2013 05 Real Weddings Mary Brads Amazing Travel

Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance. Both sexes seem to be finding that the full force of the myth derives little from private sexual relations, and much from the cultural and economic megalith “out there” in the public realm. Increasingly, both sexes know they are being cheated. But helping women to take the myth apart is in men’s own interest on an even deeper level: Their turn is next.

Advertisers have recently figured out that undermining sexual self-confidence works whatever the targeted gender. According to The Guardian, “Men are now looking at mirrors instead of at girls…. Beautiful men can now be seen selling everything.” Using images from male homosexual subculture, advertising has begun to portray the male body in a beauty myth of its own.

As this imagery focuses more closely on male sexuality, it will undermine the sexual self-esteem of men in general. Since men are more conditioned to be separate from their bodies, and to compete to inhuman excess, the male version could conceivably hurt men even more than the female version hurts women. Psychiatrists are anticipating a rise in male rates of eating diseases.