#646 - Scott Griffiths - Why Are So Many Men Unhappy With Their Bodies?

30:22Men think that women want bodies that are far more muscular than what they actually want. And women think men want bodies that are far skinnier. And when they're asked to select proportions of men who they think have a type that is are they want skinny women with big boobs and then for men tall men with broad shoulders it's that they're wildly divergent on that too. All of the nuance that comes in your 20s and 30s when you finally encounter people who can say, oh you know actually I actually kind of like men are a bit more way fish and a feminine I don't like the big jacked bros. 20 -year -olds kind of love to believe that.

31:05But then you realize oh it actually is the case is a lot more diversity in terms of what people are attracted to. Sure, there's a general trend, but then you cannot base world views on general trends. It's too black and white. Correct. Yeah. There is an average, I think, you know, on average taller guys will be more successful in the dating market. On average, guys that have a broader shoulder to waste ratio will be more successful. On average, guys with a lower voice, on average, guys with a full head of her. But Jason Statham fucks. Like he's seeing is it Rosie Huntington whatever a face is, that like fucking hyper model from the UK that was in Transformers.

31:44You know, my point being that there are particular markets for pretty much every single niche. And you know, I don't think I'm not the guy that's going to advise anybody not to go to I think that for every guy, you know, it's protective. I lend this from Ed Hagen the other week, that it's protective against depression. That depression, when you control for pretty much everything else, depression seems to be just, it seems to be very highly correlated with physical, like fragility, the less physically fragile you are, the more robust you are defended mentally against depression through how you show up physically.

32:22So I'm like, you know, go and train you up hand grip, or whatever it is that it goes on. But yeah, it's such a, it must be fascinating to try and pass all of this apart because you've got a world which will reward people for being in good condition. That's taken to the extreme will get more reward but will begin to cause costs to the individual. It's like a reverse tragedy of the commons. It's like a tragedy of the individual. Well, I know that I think you've heard you say that 20s, the typical avatar for this would be a guy in his 20s or his 30s that is going to the gym and maybe using steroids and doing the blubber.

32:58Why does it start to drop off in 40s? Well, some folks will come and get treatment, but I think another significant contributor and you see this for a number of psychological conditions, including things like social anxiety. It's called spontaneous remission and it's where the disorder kind of resolves on its own. And the process of that happening is not dissimilar to how you felt about training and dieting when you were, say, 20 compared to now. It's not that you're a fundamentally different person. You've just relaxed in certain areas. You've perhaps diversified your priorities. You probably have a more stable sense of self and self -esteem that's like internal to you, not external contingent on others.

33:53So you would be less likely to have muscle as well, if you're able to be less likely to be socially anxious. It might push you below the threshold for having the disorder anymore. Now you can just be the guy in the gym, who enjoys being there and gets all the physical benefits of exercise, which as you mentioned are numerous and very real and you want as many people in there enjoying those benefits for what they are as possible. Are people less satisfied with their bodies now than ever before? Yes. How so, how do you track that? There are good general population estimates of body dissatisfaction for men in women, men and women in several countries.

34:39And to take Australia, for example, it's unfortunately the case that far from all of this awareness and advocacy diminishing body dissatisfaction among women, we've just watched the rate of body dissatisfaction for men climb up at a faster rate than women such that at some point in the future we could conceivably achieve parity. So we're not making progress there and it's not unsurprising because I have not felt for one sense that a one second sorry that the importance society puts on physical appearance and the broad arbiter that it gets to be of social success and prestige has diminished that that hasn't gone anywhere so it's no wonder that when people feel anxieties about being in this social arena that they succumb to it there's companies everywhere who will cater to your anxieties, influencers who will have those anxieties whether intentionally or not inflamed that stuff's lost all there.

