Psychology

Body image has established its historical importance and has been greatly emphasized in many literatures accounting for the high regard of a beautiful body, particularly of women. In this regard, women became an objective being compared to men, whose subjectivity is affirmed being the one who is looking at the former (Wooley, 1994). The media, on one hand, worsened womens endless struggle to achieve their physical ideal and therefore had lead to body image maintenance and eating disorders among women (Twamley  Davis, 1999). Ergo, many would assume that appearance-related issues are just womens concern and not of men.

Several researches have shown that, where females general population are not satisfied with their body figures, males on the other hand, are happier with their body weight (Leon et al, 1985), shape (Fallon  Rozin, 1985), and overall appearance (Pliner et al, 1990). Corollary to this, studies of body image concerns and eating disorders were largely quoted as female-specific concerns (Rodin et al, 1986 Thompson et al, 1999). Lee  Owens (2002) have shown that there is a great difference on body image attitude between men and women, where women are assailed with several idealizations of what their body should be compared to men. Most of the womens magazines today, contain images of women with ideal body figures, which in return, the readers will seek to have that kind of body similar to the models in the magazines.  Aside from the magazines, there is a plethora of media-influenced body idealization which we can find in TV programs, films, advertising, and other media (Rothblun, 1994).