I would like to say that this is changing very rapidly as beauty standards evolve. A specific example is eating disorders in boys and young men. The prevalence has skyrocketed in the last twenty years and continues to climb as men’s beauty standards becomes more unrealistic, more rigid, and more commonly enforced. The strict adherence to a highly regimented diet that many gymrats do is increasingly being analyzed in terms of disordered eating.

I’m going to drop this healthline article because I’m struggling to find solid numbers, but the lede is that 1/3 people suffering from an eating disorder right now is a man. The article also points out that nearly 1/4 young men are taking some kind of performance enhancing drug in hopes of gaining muscle mass.

https://www.healthline.com/health/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-in-men

The clearest example of how rapidly things are changing and how extreme it’s getting is would be looking at Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of wolverine over the last twenty years as he transforms from a strong man to a freakish caricature of strength, dehydrated to the point of injury with bulging veins and muscles. The beauty norm was built deliberately by advertising companies to sell weight loss pills and they’ve never stopped trying to convince people that there’s something wrong with them so they can sell more creatine and skincare products.

Again, this isn’t a “what about the men?” thing, rather I’m hoping to illustrate that there’s no real basis to the beauty standard, it’s artificially constructed and changes over time, both organically and when capitalists deliberately manipulate it. Men are not currently held to the same standards as women, but as capitalism and patriarchy continue to evolve that may change, bringing the harm inflicted by the beauty standard down on more and more people.

Another illustrative example are these images of Steve McQueen and James Dean. These guys were the undisputed sexiest and most handsome men of their age. Their bodies look nothing like Jason Momoa or Chris Hemsworth in super-hero mode. I really like this example because the appearance of the most desirable men of the 60s and 70s is so radically, obviously, indisputably different from the norm expected of actors in the 2020s.

Compare with Jason and Chris

Jason’s picture is noteworthy because it highlights just how completely unattainable the appearances being pushed on young men now are. Jason Momoa doesn’t even look like Jason Momoa except right before he needs to shoot a shirtless scene, where he fasts and drinks no water for a day or more to achieve the ultra-shredded appearance that only comes with severe dehydration. Whereas James and Steve are just reasonably fit men who maybe do some pushups and curls.

By contrast, Marilyn Monroe and Sydney Sweeney;

Marilyn could walk side-by-side with Sydney down the red carpet and she’d fit right in. The makeup and clothes have changed but the overall expectation of beauty remains just as unrealistically demanding.

To me this clearly, visually illustrates how much the beauty standard is fake. It’s an artificial machine that has to be maintained and repaired constantly. Capitalism, advertising, patriarchy, created this thing and they’re the ones who protect it and keep it running. They also change it; Capitalism always demands new markets and over the last few decades it’s begun trying to enforce unrealistic body standards and the anxiety that goes with that on young men in order to sell pre-workout, steroids, and whey protein.

The take away is that if they built it we can smash it up. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about it, it’s a system within capitalism and like any other capitalist system we can tear it down and build something better.