Faculty develop program to battle ‘gym bro’ culture, ‘looksmaxxing’ and harmful masculinity standards

A quick swipe through social media platforms or the nightly news reveals jarring images of what men believe they have to be: extremely muscular, rugged jawlines, triangular torsos and more.

More frightening are the means men use to reach these impossible body standards: starvation and bulking diets, excessive time spent working out, steroid abuse, plastic surgery and even at-home methods of body shaping.

"The latest trend for teenage boys is to take a hammer to their face to break their bones, so that they can have that jawline that's really rugged-looking and that kind of jagged masculine look," said Mary Pritchard, a Boise State psychology professor who has studied body image and eating disorders for nearly 25 years.

With adjunct psychology professor, lab manager and licensed professional counselor Laci Whipple, Pritchard received a grant from the Mental Research Institute to create M-Body, a novel intervention with the goal to redefine masculinity through positive body image.

Though the research is in its early stages, Whipple and Pritchard are already beginning to see their intervention making important waves for the young men involved.

Their research could not come a moment too soon. In an unprecedented leap from historic data, collegiate men at Boise State and across the nation are surpassing women in their prevalence and level of dissatisfaction with their bodies. According to a recent survey conducted by Whipple and Pritchard, ninety-three percent of male Boise State students look in the mirror and think, "This isn't good enough - I need to physically change."

Additionally, Pritchard revealed that eating disorder rates have doubled in college students over the past decade and are increasing at a faster rate in men than women.

The context is critical

Where are these trends coming from, and why have so many of them gotten so far out of hand to the point of being normalized?

First, we have to consider how the end of the boomer generation signaled multiple important shifts in families and in gender dynamics. Women historically stayed at home, and men were seen as the protectors and the providers. During Generation X, when that dynamic began to change and women became their own providers and protectors, this left men at a loss: What was their role, and who were they supposed to be if these historic roles were disappearing?

Pritchard explained that there is a theory that this loss of purpose and guidance translates into relying upon one's physical appearance to find and hold a sense of identity and meaning - as women have historically seen with impossible body standards.

"Men are now objectified just like women are," Pritchard said. "There's a lot of research that suggests that for men, it's a broader mental health issue. It's not just about what they look like, but it's connected to their eating behaviors, their exercise behaviors, their self-worth and self-esteem, even things like dating violence. And then we have this culture where we keep being told that masculinity is toxic. Men are really struggling to try to figure out 'How do we do this thing called masculinity?'"

Throw in the advent of social media and toxic influencers, and you have a recipe for disaster. A quick survey of terms and trends coined in the past decade makes it clear how omnipotent and toxic the physical health standards propagated online have become. Examples include "gym bro" (a male whose identity is inextricably linked to being in the gym and exacting muscular standards), "looksmaxxing" (the practice of maximizing one's physical appearance to reach impossible levels of attractiveness) and muscle dysmorphia (the mental health disorder in which one becomes obsessed with the size of muscle groups).

"It's really hard for men, A) to talk about body image issues, but B) to even realize they have an issue. Because with this gym-bro culture, it is so normative that they don't think that there's anything wrong with what they're doing, even if they're taking steroids or are on the carnivore diet or lifting seven days a week, and for three hours a day. I mean, they don't realize that that is disordered," Pritchard said.

'[Originally] to be anorexic, you had to skip a menstrual cycle'

An important layer to this complicated concept of masculine physical and mental health is that eating disorders and body dysmorphia (a mental health condition where a person worries excessively about perceived flaws in their appearance) were initially only diagnosed and even clinically defined in terms of how they impacted the female body.

"There's a lack of language for men's body image," Whipple said. "All of the language for eating disorders or eating disorder prevention and body image-related topics are all feminized. Even within the clinical field, there have been really feminized definitions of what an eating disorder is. It wasn't until 2013 that men could be diagnosed with anorexia, because you had to lose your menstrual cycle to be qualified for that diagnosis."

As a counselor who specializes in eating disorders and body dysmorphia, Whipple wants to tackle the overlooked and misunderstood nuances of men's mental health and eating disorders. Historically, men's eating disorders are more likely to go undiagnosed, and as a result, men are more likely to die from eating disorders than women.

"Eating disorder counselors don't necessarily know how to treat men, because that hasn't been the clientele that comes to us. There's a lot of disordered behaviors that men are just like, 'Oh, it's healthy, it's what you do when you go to the gym, and you bulk, and you cut,' and these are actually binge and restrict cycles, and we've had feminized language for all of this for 50 years."

An important stepping stone to their new intervention came when Whipple and Pritchard discovered that gender-neutral body image intervention worked well for women and adolescents, but for men, these programs fell short.

They still failed to answer the question that is wracking male mental and physical health: "How do we do this thing called masculinity?"

Hence, the very real need to create M-Body.

Creating solutions for Boise State's young men

Taking inspiration from the existing "Be Body Positive" program - founded by Connie Sobczak and Elizabeth Scott - Pritchard and Whipple are developing and teaching four-week interventions during spring and fall 2026, alongside control groups. This project includes surveys both during the intervention and also in the following months to see how well students retain the lessons.

The initial cohort had 40 students, but the team hopes to attain more grants and expand their offerings to get more students in the fall and the year to come.

Excitingly, Whipple and Pritchard are already seeing a marked difference stemming from their intervention on male Boise State students.

"We started with an hour-and-a-half-long intervention last year, but we found out it wasn't long enough," Whipple said. "Once the men really started opening to one another, they're like, 'This is actually really powerful, can we do more of this?'"

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