35:48How have representations of men changed over the last few decades. They have become more muscular and that's not just anecdotes that's from research. We can show that representations of male bodies in a variety of media have become more disproportionate relative to the average male. You can look at things like action figurines where say looks skywalker Han Solo from the original Star Wars, the action figurines look like normal regular guys, but then for the re -release they look jacked. You can see this for Superman, Teenage and Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, when you look at magazines, when you look at TV, you see a similar pattern as well.

36:36So in terms of being a young guy growing up and you're thinking, Oh, how am I supposed to look at my track dear to my heart? And you look for a frame of reference. Let's say you see a hundred male bodies in your media diet per week, the hundred that you see today in 2023. You come out on the negative end of those comparisons much more than you did 20, 30 years ago. You're not measuring up as far as you're concerned in your own head a lot more than you used to. I heard you talk as well about the switch from thin spell to fit spell for girls. Yeah. Can you explain that? Yeah, and that sucks. So in the late 90s, early 2000s, Pramanna, thin inspiration, huge thing on Tumblr and elsewhere, where the goal was to be as thin and skinny as possible and you'd see lots of motivating images and memes being like, you know, nothing tastes as good as skinny fields, etc.

37:40Do you remember thigh gaps? Do you remember thigh gaps, returned? Oh, I remember, I'm not there. Still there. They come up on TikTok reasonably regular like a cycle of body trends and fizz -for -ation emerged as this quasi -healthy balance, right? What it's like, don't just be a waif, don't be then in skinny, get healthy and build some muscle, but the bodies that you see in images that are valorizing, right, this fit and healthy lifestyle, you'll have a woman who is very skinny and has a six pack. And I'm sure you would be familiar and as many of your listeners probably are, that if you're a woman who wants to both be thin and have a six pack, it's going of even harder work than if you're a guy.

38:30It's even more impossible to get that body type. The idea that we've made this gigantic improvement in representation for women's bodies, we've just given them another thing to chase. Very interesting man. I've got a number of friends. Lucy Davies is one of them, she's marrying my good friend Ben, and she had eating disorder, and she regularly posts photos of herself, you know, like from when she was at the depths of Anorexia and she was super, super thin. And now she's, you know, like she runs and does all this stuff and she eats peanut butter sandwiches and has an almond croissant, doesn't really care so much.

39:12But there is an element here where I think a lot of the girls downstream from that, some of the girls downstream from that now have two battles. They're waging a war on two fronts. That it's not just that they're trying to be thin, it's like, I need to be thin, but I also need to be able to deadlift 100 kilos. And that's also tough. So yeah, I... Super tough. And I guess because you're coming at this from a clinical psychiatry perspective, I don't think that anybody would argue that a woman who is, a probably a healthy BMI who is holding more muscle, who's bone density is improved, who's got a better VO2 max, who's got a better resting heart rate, heart rate variability, all of this stuff.

39:59Physiologically, they are probably objectively significantly better than the size zero goal that had diated themselves into the floor. But from a clinical psychiatry perspective, I imagine that there isn't actually all that much difference. They've still ruminating about their body image, still obsessing, trying to dial absolutely everything in, still probably got terrible about the ruminative thoughts about the way that they look and stuff like that. And I guess this is a difficult line to pass as well. Again, objectively, the world is not only going to say, yeah, you look good and wow, that's healthy and you know, it's so much better than when you were really, really thin, but where's the drive coming from?

40:36Mentally, how much of that has been fixed? Yeah, exactly. The underlying psychology is still there. And that's part of the reason why we often see in guys with muscle dysmorphia, they've had a history of anorexia, or guys with anorexia, fed a history of muscle dysmorphia because the underlying psychology is the same. Maybe the disorder got really rough and so they they engaged with some medical professionals or talk to people in their life who said okay maybe just try and pull back on this and instead they've just they've shunted it in the other direction because they're still that same person and they get caught up in it again.

