Hot men do not make males self-conscious

COLUMBIA, Mo., Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Female models have had a negative impact on how women view their own bodies, but male models have an opposite effect on men, U.S. researchers said.

Jennifer Aubrey of the University of Missouri looked at the effect of male magazines on college-age men. The research, scheduled to be published in Human Communication Research, found that the cultural expectation for men is not that they have to be as attractive as their peers, but that they need to be attractive enough to be sexually appealing to women.

In one study, Aubrey measured male exposure to "lad" magazines, such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff, which she said contains sexually suggestive images of women and articles that speak in a bawdy, male voice about fashion, sex, technology and pop culture.

Aubrey also measured male body self-consciousness, tendency to monitor one's appearance and appearance anxiety.

"We wondered why magazines that were dominated by sexual images of women were having an effect of men's feelings about their own bodies," Aubrey said.

In a second study, Aubrey and Laramie Taylor of the University of California-Davis had men examine layouts from lad magazines that featured objectified women, a second group viewed layouts about male fashion and a third group inspected appearance-neutral layouts of technology and film trivia.

"Men who viewed the layouts of objectified females reported more body self-consciousness than the other two groups," Aubrey said. "More surprising was that the male fashion group reported the least amount of body self-consciousness among the three groups."