In a regular feature titled “The Real-Life Diet,” GQ interviews men about what they eat and how they exercise. Some of these men are celebrities (see of The Good Place), but most are professional athletes, like “,” or Panthers running back . Last week, though, GQ profiled , fact-checker Mick Rouse, naming him “the Fittest Man at GQ.”
As Atlantic writer , it’s difficult to imagine a women’s magazine publishing a similar evaluation of a staff member’s body, much less holding an equivalent discussion in the first place. While women are still, obviously, judged on their diets and appearance (often under fat-phobic guidelines masquerading as objective health criteria), women-focused media outlets have become, at least nominally, body-image conscious in recent years. Mainstream magazine covers don’t spotlight “11 Amazing Weight-Loss Tips” — instead, they show “11 Amazing Ways to Love Your Body.” Whether the latter is actually any more progressive is arguable, but we seem to have come to an agreement that publishing explicitly objectifying weight-loss-oriented content is passé.
Men’s magazines, meanwhile, remain free to cheerlead openly disordered eating: In his interview, Rouse says he used to eat oatmeal for three meals a day to lose weight, and while he warns readers against doing the same, his current diet (“pretty much grilled chicken, broccoli, sweet potatoes, and rice”) is presented as healthy, “balanced,” and essential to his lean, muscular figure — the body deemed “best” by the staff’s own criteria. It might not sound like starvation, but Rouse’s diet is extremely restrictive by his own admission, and it’s the sort of meal plan that, coming from a woman, would elicit anorexia accusations, perhaps not inaccurately.
GQ’s recent interview with the Reverend Al Sharpton was even more alarming. Twice mentioning that Sharpton had more than halved his weight (he now weighs 59kg), the interviewer admires Sharpton’s no-days-off, 5am daily workouts and upholds the dietary advice of none other than rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who once told the mag he doesn’t think . Sharpton seems to agree: He tells the interviewer he eats only three slices of bread, a banana, and a kale salad with a boiled egg each day. This amounts to approximately 700 to 800 calories, if I’m estimating generously. The daily caloric intake for men is 1500 calories. Sharpton is starving.
Research suggests that young men are just as susceptible to disordered eating as young women are.
When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey shared his own intermittent-fasting plan (which includes eating nothing at all on Fridays and Saturdays), critics rightly pointed out that his diet . But because Dorsey is a man, and his self-professed goals are more about abstract concepts like “mental clarity” and “sharpness,” what would otherwise be labelled anorexia is as self-improvement. Still, for every outlet that labels Silicon Valley’s emergent eating issues as , there is a men’s magazine presenting extreme dieting as an .
Though the desired results may differ and have a different vocabulary — lean vs. skinny; jacked vs. in shape; keto vs. low carb — research suggests that young men are to disordered eating as young women are, but because our cultural framework positions both dieting and disordered eating as largely female endeavours, we just don’t recognise what it looks like in men. While female dieters are forced to the fringes (gathering on pro-anorexia internet forums or coding their weight-loss goals as “wellness” aims), men’s magazines are providing male dieters with national platforms on which to congratulate each other for not eating. It’s weird and sad to witness.
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