41:19We call it is it the tyranny of progress? Yes, the tyranny of progress comes up in the narrative of people with muscle dysmorphia constantly. They have to be progressing. They have to be getting better because they didn't use to be how they are now. They were deficient in some or many ways. And now they've finally got to this point where they can be okay with themselves But they need to get more and you have to be on luck with your diet training to progress But it's a tyranny because it's never enough You know a good sign that you don't have muscle to smolfere is if you set yourself a goal And you get there and then you're just happy with yourself great.

42:06You achieved a goal. That's that's awesome That won't happen in muscle to smolfere or it'll be fleeting you'll feel good for the day And the next day it's like, oh, yeah, but I've still got that. I've still got quite a bit of fat around the midsection, don't I? And then off you are again, on another little call. What do you think about lifestyle dysmorphia or personal development dysmorphia or business success dysmorphia in the same regard, the tyranny of those different things? Yeah, I've got you. So look, I think any time you put all of your eggs in my basket and have your self -esteem and sense of self -worth and what makes you feel like you're in control of your life coming from one source, you just make yourself super vulnerable.

42:49That's a fragile psychology, right? And it's no wonder that we have so many terms like workaholics, for example, none of... So some of these have let themselves more to clinical psychology and psychiatry and a way of diagnoses than other things. You haven't managed to come up with some sort of diagnosis, DSM statistical manual for monk mode grind set sigma males. I believe me I'm trying, is out there trying to diagnose as many as I can and bring that money in. But no, but I take it broader point, right? because you are correct that the way clinical psychology and diagnosis is set up, we more readily recognize the pathology that comes from the singular pursuit of somethings, we have preoccupation and less with others because workaholics can ruin their lives, but we're not going to see that as a diagnosis anytime soon as we expect.

43:50So interesting, man. It's like this cyclical dissatisfaction or this ambient dissatisfaction that happens. I have a goal, I work to the goal, I achieve the goal, I'm dissatisfied. I set another goal. I presume that this goal is the way it was because I didn't, it wasn't big enough, it wasn't long enough, it wasn't, whatever enough. And I'm really trying to square this circle as somebody who takes an awful lot of value in progress in life, in becoming better, and growing his impact, in improving day by day. And I wonder how much of, I've said this to myself for a very long time, how much of your personal development is papering over the cracks of fundamentally not being happy with the person that you are and feeling that you're not worthy of love and acceptance and praise unless you're making progress.

44:46and the reason that progress is able to paper over those cracks is because as long as you're continuing to make progress it doesn't matter if you're dissatisfied with yourself right now because the version that you are tomorrow might be the one that you can finally be satisfied with. Yeah, and you'll find out how much of a problem it is once there is a setback or something that stops you from making progress because if it's a if it is an issue that substantial looking in the background you won't find a enjoyable at all. And it's a matter of balance, you know, that boring solution to exciting problems again, where you, I think achieving and being driven is important for people to feel good about themselves.

45:27And having a core, inalterable sense of your worth as a person is core as well. You need both. And both of that just makes for a healthy individual. That's a strong psychology but is resilient against the world and can grow and evolve as a person strives and succeeds. That's a really good point and I think that again it's a subtle one but an important one to think that for all of the people who are part of the Sigma male grind set mode thing which I've fallen to as I had fucking David Goggins on the podcast a couple of months ago right like the ultimate man is grind is the ultimate discipline bro.

46:09Goggins speak Right. We always be grinding. But there is an element, I think, and I would say this to David, if you require this complex framework of daily activities in order to buttress your sense of self, and I don't know whether this is true, I don't know whether if he did take time off how bad he would feel about himself. But if that is the case, how can you say that that's a robust state of mind? The whole goal here, the internet, and a lot of the spaces that I inhabit valorize is this kind of like Spartan -esque, very sort of tough guy. I can deal with the discomfort. I can deal with the fragility.

46:53Okay, well deal with an injury for two weeks or deal with not being able to go to the gym. Like what happens if you're not allowed to train or follow your diet for two weeks time? How resilient are you then? when there's no enemy to fight, there's no weight to lift, there's no battle to wage. How resilient are you then? And I think that that's a really interesting and a very uncomfortable question because most people would say, oh, but that's just like that's a cooked mentality. You don't need to worry about that. Like you just you keep grinding man. Like you know, you just work through the difficulty and you go, okay, well, why is it genuinely?

