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by Reena Daruwalla, guest writer for Nancy Hayssen.com

Once I started to read about body image issues among young boys, I realized that there a lot more to body images issues among men than may meet the eye immediately. In a survey conducted by Psychology Today, it was found that that 56% of the women and about 40% of the men who responded to their survey in 1997 were dissatisfied with their overall appearance.

As women erroneously believe that a men desire a certain physical ‘ideal’ among women, so also men have certain misconceptions about what women want. Research has indicated that many men wish to become more muscular than they currently perceive themselves to be and may desire up to 26 pounds of additional muscle mass. As women strive misguidedly to be thin (under the impression that this is what men want), so do men have the tendency to overestimate the amount of muscle considered ideal by women. Like i said before, most women do not find Arnold Schwarzenegger that desirable!

There is a Barbie equivalent among young boys as well: as girls grow up thinking that you have to be like Barbie (tall, thin, blond, blue eyed) to be pretty, so do boys grow up with action figures sporting ridiculous amounts of bulky muscle. These action figures are often depicted as super-muscular, usually beyond the actual limits of human physiology.

While this male desire for more muscle has amusing nicknames like “The Adonis Complex”, “Bigorexia”, “Reverse Anorexia” etc., this is no laughing matter since this dissatisfaction with muscle mass and negative self image among men does lead to low self esteem, and is cause for great concern.

I think that I have a healthy body image and low self esteem is not an issue that I even had to battle with, but even I have certain areas of my body that I think could do with some improvement, so I thought that I would do a body image quiz. I took this quiz, and it pretty much reinforced the view that I have of myself, and when I took this quiz, I found that there were a lot of interesting (some shocking) statistics that I did not know about.

And if need a laugh after all this serious stuff, visit here for some great body image cartoons.