When body positivity morphs into toxic masculinity

The body positivity movement started for women but in a warped sort of equality, men now appear to be just as miserable about their looksWhat's prompting some men to achieve an idealised version of masculinity that's doing them more harm than good?The body positivity movement started with women confronting the unrealistic expectations and unrepresentative portrayals of them in media and advertising. Men weren't part of it ... their bodies hadn't been sexualised to the same extremes and they didn't really need it. But now that's changed. And in a warped sort of of equality, we could very well be at the point where men are just as miserable as women about the way they look. Today on The Detail we look at at the male side of the body positivity movement. (Next weekend we examine the female side of it.)Kris Taylor, who is a doctor of psychology at the University of Auckland says men feeling insecure about their body isn't new. But there's growing concern that people sharing tips on how to be masculine are taking it too far, and as a result young men in particular are becoming more self-conscious about the way they look."There's research that goes back to the late 1990's and early 2000's about men's perception of their bodies and lots of men are unhappy about the ways that their bodies look," Taylor says.He points out that the way the different sexes arrived at this same sort of insecurity has come through different paths. "The body positivity movement for women, as I understand it, is borne out of an attempt to find a space between hypersexualisation and disgust, and a way to represent different bodies," he says."Men have been represented as active participants in their sexualisation... the sexualisation is not a gazing upon them in a passive way, it is an ownership of their sexuality."Taylor also adds that men who don't fit this ideal male model haven't faced the same level of dismissal that women have."We can think of larger men represented as being funny and sometimes dopey, and there isn't that same level of disgust," he says.Taylor says it's not that body image issues don't exist for men, but rather that the avenues for them to express their feelings around their insecurities are very limited, leaving them vulnerable to potentially damaging advice…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details