew it.
However, my main concern and potential objection is that I think we have a lot more insecurity than I assume we did in the past, since a lot of teenagers (and also adults) are concerned that the process of making friends and or romantic relationships is basically getting others to see things they like in you so you can connect over something, which is more conducive to the idea of trying to go with the flow than the more exploratory mood you describe.
What makes you think that? I can tell you that the 80s in the US were a very conservative time and teenagers were very concerned with going with the flow and getting other kids to like them. Just watch the movies and TV from that time period. I think of shows like Square Pegs where each week was another episode where the nerdy kids were trying desperately to be liked by the popular kids. And watch any movie directed by John Hughes or starring John Cusack to see how insecure were. But even with that, you had more freedom to explore than adults did. I mean you just had more time since you didn’t have a full-time job for most of it.
Yes. The experience of being an outcast in highly stratified high-schools is probably one of the most recurrent themes in popular movies for young people during the 80s and 90s, to the point that...
Yes. The experience of being an outcast in highly stratified high-schools is probably one of the most recurrent themes in popular movies for young people during the 80s and 90s, to the point that it became a tired cliché at some point. This is not just a common theme, it's presence in American (and therefore the world's) culture is overwhelming.
This didn't quite resonate with me. It isn't that I don't buy that men have body issues (I've got a few myself) but they're different enough as to not cleanly compare to women's issues in this...
This didn't quite resonate with me. It isn't that I don't buy that men have body issues (I've got a few myself) but they're different enough as to not cleanly compare to women's issues in this regard. Even today it is more acceptable for men to be fat. Masculinity is portrayed by size, muscle, then fitness in order. The recent trend of superhero media may have shifted it a bit for the younger generation, so maybe I just haven't seen it.
I also see the lack of male teenager media as a benefit. Seventeen, and similar magazines have done massive amounts of damage to the young female psyche, and having male teen media would only start men on body image issues sooner.
I didn't read the article as positing some kind of absolute equality between the two, but anyway I think that's a very unproductive angle to focus on. Not that I'm accusing you of that, but I can...
I didn't read the article as positing some kind of absolute equality between the two, but anyway I think that's a very unproductive angle to focus on. Not that I'm accusing you of that, but I can foresee two or three comments down the line we're gonna devolve into Misery Olympics if we go down the path of comparing the relative impact and severity of men's and women's pressures regarding a socially approved body type.
I've never been that much into lifting and such, but for whatever reason, for the past few years I've been tapped into the world of fitness youtube, bodybuilding, and that whole industry. Probably I watched a couple of videos about it one time and the almighty Algorithm decided I was into it, so it kept pushing that content on me and I kept consuming it. Which is just a prelude to say that I find this resonates quite a bit with me even though I personally am not really much of a lifter and certainly not a bodybuilder.
If you follow online fitness culture, there's a definite hierarchy emerging. You're right that being fat is probably more socially acceptable for men than for women, but on the other hand, being skinny and not muscular is not. A fat dude can in some cases get away with claiming to be "bulking" - building muscle while also putting on fat in anticipation of a later phase of dieting to reduce bodyfat, thus obtaining a more muscular, lean physique. A skinny dude is just a lazy "DYEL" (do you even lift?). Even a dude who goes to the gym three times a week but doesn't have a pro athlete's diet and doesn't devote their life to lifting and getting jacked and swole can be a DYEL.
Then there's the massive amount of PEDs used by many fitness influencers, further skewing the body ideal towards a physique that doesn't just require extreme dedication and good genetics, but to one that is literally impossible to achieve even if you have those two things but are unwilling or unable to use the secret sauce. You got teenagers hopping on SARMs because they're quasi-legal in many countries and less scary than sticking testosterone analogues in your ass cheeks with a needle, but nobody knows much about their long-term effects and it's likely they carry many of the same risks as traditional steroids. Except at least we know something about the effects and risks of testosterone or trenbolone, while novel chemicals with alphanumerical names from Chinese labs are largely un- or under-researched.
If you spend any time in the echo chambers related to building muscle, you can easily adopt an extremely skewed body image which can, if left unquestioned, evolve into body dysmorphia. I catch myself thinking Brad Pitt's much-lauded Fight Club physique is whimpy and unimpressive, because I spent some time hanging out in places like r/bodybuilding where the ideal is somewhere between this and this.
