Submissions for Journalism and Public Relations are open to one work of creative nonfiction journalism or public relations completed for coursework during an eligible semester. Submissions should not exceed 10 pages. Tyler Gamboa wrote the 2nd place submission in the Journalism and Public Relations Category for the 2026 President’s Writing Awards.
About Tyler
Tyler Gamboa (he/him) is graduating with his degree in Professional and Public Writing and a minor in Physics. He’s in his second year at the Writing Center working with students from all over campus. He loves to write and always seems to find a way to weave gender and masculinity into a discussion (as evident in his article). In his free time he loves to play DND and is an avid fighting game aficionado. He thanks you for taking the time to read his article!
Winning Manuscript – The Masculine Urge to Look Like Brad Pitt: Masculinity’s Relationship with Eating Disorders
I have an eating disorder. I am a man. These two sentiments have been a leading factor on my own path to finding comfort in who I am and I have been challenging myself to confront what that might look like. My identity as a man is something that I find to be ironclad, but there are and have been people who try to undermine that because I do not exhibit the traditional ideology of what a man should be. From the way I talk, the way I dress, and from what I eat, I do not fit in their box of what is traditionally masculine. The gendered nature of eating disorders and the discussion around healthy eating is focused around diet culture and the feminine identity, which is important, but in turn there is less of a focus on how eating disorders manifest themselves in the male identity. For me, this led to a silence for longer than I’d care to admit and there was this feeling of lacking I couldn’t place at the time. This feeling became all-encompassing until I finally put the dots together: I simply lacked support. It felt wrong to have these eating problems; it was emasculating and I only felt less than those around meIt felt as if there was no one who would listen. The ideology of traditionally masculine men and what fitness is to them creates unhealthy habits while not creating an environment to discuss them without ridicule.
Fight Club is a movie that needs no introduction as one of the most universally loved movies particularly with men. There are plenty of other articles and analysis of the movie itself but the thing that I want to pick out specifically is Brad Pitt. His physique in the film is one that is extremely lean with a high volume of muscularity, in other words the ideal male physique. This physique is impossible to both attain and maintain. Above all else, no matter how lean and muscular I could make myself, I can never look like Brad Pitt. This level of fitness is curated for a movie, for fiction, but it is treated like a standard. It is through this perceived standard that a plethora of eating issues arise in men.
In my own understanding of my masculinity, I found solace in the gym for a variety of reasons but one of the leading reasons was feeling more like a man. It was one of the only areas related to traditional masculinity that I was able to find enjoyment in. Cultivating the physique, getting closer and closer to the standards of the “ideal man” I had seen in all forms of media. I was getting closer to that dream physique that was going to fix all of my insecurities with my gender and it didn’t matter what I had to do to get it. I partook in yoyo dieting, often overeating or eating nothing at all based on my perception of how my body looked. While this was not the only way my eating disorder manifested, it was certainly the most problematic. Through my time at the gym and how I was dieting, my issues regarding my weight have continued to persist.. My place of solace became one of my largest follies and I’m not alone in feeling this way.
“C” is one of several interviewees that I conducted to learn more about the interactions with eating disorders and one of the key factors I found in the discussion with him was how the gym and fitness as a whole impacted him in a way. His eating problems manifested in binge eating which has recently become a problem for him. According to C he hasn’t been as active as he would like, describing the issues that I had become intrinsically familiar with. Quite bluntly he said: “I feel less of a man because I don’t go to the gym and am less fit.” While he describes his relationship with his masculinity as healthy with many sentiments in our interview supporting that, any time we discussed insecurity in masculinity it would always come back to this sentiment. The gym is an advertisement for defining what a man is or rather, “should be.” It is through this space that it can be seen as a gender affirming environment for many people. We see it through both my and C’s experience: it helped affirm ourselves as men. While it has the ability to affirm, it can just as easily create strain with an individual’s relationship with their masculinity because of how intrinsic the relationship between masculinity and the gym is.
Gender affirming environments are vital in ensuring comfort in gender. The gym is not an exception to this and can have positive impacts with creating a healthy relationship with an individual’s gender. Interviewee “V,” a trans man, cited that working out has done wonders for his mental health and a large part of that is the gender affirming aspects of the fact that it is gendered. It helps him come to terms with his masculinity and creates a healthier relationship to his sense of self. The issue arises when men feel the need, that they have to do this or else they are less of a man like the experience of C. They have to be fit or they are less than. To not adhere to unrealistic body standards is perceived by men as less masculine.
In William Jones and John Morgan’s: Eating Disorders in men: a review of literature it states that, “data from magazines also document increased social pressures on men to have low body fat and high muscularity and provide evidence that boys’ action figures set an even more unrealistic body ideal for boys than Barbie does for girls” (26). The pressure to look a certain way is not a gendered phenomenon yet the conversation around it persists to be so. One of if not the largest contributing factor in the persistence of gendered norms can be found in social media.
It has been found that many health messages do not line up with what could be considered “official” health advice and rather reinforce these gendered norms in both men and women (Jelicich and Braun 3). I have found this to be true; as someone who has been deeply involved in gym culture in the past, the social media presence around healthy eating tends to enable unhealthy eating habits. There are plenty of creators on the platform that are advertising, even advocating, that to get “gains” and to achieve the ideal “male body” that you have to always be miserable and starve yourself, that eating should not be pleasant but a means to an end. This sentiment reappeared in K’s interview—a cis woman— when discussing her eating habits in relation to her body image. While she did cheer in high school, the constant comparison to other people and the pushing of the ideal body led her to this mindset that there should not be pleasure in food, only enough to get through the day.
