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Abstract
Into this arena comes the Adonis complex, a recent popularisation of "muscle dysmorphia" by Harrison Pope and colleagues in their book on this topic.5 They have backed their assertions of this novel diagnostic entity in a series of scientifically rigorous papers.6-8 Muscle dysmorphia is characterised by a preoccupation with overall muscularity and drive to gain weight without gaining fat. By contrast with normal-comparison weightlifters and male college students, men with muscle dysmorphia show greater abnormalitites on every biopsychosocial variable. These changes include cognitive distortions of body image, abnormal eating attitudes and obsessive thoughts about muscularity, behavioural manifestations in the form of anabolic steroid misuse and excessive exercise, and marked functional deficits in terms of social avoidance and occupational functioning.b Muscle dysmorphia may represent the tip of an iceberg of male body-image distortion in the general community. Pope and colleagues have developed a computerised instrument, the somatomorphic matrix, as a measure of body-image misperception.7 Among collegeage men in Austria, France, and the USA, they found that most men believed they would be more attractive to women if they were14 kg more muscular than they really were, whereas women rejected this brawny monstrosity in favour of a fairly average male body image. This finding is highly reminiscent of Fallon and Rozin's observation that women routinely believed that their most attractive weight was lower than their current weight, and that their ideal weight was lower still, whereas men's preference for female weight was significantly higher than women's.9