Hollywood’s toxic beauty standards reveal dangerous limits to which men have to push their bodies

It's widely known and accepted that women are objectified on screen, pushing unhealthy ideas about how we should look and the lives we are supposed to lead. There have been always been complaints that the movie industry holds men to the same 'beauty standards as women and while that is largely true, stringent diets and unhealthy lifestyles are enforced on men as well. Such unrealistic demands can often have a huge effect on their health and set unrealistic expectations of the average individual who look up to these actors. Game of Thrones actor Natalie Dormer opened up on the demands made of men in the industry. Dormer said men faced just as much objectification as women. “My personal experience has been to work on phenomenal jobs in which the men are objectified as much as the women. Actors suffer from it, too,” Dormer told Radio Times in an interview, reported The Huffington Post.

Dormer added that it wasn't just being thin, but about various having the physique to suit different kinds of roles. “We’re not just talking about being slim here. We’re talking about character actors with big eyes getting typecast in the ‘friend’ role,” said Dormer. “It’s not just about bed-ability: it’s about your physicality more generally.” One only needs to look at Zac Effron movies to realize that he takes his shirt off in pretty much every one of them, including the one in which he played serial killer Ted Bundy.

Dormer's comments follow Emma Thompson's comments on rampant sexism in the industry. “I don’t think there’s any appreciable improvement and I think that, for women, the question of how they are supposed to look is worse than it was even when I was young,” she told Radio Times, reported The Guardian. “So, no, I am not impressed, at all. I think it’s still completely shit, actually.” She added that it appeared that the demands of the industry appeared to be getting worse. “When I was younger I really did think we were on our way to a better world and when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women and I find that very disturbing and sad. Some forms of sexism and unpleasantness to women have become more entrenched and indeed more prevalent.”

The topic of men being objectified started a discussion on a Tumblr thread and many users highlighted similar problems concerning men in the acting industry. 

“Oh my God! I’ve honestly never in my life worked as hard on anything as I have on this,” said Evans in an interview with EW. “You just get hurt. You get whacked! The hardest thing about this movie is keeping the weight on,” he said. “Three months leading in, you get this training regimen. You try and get as big as you possibly can. There’s a couple scenes in the movie where I’m in either tight T-shirts or tank tops or stuff like that— you wanna make sure you got the size. Then they save the big, big action sequences for the last month or so. You’re just busting your ass all day, shedding weight, and you take this thing off and you’re like, ‘Ugh, I think I’m like eight pounds lighter,’” he added.