Thankfully, as I said, I am not personally much of a fitness guy to begin with, and mostly follow things like bodybuilding out of a combination of intellectual curiosity about the limits of the human body and a kind of absurdist appreciation of the freak factor. But if I were sixteen and just started lifting weights, I could easily see myself adopting the mindset that I'll never be big enough, lean enough, strong enough to be worth anything.
Which reminds me of the short film Dennis, which tackles the kind of issues that underlie some (not all!) men's search to be ever more muscular.
This neat article article was posted in r/menslib and got good reception there. The reason I put male in the title is because this article clearly aimed at men and is coupled with The millennial vernacular of fatphobia, which is similarly clearly aimed at women. As said in the title, this is focused on millennials, so if you're under 25 or so like me, a lot of this probably will be foreign.
One interesting paragraph is this one:
In the menslib post the guy who posted this talks briefly about how true this is and how there are basically no desirable traits presented in the teen boy/dude/man and you are encouraged to basically just get through adolescence and leave and how this ties into the toxic aspects of masculinity. While I agree, I can't help but wonder how much of this can be dealt with from the POV of "It shouldn't be something you need to rush through and leave", and I personally feel. A lot of people talked in that thread about how they don't really miss their teenage years and how awkward they were, and a lot of the content on r/teenagers was when I used it and probably still is "tfw no gf" content. Someone asked what the value of teen boyhood was and the answer with 300% of the upvotes was free time alongside freedom to explore and others, which is fair but it doesn't make me like being a teenager more, especially given the lack of free time of adults is probably better seen as an employment and capitalism issue and none of the other things mentioned should be blocked to adults.
I don't agree with this at all (though I'm not a millennial, so maybe that's the difference?). There were tons of movies about being a teen boy when I was one, so society seemed to deem it a worthwhile thing. Teenage boyhood's main feature was, as they say in the comments, exploration. That is, exploration of your physical world, your sexuality, your emotions, your community, your beliefs, etc. I started out my teenage years as a church going virgin who had moderately conservative values, didn't really know much about the world beyond where I lived, and didn't think much about who I was or what I wanted or believed in life. I left them as an agnostic, non-virgin, strongly liberal person who had done some traveling and met a larger set of people, and was pretty sure that I wanted to do something tech and art related for the rest of my life.
People in the comments you linked to phrased it as "it was about getting to adulthood as fast as possible," but it wasn't like that for me. (Which isn't to say I enjoyed every minute of it, or that I didn't wish I were an adult already at times.) It's about learning what type of adult you want to be and figuring out how to get there. It's about a seemingly endless ability to try out different things. Prior to my generation (GenX), children and teenagers were not really considered fully human or deserving of their own thoughts. You didn't let your kid decide what they wanted to be, you told them what they were going to be. You didn't let them make decisions about what clothes they wanted, or what toys, or whatever. You got them what you deemed was right for them based on some arbitrary moral code that only you knew. It was rather different that my generation suddenly had teams of people creating advertisements aimed directly at us, not our parents, for example.
In addition to creating movies aimed specifically at teenage boys, we had video arcades and home systems that catered largely to teenage boys, an endless stream of YA fiction about smart young boys getting into harmless trouble, cable TV channels, and numerous other things.
Has it changed so much since then? I don't interact with too many teenagers, so I can totally believe it has. But it certainly seems like a lot of the things I see in my day-to-day life that are geared toward that demographic are similar to what I experienced (but, you know, on the internet instead).
(This came out a bit like a ramble.)
While this is fine as a positive, a lot of people have also talked about how this can come at the cost of such exploration being disliked when you're an adult, and that adults would benefit from not being discouraged from doing it. However, my main concern and potential objection is that I think we have a lot more insecurity than I assume we did in the past, since a lot of teenagers (and also adults) are concerned that the process of making friends and or romantic relationships is basically getting others to see things they like in you so you can connect over something, which is more conducive to the idea of trying to go with the flow than the more exploratory mood you describe. (Although the part about going with the flow probably hasn't changed a lot for a pretty long time, and it doesn't apply to everything.)
Personally, I feel things are generally similar, but with a pervasive atmosphere of self-deprecation that I like to believe didn't exist 20 or so years ago (although this atmosphere encompasses many more people than just teens age-wise of course), and my aforementioned insecurity and worrying about socializing with others being easier if you are similar to them. Of course, people still worried how their peers 'really felt about them, I'd imagine that's very common throughout time, but I imagine a lot more of socializing was done in the childhood stage, which meant teenage years were more focused on just romantic stuff, which I imagine seemed less daunting than today.
