It's official: airbrushed images of stick thin women with large breasts make everyone feel bad, even dudes. A recent study has found that men feel more insecure about their bodies after reading men's magazines like Maxim and Stuff, just as women's self-esteem suffers from reading such journalistic treasures as Cosmo and Allure.
The problem is not, as you may have guessed, that men long to have the perfect six-packs and toned legs of male celebrities. (Let's be honest: the only magazines that have sexy pictures of men's bodies are not being read by either women or straight men.) Rather, the standard of impossible beauty portrayed in most mainstream magazines makes men feel insecure because they're worried they won't be able to get laid. How can I ever get a girl like that?, they wonder.
Answer: you can't. Just as we women will never get a body like that. So, as Salon's Kate Harding suggests, what we need to do is fill magazines with images of absurdly attractive men, since hot men don't make anyone feel bad about themselves. "Seriously,y'all," she writes. "Think of the children."
Photo: Many Bells Down
