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Whose body is it anyway? Advertising and male body imagery

December 05, 2000

A paper on men’s responses to the male image in advertising was given today, Wednesday 20 December, at The British Psychological Society’s London Conference, held at the Institute of Education.

Researchers Rosalind Gill and Carl McLean, of the London School of Economics, and Karen Henwood, of the University of East Anglia examined whether the images in advertising of the male body as hard, muscular, ‘worked out’ and eroticised led to men, like women, reporting problematic relationships to their bodies, whether men still seem less subject to body image pressure, or whether such advertising has different effects for men.

The researchers interviewed 140 men from England and Wales, between the ages of 15 and 35 from varying social backgrounds, of different sexualities. They used advertising images featuring the male body as prompts.

They found eight reactions to representations of idealised male bodies ranging from anger to desire. Men described several responses, with few men reporting either indifference or a very problematic relationship to the representations. Their reactions were affected by their sexuality, age, class, regional location and relationship history.

The paper, which formed part of a symposium on ‘Culture, Psychology and New Technologies’, concluded that the ‘technology’ of masculinity in the new advertising is indeed having a profound effect on the way some men define themselves, but that other sources of identity, such as work, parenting and sport, are still important.

British Psychological Society (BPS)