Seduced By The Adonis Ideal, Men Chase The Body Beautiful

In Disney's animated "Tarzan," a loincloth and opposable thumbs aren't the only distinctive qualities of the ape man. His six-pack abs and sharply defined pecs help make him a true King of the Jungle.

Forget Buster Crabbe, Ron Ely and even Johnny Weissmuller: The new Tarzan is the biggest hunk since a newly bulked up Brendan Fraser swung from - and smacked into - the trees in "George of the Jungle" in 1997.

As these superbly sculpted jungle dwellers demonstrate, the bar(bell) is set a lot higher these days in terms of what a guy's supposed to look like. And these new standards of appearance set by the movies - as well as television and other media - have begun to shape the ways that men and boys think about their bodies. Now, it seems, men can be as body-obsessed as women.

Need more proof that there's been a shift in the way the male body is viewed? Ogle the bods on the guys in 98 Degrees or 'N Sync or other kiddie-pop groups. Check out the provocative photo spreads that Brad Pitt has posed in to promote his new film, "The Fight Club." Glance at the hardbody models on the covers of health and fitness magazines. Walk into any gym or fitness club and try to convince yourself that every guy there is sweating solely for health rather than aesthetic reasons.

Or chat with fitness experts in Southern California, which may be one of the epicenters for the change.

"My dad never exercised. He was never even concerned about it," says Ed Collins, president of SCR Wellness in Orange, Calif., a facility that includes weight management and cardiac rehabilitation. "In the past, I think men were evaluated by their financial wealth."

Now, he says, "Everybody wants to look young. I think it's part of the movie-star thing, and it's sunnier here and people go to the beach."

Fitness consultant John Carrido, owner of Bodies by Carrido in Newport Beach, Calif., says he has noted a shift in men's attitudes about their appearance in the past 15 years or so.

"I think now guys want both the (physical) strength and power and financial clout. Most of the guys now, depending on what age they are, they're looking to be more fit because that's what girls are looking for now."

Their observations echo the findings in "The Male Body," a new book by Susan Bordo that identifies a new male physical ideal - the "lean, fit body that virtually everyone, gay and straight, now aspires to" - traces how it became an object of mainstream consumption via the Calvin Klein underwear ads in the '80s, and examines the consequences of putting it in the spotlight.

So how did a feminist scholar, who teaches English and women's studies at the University of Kentucky and has written a book on women's weight issues, come to write a book with the subtitle "A New Look at Men in Public and in Private"?

Bordo says she began to note a change in the way her male students reacted to her lectures on body image several years ago.

"All the psychological studies on body image that had been done in the decades prior to the '80s had suggested that when women look in the mirror, they saw nothing but flaws," she says. "Men looked in the mirror and saw either an OK image or actually an even better one than what was warranted by that body.

"It's only recently I've been able to talk about these issues in class without having all the men yawning. Men have begun to comment, `What about us?' - that they feel enslaved by the gym. I had more and more of my male students telling me about how they worried about the way they looked."

She writes: "If someone had told me in 1977 that in 1997 men would comprise over a quarter of cosmetic surgery patients, I would have been astounded. I never dreamed that `equality' would move in the direction of men worrying more about their looks rather than women worrying less."

Further, she writes, those fears have landed men in the formerly female province of eating disorders and other body-image dysfunction: As many as 1 million men - compared with 8 million women - have eating disorders. Men are being treated for muscle dysmorphia, also known as "bigorexia," a condition in which the sufferer sees his muscles as never big enough.

Men haven't come such a long way, baby, overnight.

Turning points along the way were the infamous Cosmopolitan centerfold featuring a near-nude Burt Reynolds in 1972, followed five years later by John Travolta's Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever."

Then, in 1983, Calvin Klein put a Bruce Weber photograph of an Olympic athlete in Klein's underwear on a billboard in Times Square, and all bets were off.

The effect of the images was twofold: It not only lessened the embarrassment that men might feel in going to the gym and working out to stay slim or build muscle, but it also increased the pressure to try to conform to the images.

"It's a cliche," Bordo says, "but I don't think we've begun to fully confront how profound a change it's made in our lives that we live in a culture in which we are inundated with perfected images - images in which bodies have not only begun with gorgeous models and these stars who have had plastic surgery and have spent four hours a day in the gym, but even after that are computer-enhanced, doctored. These images are all over, and increasingly they are setting the norm for what ordinary people feel they should look like.

"Men used to look at their spare tires and say, `Hey, it's manly to go out and have a few beers. I'm proud of my spare tire.' Now, he looks at his spare tire and he compares it to the model in a Calvin Klein underwear ad. There's a very striking difference."

Part of what's feeding this is that baby boomers are beginning to feel - and look - their age.

"I think that baby boomers have a very different approach to aging than any other generation," Bordo says. "One key difference is we think that we can stop it. Never before has there been a generation that imagined that it could stop time, but we imagine that we can and everything around us is telling us that we can. Ads for plastic surgery which promise the youthful look forever."