Men’s Construction of Media Impact on Male Body Image in the Context of Heterosexual Romantic Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research has shown that men, like women, are negatively affected by idealized media portrayals. However, there are few qualitative studies that have examined this issue, leaving the literature impoverished of the meaning of male body image to men. Specifically, there is a lack of discursive inquiry. Since romantic relationships provide a unique context for body image construction, the current study examines the ways in which men in relationships linguistically construct and negotiate the media’s influence on their own body image. Three interviews and a focus group of two men in heterosexual relationships were employed to explore this topic. Our results show that, while men speak of a negative influence of media on their body image, they do so in such a way that is adaptive and creates protective barriers between the self and the media’s messages. These strategies, which at times utilize relationship status, allow participants to construct general, albeit sometimes reluctant, satisfaction with their bodies. These findings, while largely concurring with previous literature, add caveats and may reconcile disparate results from past research by identifying contradictory constructions of media influence on males in heterosexual relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".