Buff Enough?

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan
• Position: Review

The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession, by Harrison G. Pope Jr., Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia, New York: The Free Press, 286 pages, $25

By the time I graduated from high school, I had reached my full height--not quite five feet, eight inches--and I weighed 105 pounds. Much earlier, when I was about 9 or 10, I had begun to notice that I was preoccupied with certain aspects of my appearance. After one of my father's friends made a good-natured jibe about my "nice little potbelly," I worried for months about my stomach and tried to keep it covered all the time. I would also spend long sessions in front of the mirror, using water and gel and combs and brushes to smooth out what I thought were imperfections in my hair. None of that, though, prepared me for what was to happen when I reached high school.

Today when I look at pictures of my teenaged self I see a strikingly thin but hardly hideous boy. What I saw then, however, was a monster. I was grotesquely thin. As if that were not enough, I also had bandy legs, pimples, and a mild back deformity called kyphosis that made me look slightly hunched no matter how straight my posture. I felt that my body was weird, monstrous, and also alien, something I was cursed with and trapped in. Sometimes I would fantasize about chopping off my arms and legs and throwing them into the sea, just to be rid of them.

I made sure that no one had any idea how I felt. I had no use for obtuse reassurances ("There, there, you look just fine") and no appetite to be packed off to a shrink. The isolation and secrecy were harder to bear than the malady itself. My best hope, as I saw it, was to grow up and either fill out or stop obsessing. To an extent, both happened; but by the time I graduated from college I still weighed less than 120 lbs., and although my self-loathing had ebbed quite a bit, it had not gone away. I felt freakish not only physically but emotionally, because it never occurred tome that anyone else had experienced anything like what I was going through.

What a difference it might have made if, by some time-twisting miracle, I could have been handed a copy of The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession, by Harrison G. Pope Jr., Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia. I first heard of the book from a 22-year-old gay acquaintance who had somehow gotten hold of the bound galleys and was carrying them around like a Bible. His hatred of his own appearance had driven him to a compulsive and often dangerous promiscuity (if he was having sex, he couldn't be all that ugly). The Adonis Complex was a revelation to him, as it would have been to me, had it existed when I was his age.

So the first and most important thing to say about The Adonis Complex is: Hooray! For years, the scientific and popular literature has been full of hand wringing about eating disorders and body obsessions in women; but about men, text to nothing. The authors originally focused their own clinical work--in psychiatry...