Gay body image

Body image pressures as a cisgendered gay man

There are so many societal expectations, stereotypes and pressures placed upon us in the LGBTQIA+ community and on our bodies.

Speaking about my own experiences as a cisgendered gay man, these pressures are exhausting to match and have inflated a lot of my struggles with body image and disordered eating.

If you look back through pop culture, representation of cisgendered gay men was very one note for a really long time. We were shown as lean, muscular, with great fashion sense, perfect teeth, quaffed hair and an abundance of knowledge on Judy and Liza.

It’s such a bland two-dimensional depiction that we don’t all fit.

So, if we are all shown just one flat image of “what a gay man looks like” when we’re growing up, we all termination up striving to emulate that same image.

Particularly when it comes to our body type, size and shape, it is absolutely impossible for us all to be the same. Not only that, but it’s also really dangerous.

This two-dimensional advocacy that I saw played a huge part in my body image and disordered ea

Body Dysmorphia Continues to Be a Serious Issue Among Gay Men

Reasons Why Body Dysmorphia Is Prevalent

While a growing body of analyze and experts point to the minority stress model as a key culprit in the scourge of BDD among gay men, there are other causes.

The Media Sets the Exclude Too High

Gay men often find themselves with an Adonis complex, explains Dr. Whitesel, believing what the media says a queer man should look like.

“Weight stigma is so baked into our society that we don’t even register,” says Lacie Parker, PsyD, a therapist in Seattle, Washington, who has published research on eating disorders in the LGBTQ+ collective. “Media representation of homosexual folks, which is lacking in general, certainly doesn’t portray larger bodies. Instead, we see thinness and muscularity allotted as the ideal, while fatness is the butt of the jokes. That’s extremely challenging to deal with when you’re trying to create sense of the earth and attract a companion in that community.”

In truth, a review published in in the Journal of Eating Disorders, and authored by Dr. Parker, found that men wh

Body image, sexual orientation and gender identity

While people who identify as woman loving woman, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT+) exposure body image concerns in ways that are generally similar to those who identify as heterosexual, their experience and relationship with their bodies are likely to differ in specific ways.

How does body image vary across the LGBT+ community?

Heterosexual men have been start to report higher levels of body appreciation than same-sex attracted and bisexual men ^(,).

Some research suggests that sexual minority men may be more likely to internalise an appearance preferred that is centred around looking athletic ⁽⁾ and that there may be a greater emphasis on physical appearance in the gay community, which can negatively alter body image ⁽⁾ through pressure to match this ideal.

One review of the research⁽⁾ found that gay men are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to experience a desire to be thin, which can sometimes manifest in higher levels of eating disorder symptoms. As in the wider research,

Gay Men and Eating Disorders: What You Need to Know

Gay men experience eating disorders and body dysmorphia more than any other population except for heterosexual women.

Why do gay men have higher rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia?

To help understand the link between gay culture and negative body image, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, we spoke to Carl Hovey, a psychologist and researcher at the Soho and Fidi locations of the Gay Therapy Center in Novel York.

Carl’s research took the develop of a qualitative study. He interviewed a collection of same-sex attracted men in New York Municipality, asking open ended questions prefer, “Can you talk to me a little about how you experience your body, both now and in the past?”

“I wanted to try and get a narrative going of how ideas about the body are formed by messages from family, tradition and society, and whether that was stable or unstable over time,” he explained.

“In speaking directly to the population, rather than trying to extrapolate meaning from person-less data, you get to hear nuanced explanations from the population you’re trying to u