Yeah, my fellow Brazilian, as pointed out in another comment, the 90s and early 2000s where not any better than today in that regard. If anything, things improved for a lot of people.
For example: think it's hard being LGBT now? Even though that is not as commonplace as we'd hope, a lot more adolescents come out to their parents and classmates nowadays. Back in the 90s/00s you got beat up just by looking like one, regardless of sexual orientation. No one would protect you. Coming out was a social death sentence. There was no recourse, adults were completely useless in addressing bullying, and it was RAMPANT.
As you very well known, we didn't even had a word for bullying in Portuguese, and now we just use the English word. That's quite revealing, for a lot of time this wasn't even viewed as problem. Today things are not perfect, but at least bullying is a bit harder to ignore.
For many, the 90s were a time of deep insecurity, loneliness, frustration, hopelessness, self-hate, addiction, and suicide. Wanna get the feeling? Just listen some Nirvana.
Don't romantize the past, buddy :)
I doubt that very much. Insecurities have likely always existed in abundance, IMO. It's just the forms those insecurities took that have changed due to ever changing social, economic, gender, religious and political norms. But if anything, I suspect insecurity probably peaked in the 40-50s (in the West, at least), thanks to the meteoric rise of mass-market media, aspirational advertising, rigidly enforced norms, and all forms of media pushing the myth of the "rugged individual man" and "subservient wife". And I even suspect that's why so many boomers egos tend to be so damn fragile too, which is being revealed en masse as their carefully constructed self-images have slowly begun revealing themselves as being based on complete fabrications.
Whereas at least most of us Gen-X and younger grew up already inundated with that shit, so we seem to be rather cynical and skeptical of the narratives and norms being sold by mass-market media and advertising. Admittedly though, a new thing all us younger-than-boomer generations have had to contend with that the boomers didn't is the internet and social media, which applies all sorts of powerful social pressures on us all.
I would love to see some sociology studies to prove me right or wrong though... since that's all just based on my intuition and personal observation.
I doubt that too. Have you seen what we dressed like in the 90s and 00s? We had to have a self-deprecating sense of humour about it or we all would have died of shame by now. :P
(I'm also going to respond to @mrbig and @joplin here. Also, I'm not really arguing for my own opinion anymore because I admittedly don't feel like I came to believe it in a way I would be happy with. This comment is more me just taking about the assumptions I made.)
That is a very interesting conjecture and makes some sense, since they would probably be some of the least prepared when it comes to dealing with that kind of message.
I have and I still disagree /s
But a bit more seriously, I was always under the assumption that people actually didn't see anything wrong since there wouldn't be the anonymous commenters on the internet to 'point it out' for you, especially if it was something 'everyone' was doing, since your peers wouldn't be judging either.
To be clear (and repeat myself), I have never believed people were less conservative or more tolerant in the past. I've just always assumed that people rarely grew up to be socially awkward and bad at making friends until in the last 10 years or so for whatever reasons we seemingly didn't bother to make common knowledge, and that a relatively large share of the population struggling to have relationships with others is a first in recent history.
I admit this is definitely more about how I feel about being told I can experiment more as a teenager the about whether it's correct or not. (It is.) I can't help but feel my concerns lie closer to if (some) people would really like me for who I am than anything exploratory (I have talked about it in the mental health threads). Discarding my personal reactions though, I agree with the reasons why teenagehood would be seen as more exploratory though (you explained it well), I just think that fundamentally speaking, this should be available to everyone. Someone mentioned in the menslib thread I linked about that adults doing that are frowned upon and it seems I found it a lot more salient than others here seemingly.
I guess the main difference is that, as I said earlier, I generally assumed that the amount of "nerdy kids" who would need to be like this would be massively smaller while everyone else either managed to fit in easily or they really were that 'normal'.
(I mean, how did people find niche things before the internet?).I can't really say if the 90s and early 2000s where that much worse from what came before, but I can tell you for sure that this phenomenon was very prevalent when I was growing up. In fact, I doubt there was any time in the history of civilization in which that was not an extremely common and prevalent issue. It's in our nature for better or worse. This is definitely not a localized thing.
This is a great question. I’m going to create a separate topic about it.
