A study on the Correlation Between the Level of Satisfaction Men Have With Their Body Image and the Intensity of the Adonis Complex They have
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
jih-lan, suen
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
“Take off your jacket, take off your shirt…..Take everything off, take it off, take it off!” Taken from one of the most popular and controversial Chinese-language songs in Taiwan in 2004, these lyrics encourage listeners to shake off all their burdens and restrictions, and reveal their true colors. In the song’s MV “Thorn”, Hong Kong singer Du De-wei gave a heated performance of singing and stripping, showing off both his voice and his body. This MV points to one fact, that musical products are much more than just music. Aside from the song, body image has become the hottest commodity of music industry. Du’s muscular body image, through repeated showings on TV, was imprinted on the audience’s mind.
In this study, I set out to ask these questions: Is the body image that men identify themselves with the same with the hunks crowding the popular culture? What are the factors that affect a man’s level of satisfaction with his own body image? And how is this level of satisfaction related to Adonis complex?
To answer the questions, I handed out 1,100 questionnaires to members of six different Alexander Gyms, and here are the results that I have found out.
1) In general, male members are satisfied with their body image. However, when it comes to the specifics, most men who answered the questionnaires are not satisfied with their muscle tone, nor are they with the muscles in their torso area. Hence their main objective for going to the gym is indeed to build a fit and muscular body.
2) As many as 98.6% of the male respondents said that the ideal body shape they wished to achieve has to be muscular, and more than 40% of them said that the body shape they would most like to have is like Mr. Olympia’s. This shows how much they identify with the body image of those muscular hunks.
3) There is a clear correlation between the level of satisfaction men have with their own body image and how high they regard the muscular hunks. The more earnestly they hope to achieve a fit and muscular body, the higher their satisfaction is with their own body image. Subconsciously these men believe they have already achieved such an ideal body shape, so they become satisfied with their body image. They also believe that a fit and muscular body is an achievable objective, therefore the more they work out, the closer they will get to it.
4) The more an imperfect body shape affects his daily life, the more aggressive the man is in his actions to change it. In other words, a man is willing to take concrete steps to improve his body image in order to alleviate the troubles caused by his appearance.
5) The younger a man is, the more he identifies with the body image built by the mass media, showing a correlation between age and inclination to be influenced by the media representing of an ideal body shape.
Keyword: Adonis Complex, Body image, Body image satisfaction, Self-perception, Body-building, Media representing.
Subjects
猛男情結
身體意象
身體意象滿意度
健身
媒體再現
自我知覺
Adonis Complex
Body Image
Body image satisfaction
Media representing
self-perception
Type
other
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