My next book, Good Boy, Bad Boy, opens with a question about what we see when we look in the mirror. Of course, the mirror is symbolic of how we perceive ourselves and the spirit of the question captures a more holistic view of whether we see our true goodness and worthiness or some ugly cumulation of imperfections, shame, regret and overall badness. That being said, and not surprisingly, baked into the question more literally, is how we perceive our physical body.
Throughout my life, physical appearance and beauty often seemed subjects more associated with women than men. One of the axioms I’d always heard growing up was that men don’t need to care about their looks because women don’t place as much emphasis on overall physical attractiveness when seeking a partner in the same way men do. Brad Pitt and George Clooney were (and still are) attractive but, in my hometown, they weren’t some kind of North Star to follow. It wasn’t very masculine to contemplate male attractiveness or make any real effort to attain or maintain it.
Yet, in my own experience, that was never really true either. I’ve spent most of my life feeling awkward about my appearance and trying to make up for it with status, money and, well...trying to polish up my looks in all the more banal ways like clothes, fitness, stealing my wife’s moisturiser, and having just the right amount of stubble on my face.
I’ve suffered from body dysphoria disorder (BDD) for most of my teenage and adult life. When I was an elite long-distance runner, I was determined to be as lean as my leanest competitors. As a result, I became anorexic. Training to exhaustion while eating virtually nothing drained my energy and starved my muscles. I went from a lithe 135 pounds to a wobbly 115 pounds. I had sunken cheeks and became chronically ill and frequently injured for years to follow. As the mental condition goes, I still looked in the mirror and thought I was too heavy to be truly elite in my field of competition.
Initially, it had nothing to do with looks or appearance at all. Later in life, however, the BDD had another nasty little trick up its sleeve and flipped on me as I got older.
Women didn’t want to date me because I was too small (I was told this more times than I can count). Quarterbacks, power forwards, boy bands and teen stars were objects of admiration for what seemed like all the girls next door. Envious, I became determined to become bigger and stronger to project the desired image that I hoped would help me attract love. I packed on more muscle and bought the right ripped jeans and a properly fitted t-shirt; however, no matter what external validation or dates I received, I could still only ever see the skinny awkward boy in the mirror who couldn’t get a date.
So, while I can’t say I’ve walked a mile in anyone’s shoes, I maybe have some dimension of understanding for looking outside myself for validation of my own self-worth while feeling like an outcast by society’s, or at least my own social circle’s, standards of physical attractiveness.
Like most young hormonal people, I suppose, love and sensual attraction were always on my mind. I wanted to love and be loved. There were, as they say, plenty of fish in the sea, but because I was a short skinny guy with an empathetic personality, girls I had a crush on would keep me in “friend-zone” purgatory. I would burn in torment wondering Why, if you “like” me so much, could you not “Like” me…you know…with a capital “L”?
Was this merely a real-life enactment of High School Musical or did we graduate into a wider world of romantic possibilities? Were women trained to be attracted to a certain type of male physique, personality or socioeconomic status? Was the patriarchal system influential in all this? Was it Darwinian? Was it Hollywood? Was it a cabal of cosmetics and fashion companies infiltrating our minds?
Or is there actually a natural biologically-evolved beauty standard, inclusive of men, that wasn’t really talked about? If so, did that standard also make men feel insecure and even apathetic?
Although it may be blasphemous to even say so most men, I know have at least some insecurities and trauma around how women view them and treat them.
Sure, they make passing jokes or offhand comments about it, but the truth rumbling below the surface is typically I’m not attractive enough or good enough, which paradoxically perpetuates a cycle of less-attractive and less-healthy behaviours.
While I wrestled with my own worthiness demons, it seemed I was swimming in a sea of endless mixed messages. On one hand, there was a revisionist effort to reconstruct the canon of beauty in a post-modernist frame where there were no true standards and beauty was a kind of moral suss, while on the other, it appeared that while the culture could espouse whatever virtue it wanted, beauty standards were binary and those standards were everywhere, all at once.
