I have raised that point already in this thread, and provided an idea of why this issue is on the rise.
I presume you mean you raised this issue in the post quoted below?
The more i think about it, the more i think it is not so much the ideal body that has changed, it is much rather the availability of that.
Whenever we look at statues or pictures of what people thought was the ideal male body we will see a muscular yet lean man. We find that in early cave paintings, in the remains of the early high cultures, no matter at what part of the world we look (actually i don't know about the far east, but for the early high cultures in europe it is true, as it is for old egypt. And it has not changed so much. If we look what shaped the idea of the ideal body of the western world after the middle ages, we look at Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and Michelangelo's David. There are of course many more, but i thought i name these because everyone has seen them. IS that standard really so much different from ours today?
Or is it just the availability of that standard that has these consequences. Or at least the illusion of it. And by that i do not only mean the constant confrontation with the ideal through tv and internet where models look like that, but the fact that whenever you turn on the tv you get told that you can look like that if you only work 5 minutes a day if you get that very special device, that every time you walk through the grocery store you see ads that tell you you can look like that if you only would eat their delicious and expensive products. That every time you walk down the street you see a gym and they have a sign telling you that you could look like that standard if you would only take their help. At the same time we are surrounded by everything unhealthy, Stress and laziness make people take a car for any distance and if it is only a thousand foot, the way we work has changed too, more and more we sit still behind a keyboard and screen than being physical active. Also has the classical family changed, for many people there is no wife that is purely a homemaker anymore, and i am certainly glad about that, but it means that the time for cooking has decreased and the food that is cheap and fast available is usually rather unhealthy.
So while the the average lifestyle has become more unhealthy, and makes it harder to achieve a physical standard that is presented to us, we still can not but be confronted with the illusion of the reachability. And there is no scruple for businesses to take advantage of the insecurity of men if there is money in it, keeping that illusion up.
Which leads to millions of failures, unfortunately humans don't react well to failures, and that i think is a big part of the reason why western cultures have trouble with eating disorders, men and women, obesity and underweight.
The first part is interesting in that you posit the existence of a fixed cultural standard of male beauty, the problem is that this standard has in fact been adapted and changed with cultural trends.
The differences between the Vitruvian or Classical archetypes of the male form and formal imagery from ancient Egypt and the Near east are striking, indeed different ideals have existed around the world at various periods in history, and when viewing images of the past it is always worth remembering that not only are we looking at an ideal we are looking at an ideal arrived at through an observation of the world as it was at the time of the ideal's creation. Therefore images of gods in the ancient world express physical substantiality, power, presence and eternity, images of Kings express power, and energy and physical prowess and warlike traits, images of priests, philosophers, artisans, peasants, slaves etc are all idealised also but in a different way.
Overall I do agree though that particularly in men physical ideals have been more stable than those applied to the appearance of women which have undergone fairly radical changes at different periods in history.
I agree that failure or feelings of inadequacy caused by the experience either of actual failure or perceived failure have a potent effect on people. No doubt these feelings provoke a vast array of human behaviour, some of them perfectly useful and some of them self destructive.
There's every reason to think, indeed the best opinions seem to confirm, that feelings of failure related to personal appearance (especially a prolonged one experience of them) can be the spur to a variety of self destructive habits. Being excessively self critical, being equally critical of the appearance of others, developing food phobias, and unhealthy eating habits (such as binging and purging) or a sense of shame related to food and eating in general which can cause both over eating and under eating. This sense of shame, about food and personal appearance, can be so intense that it causes depression and a variety of knock on mental illnesses and conditions.
That different people react to the same kinds of pressures in different ways in evidenced by the variety of behaviours and conditions which result from these diverse reactions. That they might all be prevented if the root cause were somehow eliminated seem axiomatic, but is not so simple in practice. This means that this spectrum of conditions and behaviours need ultimately to be treated in similar ways when they are similar in nature, but in different ways when they are different in nature, even if the root cause is as we have seen the same.
Certainly the obese compulsive eater and the anorexic compulsive starver share a large amount in common in terms of the cause, nature and psychological mechanics of their respective conditions and it all reflects deeper human behavioural imperatives programmed by evolutionary pressures.
