Wednesday, October 17, 2012
My question for this week is: "Why do women get eating disorders so much more often than men?" I understand why women have body image issues. Turn on the tv or flip through a magazine at any given time and you will see a vast amount of beautiful women with perfect, unachievable bodies. Being surrounded by these images is enough to make any girl feel bad about herself. And these problems with self image lead to eating disorders in a lot of girls. But when flipping through these magazines and watching these commercials, you also see a lot of really hot guys with perfect, unachievable bodies. All cologne commercials sell their product by showing a hot naked man holding the bottle. Deoderant commercials also sell their product by showing perfect naked men with impeccable bodies. I'm not sure what naked men have to do with cologne or deoderant, but I'm certainly not complaining. Why do guys seem to be so much more immune to these ads? While girls are watching these commercials and tearing themselves apart, most men seem to be unaffected by the perfect male bodies on their tv screens. I'm not saying that no men are affected, but statistics say that girls get eating disorders much more often. Why is that?
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This is a good question. I’ve never paid attention to the fact that eating disorders are rarely found amongst men. When I first learned about eating disorders, all of the examples were of women. Every time I see a picture of a person with an eating disorder, it is a picture of a woman. I never heard of a man having an eating disorder, and I've never thought to link a man to one. Now that you’ve mentioned this, I’m also curious to know why eating disorders affect women more than men. I think it may be because most men have a higher self-esteem than a woman. They think highly of themselves, so they feel as though they don’t need to change anything about themselves. Women seem to be the ones who take the media and magazine ads more seriously because they are pressured to look a certain way or they want to impress certain people by having a nice figure. Maybe Dr. Liz will help us understand this a little more!
ReplyDeleteI'd definitely like to know the answer to this question as well. I've never met or know of a guy with an eating disorder. Not to say that they don't exist, because I'm sure they do, but honestly there truly are just as many hot guys out there as there are gorgeous women.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem like in general mainly girls get eating disorders. Girls seem to get so many negative ideas about their body image because of all these magazines and media. I’m not sure why but there is just more talk about girls having these major issues with their bodies and not so much with the boys. I’m sure though that on some level boys do feel this pressure too. It is just not as talked about or as big of an issue to the public. I kind of think that is sad because I’m sure this really does affect some boys too and they just get swept under the rug.
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