In her 1991 international best-seller, The Beauty Myth, Dr. Naomi Wolf challenged age-old beauty standards and the notions of attraction. She argues that our sense of attraction is societally fabricated. This seminal work was a beacon for the third wave of the feminist movement and an impetus for the inclusivity movement that has continued through today. However, just this year, Dr. Gad Saad, a social behaviour and evolutionary scientist, argues the opposite in his book, The Saad Truth About Happiness. While discussing his book on the popular Unherd Podcast, Dr. Saad claimed:
There absolutely is a beauty standard, and there is no singular culture that has ever been where women say, ‘What I’m looking for is a pear-shaped man with a nasal voice, who’s unemployed and shows no ambition or assertiveness, that will turn me into a sexual frenzy.
- Dr. Saad
As the conversation continues, Dr. Saad and host Florence Read discuss our biophilic instinct and love of beautiful architecture, art and nature as markers for an innate bias to a certain type of beauty. Read concludes, “We know for a fact: beauty brings us satisfaction.”
Of course, a double standard persists as well.
In the recent Barbie movie, the triumphant heroine makeover of Barbie, and its messages of unrealistic body standards and female empowerment, stars (and savour the irony here) Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and a bunch of others who would fall into the “impossible-beauty-and-body-standard” category the very movement rages against.
How about another recent example from Hollywood? Despite the incredible momentum of this body-positivity movement, Jimmy Kimmel can still get up on stage at the Academy Awards and crack a joke about Ozempic (a diabetes drug often prescribed for weight loss), insinuating its role in the celebrity audience looking picture-perfect, and making them laugh. Was this on-cue nervous laughter or genuine guffaw?
Whether it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s just-right dad bod, Chris Hemsworth’s healthy and chiselled look at 40, or Chris Pine having the best hair and style of all Hollywood’s Chris’s, it still seems there is no doubt, a standard. One that many men feel desperate to meet.
Is the rise in popularity of TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) and growth hormones for men simply to stave off ageing or to look a bit more like _________ (insert the name of your favourite actor, manosphere YouTuber or TikTokker here)?
According to the Aesthetic Society, cosmetic surgical procedures among men have increased across the board, and they’re not just nipping and tucking either. They’re getting PRP (platelet-rich plasma) injections into their phalluses to make ’em bigger, and putting steel plates in their legs to make themselves taller.
While on the surface this may seem an almost clichéd expression of a materialistic society, imbibed by only the most vain men, a deeper dive shows its rippling effects on the male psyche.
In the depths of the digital discords and manosphere, a general apathy has formed around the idea that you need LMS (looks, money, status) to attract a partner today. While querying the truth of that claim in Quora, the top response I found was by L.G. Brandon, who claimed, “No, they also care about height.” A fact that, at least in the world of dating apps, appears to check out. According to a survey shared by BuzzFeed, the top keyword to get matches is “6 feet” and only 2% of women preferred men under 5’8” tall. As such, just saying you’re 6-feet tall on your profile is now a popular hack to just have the chance to make someone fall in love with you online, for you really are.
This all seems fairly aligned with Dr. Saad’s view of the world.
Yet, further probing into the comments on Quora and Reddit shows that men who don’t seem to think they have much in the way of looks, status or money have been able to “find a wife.” And as Deathknightish from Sweden aptly points out:
I literally only have to walk outside and have a look around to see that it [LMS] isn’t the case at all. If I look among my friends, nobody stands out either. Everybody is as average as they come. They are not bad-looking, but no model material either. We all earn about 2500-3000 dollars (converted, which is the average salary in Sweden) a month, and none of us are that high-standing socially. We aren’t inept social hermits, but we aren’t the type of guys who get invited to five parties at night either, just your average Joes.
What, then, am I missing here? Does Dr. Wofl’s theory play out more in Sweden than in North America? Doubtful.
While Mr. Deathknightish may be more dismissive of the LMS ilk, he may have hit the vein of something more salient: Acceptance.
Allow me to explain what I’m driving at.
While the parlance of beauty in our culture is all about diversity, inclusivity and self-acceptance, I still wonder whether we are sincerely accepting ourselves and each other for who we are on the inside. Much of this movement seems like the prescribing of a social instruction around the cultural conversation of beauty leading to woke-washing and virtue signalling on social media. In other words, it’s all more of a ‘what we’re saying,’ not ‘what we’re doing,’ situation.
