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When you visit the office of Harrison
(Skip) Pope, in a grim institutional building on the rolling grounds of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., the first thing you notice are the calipers
hanging on the wall --partly as objets d'art, but partly as a reminder that what we
subjectively consider attractive can sometimes yield to objective measurement. Pope, after
all, was one of the scientists who devised what might be called the Buff Equation, or: FFMI =
W x {1-BF/100) x h-2 + 6.1 x {1.8-H).
The formula is ostensibly used to calculate a person's Fat-free Mass Index; it has
sniffed out presumed steroid use by Mr. America winners, professional bodybuilders and men
whose unhealthy preoccupation with looking muscular has induced them to use drugs.
Pope is a wiry, compact psychiatrist who can squat 400 pounds in his spare time.
("You can reach me pretty much all day except from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.," he told me, "when I'm at
the gym.") I had gone to see him and his colleague Roberto Olivardia not only because they
were the lead authors on the G.I. Joe study, but also because their studies of body-image
disorders in slightly older postadolescent men may be the best indicator yet of where male
body-image issues are headed.
Shortly after I arrived, Olivardia emptied a shopping bag full of male action dolls onto
a coffee table in the office. The loot lay in a heap, a plastic orgy of superhero beefcake --
three versions of G.I. Joe {Hasbro's original 1964 version plus two others) and one G.I. Joe
Extreme, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in their 1978 and mid-90's versions, Mighty Morphin
Power Rangers, Batman, Superman, Iron Man and Wolverine. The inspiration for the whole
study came from...an adolescent girl. Pope's 13-year-old daughter, Courtney, was surfing
the Web one night, working on a school project on how Barbie's body had radically changed
over the years, and Pope thought to himself, There's got to be the male equivalent of that.
Once Pope and Olivardia gathered new and "vintage" action figures, they measured
their waist, chest and biceps dimensions and projected them onto a 5-foot-10 male. Where
the original G.I. Joe projected to a man of average height with a 32-inch waist, 44-inch chest
and 12-inch biceps, the more recent figures have not only bulked up, but also show much
more definition. Batman has the equivalent of a 30-inch waist, 57-inch chest and 27-inch
biceps. "If he was your height," Pope told me, holding up Wolverine, "he would have 32-inch
biceps." Larger, that is, than any bodybuilder in history.
Now let it be said that measuring the styrene hamstrings of G.I. Joe does not
represent 20th-century science at its most glorious. But Pope says it's a way to get at what he
calls "evolving American cultural ideals of male body image." Those ideals, he maintains,
create "cultural expectations" that may contribute to body-image disorders in men. "People
misinterpreted our findings to assume that playing with toys, in and of itself, caused kids to
develop into neurotic people as they grew up who abused anabolic steroids," Pope said. "Of
course that was not our conclusion. We simply chose the toys because they were symptomatic
of what we think is a much more general trend in our society."
Since the early 1990's, evidence has emerged suggesting that a small number of adult
males suffer from extreme body-image disorders. In 1993, in a study of steroid use among
male weight lifters, Pope discovered that 10 percent of the subjects "perceived themselves as
physically small and weak, even though they were in fact large and muscular ." Researchers
termed this syndrome "reverse anorexia nervosa" and started looking for more cases. Two
years ago, the Pope group renamed this disorder "muscle dysmorphia," the more specialized
condition that involves an obsessive preoccupation with muscularity. Men who were clearly
well developed and, by anyone's standards, exceedingly muscular, repeatedly expressed the
feeling that they were too small, too skinny and too weak, to the point that their obsessive
quest to build up their bodies began to interfere with work and relationships
-- in short, their entire lives.
"It's very hard to document trends like this in quantitative terms," Pope said, "because
people who are insecure about their body appearance are unlikely to come out of the
woodwork to confess that they're insecure about their body appearance. And so it is an
epidemic which by definition is covert. But it clearly has become a much more widespread
concern among men in the United States."
-- Stephen S.
Hall, New York Times Magazine
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