I'm in my 50's, and can remember a time when there wasn't this awareness of men's bodies. While it was admirable to be fit, and women certainly appreciated muscles and a lack of a beer gut, it wasn't seen as that important. Men could be flabby and still seen as physically attractive.
Moobs are normal. Not being able to grow a thick beard is normal. Body hair, or any hair, or not, is normal (I could count the number of hairs on my chest in my 20's and never once considered this to be unusual or in any way affecting my masculinity). I have friends who were balding in their mid-20's and that was normal.
The difference between 30 years ago and now is not in men's bodies. It's in our attitudes to men's bodies.
Men (and women, as always) are being taught to hate our bodies because businesses can profit from that emotion. We are being told that no-one will love us unless we're taller, stronger, hairier. We're being fed images of "perfect" men as aspirational targets that we should aspire to match (and to get there we need to buy a bunch of products, obviously).
We need to learn that all bodies are different, and all are acceptable. It's normal to have flabby bits. If you have to hate something, don't hate your body, hate the people telling you that your body is not good enough.
Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
I have never had my testosterone checked. I knew one guy who had has checked, and it was by a female doctor who put him on pills.
I've always wondered where that testosterone level database is?
Maybe they test in the military? I don't know, but would like to know.
I just found a study, but didn't dig into it:
"Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17436...
People 50-70 years ago on average lived a very different life style in the US. The fear was that people weren’t getting enough food in the United States and the modern food industry was born and kind of over corrected and now obesity is the problem we are trying to solve.
On top of that I am shocked by how little the average American exercises, and I just don’t mean going to the gym and running, I mean basic, walking and doing something, anything physical.
marcus_holmes correctly points out that in some cultures men are under more pressure to fit into a gender stereotype around being really muscular.
(And it's well known that women receive even more pressure to be slim and so on)
This is true regardless of the worsening food quality and availability making people fat. Or environmental factors reducing sperm count and so on.
Looking at the time frame, I don’t think the other things you mention fit either. They just haven’t changed that much since the 70s. And they don’t explain wild and lab animals also being fatter now.
Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today. It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
No, its not.
> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.
And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.
They’ve increased to “a very large minority, even in the fattest state”.
What used to be “fat” has not become “thin”, its just “fat" has become more common.
> And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.”
Yes, and they’ll show that overweight and obese people are greater proportions of the total. That I didn’t argue against.
The ridiculous hyperbole is what I took issue with.
>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.
Testosterone levels have been decreasing for decades, in significant amounts. https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...
Interestingly, the Forbes article you're referencing is partially based on this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26126... which confirms a link between advertising and voluntary testosterone testing (entirely supporting my point). Men are being targeted by advertising that encourages them to think about their bodies differently.
Instead of completely ignoring their point and just telling them to accept themselves as they are, why should we not also be looking at our environment and asking if it is impacting us?
Do you by chance sit around at a PC all day and get less exercise than you really should? I'm not sure I'd pin this on a biology thing just yet, there's so many things that could cause that
Losing weight and getting exercise gave me all sorts of "manly" traits. Turns out sitting around letting your muscles go to goo can mess with your systems a bunch. I have to shave too often now if anything haha
However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
Like all the “why are people gay‽”-type nonsense, I also think it's not that – but people are complicated. There is not going to be a single factor for anything, so I don't think that's a valid reason to discard the hypothesis. “There is no real correlation in the first place” would be.
Who said this?
I do four hard weight focused workouts per week of 1.5h each so 6h of exercise. I probably need to address diet, but even so, lots of fresh home cooked meals in there. Maybe need to do more cardio but that tends to set off my SVT. Thanks for asking.
It came up as a thought because you mentioned manboobs, which I have personal experience with hence the rest of my comment, but aside from that my words are my own
How is this true?
How will these men mean there are more transgender people in the world?
Also gender is independent of sexual apparatus.
What exactly do you think being transgender means?
If you've never been fit enough to do something like a muscle up then you have no idea what having testosterone feels like.
I'm saying this as a former blob who got fit during covid by accident. You are your body and your body happens to have a mind, not the other way around.
You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake.
You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.