“It's not healthy and it's decidedly not masculine”: a media analysis of UK newspaper representations of eating disorders in males

Abstract

ObjectivesRecent qualitative research found young men reporting that an expectation that eating disorders (EDs) mainly affect young women led them, and others, to only recognise their symptoms when their ED had become entrenched. This raises questions about how these stereotypes persist. We therefore explored how EDs in males were represented in articles published in UK newspapers over a 10-year period (7.12.2002–7.12.2012), specifically attending to whether newsprint media represent EDs in males as ‘gender appropriate’, ‘gender anomalous’ or ‘gender neutral’.DesignA qualitative thematic analysis of UK newspaper articles.MethodsWe searched two databases, Newsbank and LexisNexis, for newspaper articles including ED and male terms in the lead/first paragraph. Following de-duplication, 420 articles were scrutinised; 138 met inclusion criteria for detailed textual analysis and were imported into NVivo10.FindingsThe number of articles peaked in 2008 when a UK politician announced that he had experienced bulimia nervosa. Analysis of how the articles portrayed male ED-related characterisations and experiences revealed that they conveyed ambiguous messages about EDs in males. Despite apparently aiming to dispel stereotypes that only young women experience EDs and to address stigma surrounding EDs in males, many aspects of the articles, including repetition of phrases such as ‘a young woman's illness’, serve to reinforce messages that EDs are inherently ‘female’ and so ‘anomalous’ for men.ConclusionsNewspaper articles represent men with EDs as atypical of men, as a result of having an ED (and any feminising or demasculinising characteristics associated with this), and as atypical of people with EDs, who are still usually portrayed as teenage girls. Such media representations frame a cultural paradigm in which there is an expectation that men may feel shame about or strive to conceal EDs, potentially contributing to men with EDs delaying help-seeking, gaining late access to treatments and reducing chances of successful outcomes.

Environmental and Genetic Influences in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and its Comorbidities

“…Prevalence for binge-eating behaviour was extremely low, which suggests that our results are conservative. It is possibly that asking about loss of control over food intake contributes to underreporting, especially among men (206), because these symptoms are generally considered shameful. Another limitation is that, while we assess lifetime occurrence of binge-eating behaviour, ADHD is assessed as current symptoms.…”

“…However, binge eating was rare, especially in men. Men may under-report their eating-related problems, possibly due to fear for stigmatization (206). More knowledge and possibly other methods, such as structured interviews in clinical populations regarding impulsive/ compulsive behaviours, including loss of control over food intake, are necessary to investigate binge eating problems and their association with ADHD in adults.…”

Implementing and assessing a service to demonstrate public impact of faculty research in news and policy sources

“…Greenhalgh et al note that “researchers are increasingly expected to be accountable and produce value for money, especially when their work is funded from the public purse” [5]. This need to communicate value is particularly notable in the health sciences, where media coverage is strongly correlated with public perceptions of health-related policy decisions [6], demand for health services [7, 8], and attitudes toward illness [9, 10]. Researchers have described the importance of effective media communication as a means of changing health behaviors at both the individual and community levels [11].…”

The #MeToo Movement: Men and Masculinity in Swedish News Media

“…Studies of representations of masculinity in the media often highlight constructions that center masculinity around notions of violence, control, and aggression, for instance, in studies of presidential campaigns (Katz, 2009) and advertisements (Messner & Montez de Oca, 2005;White et al, 2012), and how the White body constitutes the norm for masculinity in a Western media context (Park, 2015). But there are also studies of how the media represent phenomena that challenge dominant notions of masculinity, such as eating disorders in males (MacLean et al, 2015) or caregiving (Hunter & Riggs, 2019).…”