Reddit reviews The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys

Just to add a great layman-accessible reference about this stuff, [The Adonis Complex] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Adonis-Complex-Identify-Obsession/dp/068486911X) is a good place to start if you want to learn more.

I did my undergraduate thesis on male body issues and muscle dysmorphia, which is a subtype of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. I had groups of college-age men and women give ratings for the desirability of male physiques. The physiques were drawn from the Somatomorphic Matrix, a set of line drawings of male bodies that differed along the axes of muscle-mass and leanness.
Men were to rate how much they desired to look like each physique and how much they thought women desired men with such physiques. Women were to rate how attractive each physique was, as well as how much they thought men wanted to look like each physique.

My research indicated that men wanted to be at the top end of the muscularity and leanness scale and believed that women wanted them to be in the same approximate region of muscularity and leanness, but that women actually desired men with a more moderate level of muscularity and high level of leanness. Women understood that men wanted to be larger.

The take-home is that there's a disconnect between what women actually desire and what men THINK those women desire. A big problem with my research was external validity -- those line drawings were a reasonable approximation of body size, but as we all know, attraction and desirability is a complex construct, and there's the possibility for numerous statistical interactions. Men with the largest and leanest physiques may covary with other constructs, such as confidence, socioeconomic status, etc. In the end, I decided the study was too shitty to publish, so I just moved on with my life.

>yup. i get anxiety when i miss a workout/eat something really unhealthy.

I think I understand what you mean, but be careful here. This can be problematic. I'm a good sized guy at 6' 2" and 210-215 pounds. However, I was really skinny when I was younger and it impacted my self perception. While I have never been formally diagnosed, I believe I have a form of body dysmorphia. My wife gave me a book to read one day without pretext. She just handed me The Adonis Complex and said, "I think you should read this".

As I started to read it, my internal monologue was something like, "Huh, I do that...and that...and that...and that.


Shit."

It was a bit of a wake up call about how I was viewing myself. I know we joke that the day you start lifting is the day you will be forever small, but it can become worse for lots of us. If you get anxiety from missing a workout or eating one piece of pizza, it might be worth some self reflection.

This is exactly what this book is about.

Men with body issues should really read "The Adonis Complex"
The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys https://www.amazon.com/dp/068486911X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_uaGrxb1S3TFTQ

Start by taking a look at the work of Brown University's Katharine A. Phillips, MD (https://iocdf.org/providers/phillips-katharine/). She's a psychiatrist who has written extensively on body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), its relationship with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the high suicidality rate of BDD sufferers. Also, she directs the Body Dysmorphic Disorder Program at Rhode Island Hospital.

Here's an easy to read 2006 news article about some of Phiilips work surrounding BDD:

(http://banderasnews.com/0608/hb-highrisk.htm).

A more academic paper by Phillips (2007) on the suicidality of BDD sufferers is available for free here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2361388/

It's only a hop, skip and a jump from BDD to Gender Dysphoria (GD), in my opinion, despite some protestations to the contrary. The leap from Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID) to GD isn't that big either. As Phillips (2007) points out regarding BDD:

> Although individuals with BDD appear normal looking to others, they are preoccupied with distressing and time-consuming thoughts that some aspect of their physical appearance looks flawed or defective. They may worry, for example, that they have very noticeable acne, their skin is too red or terribly scarred, their hair is thinning, their nose is too large or misshapen, their head is too big, or their stomach is huge and protuberant. The appearance
concerns can focus on any body area, and preoccupation with multiple body areas is common. The appearance preoccupations are obsessional, occurring on average for 3–8 hours per day. The beliefs about the perceived appearance defects are usually delusional or characterized by poor insight.


These clinical features of BDD should sound very familiar to anyone familiar with GD. The latter are obsessed with their genitals among other things. The delusional beliefs and the poor insight of BDD sufferers particularly intrigue me. You could say the same about many transwomen (TW) regarding GD.

Given trans people love to point out their high suicide rate (or attempt rate), notice that BDD sufferers are prone to suicide, too. Per Phillps (2007):

> Suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and completed suicide appear common in individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Available evidence indicates that approximately 80% of individuals with BDD experience lifetime suicidal ideation and 24% to 28% have attempted suicide.

As for any relationship between OCD and GD, Phillips and Kaye (2011) explain in a book on obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders (OCSD):

> Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and eating disorders have long been hypothesized to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). More recently, since the advent of the obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders (OCSDs) concept, they have been considered candidates for inclusion in this grouping of disorders....Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) has been considered closely related to OCD for more than a century, and it is widely conceptualized as an OCSD....

(See chapter 2 in http://stop-abuse.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Eric_Hollander_Obsessive-compulsive_Spectrum_DisBookZZ.org_.pdf)

Unsurprisingly, brain imaging is popular among OCD researchers, too:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29159060

Everybody wants an easy answer regarding the cause of a medical problem -- be it OCD, transgenderism, homosexuality or god knows what else. Easy answers rarely exist.

p.s. Katherine Phillips wrote a book called The Adonis Complex. I haven't seen it yet but it sounds interesting. Maybe the complex is relevant to some transwomen claiming that they couldn't fit in and function as a man.

https://www.amazon.com/Adonis-Complex-Identify-Prevent-Obsession/dp/068486911X