A few years ago, this cultural finding shocked me: among cisgender people of all genders and orientations, gay men reported the highest prevalence of body shame. Dysmorphia, commonly associated with straight women and eating disorders, seemed to affect gay men in a different and much deeper way compared to other demographics, and at first I couldn’t understand why.

As fate would have it, right around this time a first-line responder from The Trevor Project DMed me on Instagram in the wake of a conversation thread about body image that I started — and she shared that body shame is the second most common reason behind suicidal ideation in young gay males (after bullying).

Now, this looked like a huge problem, and I hypothesized that its prevalence and complicated nature resulted from the intersection of biology, socialization, and homophobia as an external system of oppression. So I set out to unravel this in my research, employing what I already knew about oppression, mental health, shame and shame resilience.

The results were quite shocking. It turned out that cisgender homosexual men, among people of all genders and orientations, are indeed most vulnerable to body shame because of immutable biological reasons: the combination of predominantly visual perception of sexual attractiveness and the same-sex attraction, making them scrutinize their own bodies and directly compared them to those they feel attracted to. That’s why gay men were traumatized by body shame on a deeper plane than heterosexual women — the perception of being not enough because of their looks was created by their own sexuality, not just the objectification created by the external misogynist culture.

Zooming out to the community level, the picture became yet gloomier. While targeted by oppression for their orientation from the outside, inside the LGBT community gay men experienced the culture that leveraged the shit out of their body shame vulnerability. Appearance was consistently portrayed as the truest measure of a gay man’s worth and lovability, which explained why body shaming, body privilege, and body hierarchy were so commonplace — and far more brutal than in the majority of the culture. It explained why so many Western gay men, hustling for masculinity because on the internalized gender deficit stereotype, worked their ass off in gyms. It explained why gay men as early as in their thirties already had huge triggers around aging and spent tons of money on rejuvenating treatments. It explained the flooding of shirtless selfies on Instagram, fostering the culture of narcissism and validating the mythology of shallowness around LGBT identity. It explained why gay porn industry and gay escort industry were multi-million-dollar-making machines: much of the fuel they ran on was body shame, reported by 85% of gay men even in the most prosperous, Western countries, where people have resources available to spend on their appearance.

I do think that this culture deserves to be exposed and dismantled just like homophobia and heterosexism. For LGBT people, because of their populational proportion, it’s hard enough to find a partner. But when even inside their community, homosexual men become routinely plagued by culturally-sponsored shame, their chances of finding true love slump even lower. The oppression based on the hierarchy of bodies in the gay male community clearly replicates the systems of oppression in larger society: racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia on its own. Due to it, only a tiny percentile of people in this community (those having won the genetic lottery and the privilege of having substantial economic resources to spend on their appearance) can feel worthy of, and in fact have access to, love and meaningful relationships. That’s not equality.

Shame is highly contagious, and, reaching the critical mass, it spreads beyond the boundaries of sexuality and gender. Although straight men don’t have the same biologically underpinned vulnerability to body shame as gay men do, in the last two decades we observed a skyrocketing increase in the rates of dysmorphia and eating disorders in straight men, too. In part, it could be attributed to the significantly increased objectification of men in media outlets (much of which was guided by the gay male producers who had been locked out of the industry before).

One thing I know about shame from research is this: it cannot stand being spoken. When covered by silence, secrecy, judgment, and perfectionism, it proliferates and metastasizes exponentially. It starts controlling our lives and our relationships. When we wrap words around it and get empathetic responses from others, it loses its power. The stories and lives experiences of gay men I interviewed and worked with in clinical practice over the years evidence this truth around body shame as clearly as anything else.

source