Right off the bat, I’m going to assume that the title of this piece immediately gave you a mental image. Be honest, what’s the first thing that came to mind? Some cross between Johnny Depp, Hercules, and the kind eyes of Western-Movie-Interpretation Jesus. Now if you are, or have ever met or seen any male, you’d know that that is nothing like reality, so why is that where we go to when we think not about “looking like the perfect ideological god of a man”, but simply “looking like a man”?

I vehemently disagree with a faction of men who are taking umbrage with a new focus on issues which are predominantly being felt and spoken about by women. Visibility is not uninclusive, and the truth is that the faction isn’t wrong in saying that issues like body image and sexual violence are not strictly a woman’s experience, but nobody is implying that either, chill. So with this spirit of visibility, can we please just realise that there are certain universal struggles caused by the human condition that are not bound by gender stereotypes? In this case, I speak predominantly of body image and its effects on people’s psyche. Since my experience is male, I’ll be a little slanted, but I promise you there is nothing exclusively mine about it.

Being a 17-year-old with ridiculous hair, experimenting with facial hair, predominantly baggy clothes overcompensating for a host of self problems by being louder, larger, funnier was my chosen coping mechanism. While body image was not the main catalyst for my distress, it certainly piled it on some days. I was always the funny fat kid growing up and I was set on doing my utmost to not remain that way, but alas genetics and general lack of motivation held me there. What I now realise as I still have relatively the same body shape as right back then, nobody cared even remotely as much about it as I did. Considering everything, I had the world at my hands, but I was more preoccupied with projecting my self-hatred onto the world thus self-sabotaging every few months. I felt alone, fat, unwanted, lazy, slow, ugly.

According to the BBC’s reporting just a couple months ago, out of 2000 men aged 16-40, 48% were found to have struggled at a point because of body image in a study by the Campaign Against Living Miserably and Instagram. 58% were negatively impacted by the pandemic in terms of body image, only 26% were happy with how they looked, and only 21% would never speak to anyone else about it. The Mental Health Foundation meanwhile also found that out of their 4505 adult male respondents, 11% had suicidal ideation due to body image issues while 4% resorted to self-harm. 21% meanwhile dress in a way to hide their bodies, and 22% essentially made themselves feel miserable by comparing themselves to people they considered better.

Yes, the statistics above are UK based, but this issue definitely isn’t. What I take from those statistics is that there is a great chance if you’ve never had self-image issues, then someone very close to you most definitely has. The fact of the matter is that men are taught from a young age to ‘be the man’ which includes natural ability in sports, while being attractive to multiple women, while retaining an effortless confidence, while looking like they visit the gym twice a day, while dressing like a fashion designer, while driving a great car, while living in a sweet hang pad, while making time to hang with the bros, while providing for his next of kin, while I don’t know building a lifeboat out of driftwood off the side of a shipwreck and saving the other passengers.

As far as I’m concerned, “looking like a man” is as obscure a mental image as looking like a mushroom. Sure there’s a general idea, but I mean, do all mushrooms even actually look like mushrooms? This obsession with looking, acting, reacting like a real man is so overdone and overrated at this point. What our generation owes the next one is to cut this image-based bullshit and start focusing on values. Just to clarify, I don’t mean traditional family values, I mean learning the values of loving who you are whether you look like what you apparently illogically should.

You got this.

#MaltaDaily