47:27And you need to ask yourself this question with a very sort of gentle and open heart. But is it because you want to be better? Is it because you have a fear of not being enough? And how much is your drive coming from both of these? One of the other things that you did, you worked with Grindr, not personally, professionally, you worked with Grindr. What about the Gays? Tell me about the Gays, Scott. What do we know about the Gays? I've got to. Well, first of all, most of the Gays are doing just fine. They do experience higher rates of eating disorders and my self is more pure and it is in significant part because you've got more appearance pressures in that community and because of that if you want to feel like you belong, if you want to feel like you've got the right credentials to be in gay spaces, whether it's my clubs or the famous Mardi Gras parade here in Sydney feel like the way you look is pretty significant part of that.

48:35So guys are more susceptible to muscle -dismarfer and eating disorders because of that. Gabe, gain it. Men sometimes objectify the thing that they sexually desire. Is that news? I believe so. I believe so. I don't know. I don't know if we'll go to the international, but it's definitely newsworthy. Well, there's been for quite a while, I know I have a number of gay friends and it seems to me that gay men are a lot more open around their preferences for what they want, especially physically from a partner. I know that sometimes they list things on their dating profiles about what they do and do not accept and stuff like that.

49:18I imagine that plays into this. Yeah, it does. And you can think of the listing of a laundry list of physical traits that gay men on as sexual partners or partners in journaling other gay men as one manifestation of that appearance, centric culture. It's something we would point to to say that it's physical appearance is more prized in these spaces. And yeah, I think that it makes it very, very tough. And so when we interview gay men about this, they will very quickly tell us of a universally implicit, but often made explicit hierarchy of physical traits in the gay male community, where some are very prized, like being tall, being muscular, being white, Whereas others push you further down that hierarchy and a lot of game -manifil comfortable to saying you know no fat snowfems That kind of energy That's sorry, I can't wait to steal my love Just gay people are so they don't give a fuck man Like they don't like there is a large a large coal hot of them who simply don't and I suppose as well, this kind of plays out of the male trend of banter and of sort of digging and of being able to take a jab that a guy on Tinder or Hinge, but no fats, no like masks or something is probably going to come up against some distaste, but in an environment where It's other guys and you know no matter how gay and defeminate you have grown up in your childhood You've been subject to more male banter and male banter means that you can take the shit a little bit And if the shit in includes no fats no fems Well, you know like you were you've been prepping for this your entire life Bucco like this is this part of your culture And like the reason the reason we advertise studies on grind So when we advertise on Grindr, we advertise this guy out nationwide because we don't just want to talk people in our own circle We want to know what people are actually thinking and We talked so many gay men and the one thing that always happens They all know that it's a problem.

51:54No one is thrilled about this very appearance Rampant objectification With the gay men And it doesn't mean that it doesn't participate in it, whether with some regret or not, but they can all point to it, and they can all very least say, I don't think it's very helpful. Like it can be a pretty mean and desperating place to be as a gay man in a gay male community because of those kinds of attitudes and expectations, but as for solutions, those are hard to come up. Well, the problem is that we're fighting with human desire here, right? Like, we don't have a massive amount of control, if any, at all, over the things that we desire.

52:39We can have control over the actions that we take around the things that we do or don't desire. Many people that are listening will have done things physically with people that they didn't desire that much or maybe didn't really desire at all. And vice versa too. So I think that a challenge that we have here is, you know, we can roll this back into the hetero conversation by saying, well, I can say that because I've got this handle by my stash at the moment. I'm allowed to bridge the gap across both.

