Should mothers start worrying about their sons?  Sisters about the brothers?  Lovers about their beloveds?

The question “Why not” might lead us to consider whether it is elements in our culture that link fashion models to women’s desirability, but not men’s.  Largely disregarding cultural influence, evolutionary psychology tends to connect men’s desirability to signs of power and women’s to signs of fertility.  On such a view, annorexia is presumably fertile youthfulness badly misconstrued, which for men would create the clearly unattractive appearance of powerlessness.    

So perhaps the new look in male models will give us a test of the origins of annorexia; can culture lead men to starve themselves?

For my self, having found supermarkets sometimes problematized by the recent presence of male agression in the aisles, I am not looking forward to battling men over fashion magazines at the hair dressers’.   Somehow I don’t think that’s where this is going.

What’s more, I noted on accidently looking in at the new “aesthetics center” when I visited my doctor at the Women’s Health Care Center (!) that there was not a man in sight.  (Do prostate specialists partner with aesthetic clinics?)  I can report depressingly that just glancing through the list of what they could do rattled my self image.