While that is true, I’m not sure what it has to do with the article. For what it’s worth, it really depends a lot on where you live. When I lived in the Southern US, anything out of the norm caused great discomfort for many of the people who lived there and they were very vocal about it. Meanwhile in Southern California, people don’t really seem to mind other adults trying stuff out. I have 50+ year old coworkers who sometimes dye their hair purple, and nobody bats an eye. When I was in the South in my 20s, I regularly had to deal with violent assholes who didn’t like the length of my hair and who needed to make sure that I knew it.
What makes you think that? I can tell you that the 80s in the US were a very conservative time and teenagers were very concerned with going with the flow and getting other kids to like them. Just watch the movies and TV from that time period. I think of shows like Square Pegs where each week was another episode where the nerdy kids were trying desperately to be liked by the popular kids. And watch any movie directed by John Hughes or starring John Cusack to see how insecure were. But even with that, you had more freedom to explore than adults did. I mean you just had more time since you didn’t have a full-time job for most of it.
Yes. The experience of being an outcast in highly stratified high-schools is probably one of the most recurrent themes in popular movies for young people during the 80s and 90s, to the point that it became a tired cliché at some point. This is not just a common theme, it's presence in American (and therefore the world's) culture is overwhelming.
This didn't quite resonate with me. It isn't that I don't buy that men have body issues (I've got a few myself) but they're different enough as to not cleanly compare to women's issues in this regard. Even today it is more acceptable for men to be fat. Masculinity is portrayed by size, muscle, then fitness in order. The recent trend of superhero media may have shifted it a bit for the younger generation, so maybe I just haven't seen it.
I also see the lack of male teenager media as a benefit. Seventeen, and similar magazines have done massive amounts of damage to the young female psyche, and having male teen media would only start men on body image issues sooner.
I didn't read the article as positing some kind of absolute equality between the two, but anyway I think that's a very unproductive angle to focus on. Not that I'm accusing you of that, but I can foresee two or three comments down the line we're gonna devolve into Misery Olympics if we go down the path of comparing the relative impact and severity of men's and women's pressures regarding a socially approved body type.
I've never been that much into lifting and such, but for whatever reason, for the past few years I've been tapped into the world of fitness youtube, bodybuilding, and that whole industry. Probably I watched a couple of videos about it one time and the almighty Algorithm decided I was into it, so it kept pushing that content on me and I kept consuming it. Which is just a prelude to say that I find this resonates quite a bit with me even though I personally am not really much of a lifter and certainly not a bodybuilder.
If you follow online fitness culture, there's a definite hierarchy emerging. You're right that being fat is probably more socially acceptable for men than for women, but on the other hand, being skinny and not muscular is not. A fat dude can in some cases get away with claiming to be "bulking" - building muscle while also putting on fat in anticipation of a later phase of dieting to reduce bodyfat, thus obtaining a more muscular, lean physique. A skinny dude is just a lazy "DYEL" (do you even lift?). Even a dude who goes to the gym three times a week but doesn't have a pro athlete's diet and doesn't devote their life to lifting and getting jacked and swole can be a DYEL.
Then there's the massive amount of PEDs used by many fitness influencers, further skewing the body ideal towards a physique that doesn't just require extreme dedication and good genetics, but to one that is literally impossible to achieve even if you have those two things but are unwilling or unable to use the secret sauce. You got teenagers hopping on SARMs because they're quasi-legal in many countries and less scary than sticking testosterone analogues in your ass cheeks with a needle, but nobody knows much about their long-term effects and it's likely they carry many of the same risks as traditional steroids. Except at least we know something about the effects and risks of testosterone or trenbolone, while novel chemicals with alphanumerical names from Chinese labs are largely un- or under-researched.
If you spend any time in the echo chambers related to building muscle, you can easily adopt an extremely skewed body image which can, if left unquestioned, evolve into body dysmorphia. I catch myself thinking Brad Pitt's much-lauded Fight Club physique is whimpy and unimpressive, because I spent some time hanging out in places like r/bodybuilding where the ideal is somewhere between this and this.
Thankfully, as I said, I am not personally much of a fitness guy to begin with, and mostly follow things like bodybuilding out of a combination of intellectual curiosity about the limits of the human body and a kind of absurdist appreciation of the freak factor. But if I were sixteen and just started lifting weights, I could easily see myself adopting the mindset that I'll never be big enough, lean enough, strong enough to be worth anything.
Which reminds me of the short film Dennis, which tackles the kind of issues that underlie some (not all!) men's search to be ever more muscular.