53:15What's interesting there is look at the increase in objectification. Is object, am I using the right word? would it be objectification or like focus on physical appearances? Yeah, it's not necessarily objectification, but focus on physical differences. Okay, that gay men find when they're on these sorts of apps. Now, the reason that straight men don't feel quite the same amount is that the other sex that they're being judged by has a different list of criteria. This is to say not to say that women don't have a high, a big list of criteria, it's just other things, right? It's you money, status, etc, etc, a bunch of other traits that you can have.

53:57But I do think that, you know, and it's certainly giving me a little bit of pause to think, okay, if gay men are reporting this very overly emphasized focus on physical appearance, what's it like for women? Because women are in the market of men, right? Yeah. We are the supply demand problem. Yeah, I mean, we're having seen for a long time that it's extremely tough to be subject to male desire that so overwhelmingly privileges and positions physical appearances, the central arbiter.

54:42Like you can put all this effort, it seems to you, into diversifying the number of things that ought to make you, you think a attractive potential partner to someone. And then to learn that physical appearance constitutes such a significant part of that. I think it's pretty disempowering. And I always try to get young men who are criticizing what they believe to be the unfair physical appearance preferences of women to take stock of the very clear robust research finding that actually women are much more chill on your physical appearance than you are on their on average. Yeah, jump show you for me.

55:28Yeah, I am and again the trend on the internet at the moment especially in a lot of the minusphere spaces is that women's hypergamous nature and the fact that any guy can fly them out to Dubai at the drop of a hat and they're going to be a shake's wife and no other guy can compete with them. Means that the high probability scenario. Means means that women's selection criteria is out of the window and that all of these normal managers have been able to get a look in. I don't deny that there's a tall girl problem of high pergamy given that women are overachieving in education and employment comparative with men.

56:05I think that there has been a massive retreat of men from the mating market that isn't assisting them. And I also think that men are being accused of not only being the tyrant of everybody else's downfall, but of their own as well. There are very few groups where when they have a problem, we say, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Instead, we spend billions of tax pay a funded money to try and create initiatives and charities and startups to, you know, Title IX was introduced in an effort to do that. Now, I, you know, fuck, I have harped on for as long as is possible trying to like sing the song of men being forgotten right to the point where I've been accused by guardian readers of being a bigot but because I don't believe that women have it just super easy and that no man is sexually or that in terms of appearances over focusing on that to the detriment of women's mental health a lot of the time that also causes me to be a like a blue pilled cook so I again this is this is this appropriately as it straddles my mouth, it straddles both sides of the conversation.

57:09I really, really think that this discussion, trying to work out or trying to teach people about what each side finds attractive, the differences that you can have and how that's a challenge is really, really fucking important. One of the common tropes that we're seeing on the internet at the moment, which you must have become familiar with, is height anxiety among men. Yeah. We've put a fair bit of effort into studying this for a while. Tell me. Tell me all about it. Guys are getting fucking femur, extension surgery, they're wearing shoes that increase their height. There's stats coming out of, okay, keep it in Tinder about if you're below five nine, don't even bother getting on there.

57:56What's the current state of mental health and men's height like? It's definitely a prominent anxiety. It is less severe in all respects than matter how you approach it than you might think. So the number of men who are anxious about their height is less than you think. The number of women who care about height is less than you think. the number of men going out and doing something as drastic as a leg lengthening surgery is less than you think. It's just generally less of a, like, what's the issue on these, like a population exploding issue than it might otherwise seem. But it's definitely the case that for a bunch of men it really sucks and it's understandable why and there are certainly a preference among women for taller men out there.

59:01But that's about where it ends because there are preferences for women and men toward all sorts of physical attributes. And another thing worth noting is that it's very easy for people to say that they have a preference. People can say, I'm into this and then you might see them dating someone who's completely different. They're almost surprised by who it is that they ended up being attracted to or with. That tends to happen quite a lot too. You can say, you might be a young woman who wants to date anything like, I want a data folder, but then you're out. Maybe you meet a five foot nine dive who's really funny and you're like, huh, and then look, maybe you don't.

