Men have "fat" days, too

For class, we were asked to compare two magazine articles - one from a women's magazine and one from a men's magazine - that dealt with concepts we were discussing in class. Both of the articles I selected were about body image. Weight played a large role in the women's magazine article, while the other article focused more on smaller aspects of the body: hair, sweat, smell, etc.

The first article I selected was from Vogue - the magazine that has more advertisements than actual articles. I don't normally read Vogue because it is so full of ads (ads for things I could only afford if I sold some body parts), but I picked this one up during an errand to CVS because it had Tina Fey on the cover, a woman whom I admire.

Anyway, the article is called "Secrets of the Flesh", and it is written by Sophie Dahl, a model turned food writer. Dahl writes about growing up in Britain and moving to New York, where she was bombarded with new diet trends and eating strategies to lose weight. As she matured into her teenage years, Dahl began developing curves that she learned to embrace. On a trip to Asia, however, she caught a parasite that caused her to lose weight very quickly, and it was then that she started getting compliments about her figure. It made her reconsider her view of her body and how other women viewed their bodies. The article goes on to detail her struggle, her recovery, learning to love her body and rekindling her relationship with food.

For a magazine that has rail-thin models in so many of its ads, I have to admit that I was surprised to find an article like this. In the pictures, Dahl does not look very curvy, which leads me to think about what Bridget Jones portrayed as "fat" in her diary. To many women, 130 pounds is not, by any means, overweight. But it seemed to disgust Bridget. This is just more evidence that supports society's skewed view of what is healthy and what is not.

Moving onto the men's article - which was much more of a task to find than the women's article, let me tell you. I found an article online in Seed Magazine called "The Media Assault on Male Body Image" and can actually be found here. If you read it, you'll see that the media not only has an effect on how women view their bodies, but men as well. TV shows, movies, magazines push the idea that a sweaty, hairless (except in select places), muscular body constitutes a "real" man. Obviously, most men aren't like that, and I'm glad that this article attempts to point that out.

What do these two articles tell us? I think the most obvious is that while there is certainly a great deal of pressure placed on women to look a certain way, that does not mean men are exempt from this. Just something to think about!

Liz