K talked about beauty standards and her interactions with her body image. Something key that she noted was that her issues in regards to her body image and eating habits were always taken seriously, even if she “didn’t want them to take it seriously. Not because it’s an unserious topic but sometimes I just wanted to joke about them.” The concerns in regards to eating disorders in women is something that needs to be addressed, that’s not a debate. It just also has to be addressed with men as well. that the expectations of men need to be taken seriously as well because it can and has proven to be harmful with less normalcy in discussing the issues at hand. Both C and V had a similar sentiment of that their eating problems are not taken seriously but both talked about it in different ways.
C was minimizing his problems, comparing them to others claiming that in his own words, “aren’t as bad so less of a concern” while V led with a more concerning note that is not uncommon among men where he said, “Everyone thinks that eating problems is a joke unless you actually have it. And then, even if some people have it, they like to keep it to themselves, so they won’t take it seriously themselves.” Both of these responses are indicative of one of the core issues about the discussion about eating disorders and issues in regards to men: it is simply not taken seriously and oftentimes discounted. The constant minimizing of the issues at hand continues to create a cognitive dissonance for men in seeking help. In writing about the pandemic’s effect on diet culture in men, Virginia Sole-Smith accounts Ryan Odeal’s story stating: “[…] nobody questioned his frequent meal skipping, post-meal trips to the bathroom, or dramatic weight loss. When a friend did catch on to the extent of his struggle, he says, she was confused. ‘But, you’re a guy,’ she responded.” That stigma continues to follow and creep into the minds of men whether being said directly or not, the idea that their problems do not matter persists, with C and as it does with V.
Thus far I’ve spoken about the experience of my interviewees to expose the harm that fitness and gym culture has been having on their perceived masculinity but the issue runs much deeper.
There is a systemic issue of how men’s problems are treated and how men themselves treat their own issues. Looking even more deeply at C’s interview, the whole time the conversation leaned towards the light hearted side and tone. While some of that had to do with my own relationship with him, it was clear he did not view his problems as anything that was worth talking about. On multiple occasions he would compare his issues stating that his problems were “not on the same level as others so I’ve always chosen to stay quiet.” This itself was a concerning sentiment but not uncommon. There is a problem that men have in asking for and seeking help. Researches Abigail Mansfield, Michael Addis, and Will Courtenay performed a psychological study and deduced five factors in men that stop them from asking for help:
- A need for control.
- Minimizing problems.
- A distrust of caregivers.
- Control over emotions
- A level of vulnerability unfamiliar (Mansfield et al, 103).
Out of these, all are exhibited when discussing how men interact with their eating problems, but the two that I have primarily come across in both my personal life in talking to people and in my interviews with people have been: minimizing problems and the unfamiliarity with being vulnerable. I have already shown that both V and C minimized their issues and it has been a consistent issue entirely. I am not immune to these ideas either as there was never someone to tell me that it was okay to do something so dastardly as to share.
There is that pressure as a man to be perfect, an infallible stoic being, that showing emotion is a feminine thing to do (Mansfield et al, 97). It is this feminization of vulnerability that keeps men from being honest and open while refusing help because it has been taught to them that their problems are not as bad. The issue is that the male identity continues to believe that these normally effeminate ideologies will make them lesser than their peers and that notion is continually reinforced. In this way we see that to be masculine, to be a man, is to reject femininity. In this rejection of femininity men are devaluing it which is one reason that toxic and hypermasculine individuals exhibit large levels of sexism. While this has plenty of implications for things like therapy and medical assistance, it also continues to perpetuate the silence of me when discussing their eating problems because to them it doesn’t matter because someone has it worse, because female presenting people have it worse with diet culture.
Healthy eating and diet culture has been predominantly advertised as a feminine thing; it has been something that men have continually not cared about. It’s proving that the choices in foods to eat is based in hegemonic masculinity while partaking in dieting removes them from that masculinity (Jelicich & Braun 2). In turn, the problems that people like K have had are viewed by men as an attack on their gender identity. This idealized version of masculinity, the version that is subconsciously reinforced to men, if they engage in the ‘healthy’ eating habits proposed by diet culture, is considered a threat to masculinity. The feminized eating disorder is not only an issue sociologically but is having real implications in the full diagnosis of eating disorders.
The gendered eating disorder’s complications with diagnosis can be found in how we identify them. The tools and methods in which we diagnose are not designed for men which could lead to an underdiagnosis in men as a whole (Jones and Morgan 28). This is similar to heart disease, which is historically much easier to find in men because of the way we designed the tools to diagnose. Men speaking out about their eating problems and issues they face with their body image have been met with ridicule and surprise that they even can have problems.
The ideal body image from celebrities like Brad Pitt in the movie Fight Club has continued to reinforce the unrealistic standards of fitness in men. The inability for men to open up about these issues due to hegemonic ideas of masculinity, whether intentional or not, are continually perpetuating the cycle of negativity within men. All this to say that eating disorders exist in men
and are prevalent issues that have notoriously been devalued. As a collective these issues need to be taken seriously and we must allow those who have the courage to talk about their problems the space to do so, otherwise we continue to perpetuate these negative hegemonic stereotypes of gender.