59:47But someone's already taken what you tweeted saying, I like tall guys and being like, look, they're all like this. And now it's a big flame war on the internet. How do you pass apart stated and revealed preferences when it comes to this? Because it seems like that's the real challenge here. Yeah, that's tricky. This starts to move away from my expertise admittedly, because we're getting into social science as opposed to clinical psychology. I think you either have to follow people up in terms of how they've actually dated, which is tricky from a statistical power standpoint a few other things, or you can corroborate it with data from things like OKCupid, et cetera.

1:00:30right out, okay, cupards, data, blog, and dump often gets trotted out in supported various arguments in their space. And yeah, there can be a difference between people's stated intentions and their reveals. But again, it tends to be not as drastic as people think as far as I can tell as well. That's interesting. What about penis size sensitivity? Is this something you've looked at? Yeah and this one black because we've we've outright looked at how many people are dissatisfied with their height is men, men straight men and came in, how dissatisfied they are with their height, their muscles, their body fat and their penis.

1:01:12We've put it all floor against detail because we wanted an actual answer to this. Pain is the satisfaction was right down the bottom. Very few men. We said this stereotype that when guys get worried about how they look, it's just because they want the addictive bigger. I think that's a generation's old trope. I just don't think as many men are worried about that, as we might think. By and large, what men worry about is, I wish I didn't have as much body fat on me and wish my biceps would be good. What's the percentage and the order of stuff for those four statements? Can you remember? So you'll have penicised dissatisfaction at the bottom.

1:01:57You'll have height dissatisfaction above that and then you'll have muscularity and body fat sitting quite similarly. And it changes according to age. So for young men, it will be muscle the satisfaction that's worse than body to fat to satisfaction. I think because a lot of young men, they've possibly been skinnier growing up anyway. But then as people get older, the battle quote unquote turns to body fat less muscularity. So body fat starts to become the thing that most priority got. And body fat to satisfaction, muscularity to satisfaction for young men, almost normative. So in the field, we call it normative in the sense that it's more normal to find someone who says, yeah, I'm not happy with the amount of body fat or muscularity on me than to say that I'm happy.

1:02:46But when it comes to like, penis size, the satisfaction, we're talking under one intent. So nine intent, then we'll say, yeah, I'm fine with the way my penis looks. And height, probably around six, seven intent. and happy with that, height, dissatisfaction drops off with age as well. What's the proportion of men who say weight or muscularity? Can you remember?

1:03:15Or... For gay men, I think that will be up at 60 for straight men. For straight men, I can't recall it separable. it's probably around 40, 35 to 40. So still a massive portion. We're speaking to a huge number. And again, I don't know, man, there's not a single guy I know. I don't think who, if I ask them, would you like to lose a bit of body fat or would you like a bit more muscularity that wouldn't say yes? I don't know anybody. There's no one listening to this. There's no one listening to this. But there's also no one listening to this that says, dude, if you just go up, you want an extra inch in growth, is not going to go, yeah, why not?

1:04:07Like there's room in the garage. We'll fit it in. No one's not going to say that. That's exactly. But there's a distinction between if it was offered to, would you take it? And I am unhappy with this thing. So I agree with you. I think most men have offered something like, would you want an extra inch of high very inch of paint inside. It's almost like a yeah well I mean why not it's not gonna hurt but that's I think that's the mentality whereas a lot of men offered say an inch more on their vise, they're very inch off their waist. They're like yeah because like I think my arms are skinny or I actually do wish that I wasn't fixing this fixing it deficiency.

1:04:53dissatisfaction as opposed to like, well, if you're going to offer it, then yes. Scott Griffiths, ladies and gentlemen, Scott, I think this stuff is absolutely fascinating. I love the work that you're doing. I can't wait to see what you do next. What should people go? If they want to keep up to date with the work and the publications and all the rest of it, have you got somewhere on the internet that you can direct them? Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at ScottLongRiffiths. Yeah, and thanks for having me a really thoughtful questions. I appreciate it.