The more I think about this, and observe its impact, the more I think that the attempts to redefine the standards of beauty have only added confusing layers that make the landscape more profane, politicised and propagated. Social media’s perpetuation of this conversation of beauty is somewhat malignant — no matter which way you slice it. While it creates unrealistic expectations and standards on one hand, it creates apathy, angst and unhealthy complacency through a fallacious doctrine of self-acceptance on the other. Ergo, the credo of the Black Pill Movement, which, to borrow the Urban dictionary explanation, is “basically the ultimate and hardest to swallow Red pill. It is about realizing nothing matters and there is nothing you can do that will change anything.”
In other words, because of the very conversation around male beauty, and beauty standards in general, something far deeper, far more beautiful, is lost.
It would seem, from my own life experience, that the idea of body positivity and its role in modern beauty standards are euphemistic. An attempt at self-flagellation and moralising to create a sort of cultural diktat that skirts around the unpleasant truth of reality many men deal with all the time. There are beauty standards that apply and affect men, and create a competitive environment for finding a partner. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it certainly seems all those eyes are beholding at least somewhat similar standards.
In this way, for whatever positive intent the inclusivity movement may have, the result is actually just keeping people stuck in the conversation, at each other’s throats, and blinded by wrong thinking. In a word, it’s “ugly.”
That being said, instead of being blackpilled or apathetic, or even mentally masturbating over what that exact definition is, could there not be a positive lens to embrace all this through? Moreover, one in which Dr. Saad and Dr. Wolf are both correct? A fusion of both the acknowledgment that there are beauty standards and that they are influenced and amplified by society and culture?
I think the misconception of self-acceptance today, is that it’s a coup de grace on self-improvement. In other words, self-acceptance shouldn’t become an abdication of self-care and improvement. While I always strive to accept myself for who I am right now, I’m also always striving for ways I can improve, mentally, physically and spiritually...and even aesthetically.
I know much of this self-improvement is still driven by my insecurity — my desire to be loved but not feeling worthy of it. The catch is that insecurity can be an energy activation for positive change and continued positive self-growth.
(Inversely, using insecurity as a negative emotional driver for too long can also become a personal poison, but that’s a topic for another blog.)
As I wrote in my recent blog about masculine excellence,
attractiveness can be attributed to being your authentic self and being committed to being your best self.
Individuation through the commitment to personal growth can cut through a lot of the headline diarrhea on the internet. Moreover, there is something inherently attractive and beautiful about this kind of empowering intentionality in life.
In this way, beauty is a practice of self-care. An authentic union of the inside and the outside. Self-acceptance and personal improvement. Devotion to the more hedonistic, evanescent and, dare I say, vain aspects of beauty, as well as the deeper, essential and soulful aspects of yourself. No PRP injection required.
Just like tending to a garden to make it beautiful, or putting great thought and care into the construction of a building, we can aspire to beautification for ourselves as well.
Beauty, in this way, is not determined by how “put together” you appear, but how complete you feel within. How complete you feel within shines through because of self-acceptance and continuous improvement. A mark only you can judge for yourself.
This cuts through the stereotyped assumptions about looks, money and status. It is a deeper more beautiful, powerful, and meaningful life edict. It exudes both what is and what can be.
This past summer, I turned 37 years old. The hair on my head and my facial stubble are completely salted and peppered. Admittedly, I was a bit embarrassed about going grey so young. So yes, we can add 'touch of grey’ to my banal beauty routine. But dying my hair or wearing the right underwear and all, well it’s just surface-level stuff. Even the notion I’ve just put forth about self-care being attractive is still surface-level stuff. Our outward beauty is not who we are, and no matter what we look like, we’re still affected by our deeply-held (subconscious) beliefs, the environment—society, media, friends and family.
More often than I’d like, I still see that skinny awkward unlovable boy when I look in the mirror. I now try to use these moments as a reminder — not that I must do extra reps in the gym (even though I still will), but that I must be self-aware of the voice inside my head. I must have grace for the long journey of letting go of past pains and thought patterns and remind myself that we are all perfectly imperfect.
