In tune with previous studies that have shown women feeling inferior when they see media images of female models, a recent study has shown the same effect is felt by men when they view female models.

In the study Jennifer Aubrey, assistant professor of communications and a lead researcher at the University of Missouri measured the impact of magazines such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff had on college going men. She measured the impact of the visual and textual formats as well as assessed male body self-consciousness and appearance anxiety then and a year later.

 “We found that reading lad magazines was related to having body self-consciousness a year later. This was surprising because if you look at the cover of these magazines, they are mainly images of women. We wondered why magazines that were dominated by sexual images of women were having an effect of men’s feelings about their own bodies,” said Aubrey.

The results were confusing and Aubrey collaborated with University of California-Davis Assistant Professor Laramie Taylor. They divided the study group into three, where the first group focused on descriptive layouts of the female form. The second concentrated on physically fit men modeling men fashion and the third group targeted neutral layouts touching topics like technology and film trivia.

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

This led Aubrey to speculate that the exposure to the female form gives rise to increased self-consciousness and lowered self image. Aubrey then did an additional test where the men were divided into two groups. The first group viewed images of beautiful women while the second saw the same beautiful women but with ordinary looking boyfriends and a caption that read that beautiful women are attracted to ordinary looking men.

“We found that the men who view the ads with the average-looking boyfriend in the picture reported less body self-consciousness than the men who saw the ads with just the model. When the men felt that the model in the ad liked average-looking guys, it took the pressure off of them and made them less self-conscious about their own bodies,” Aubrey said.

The study will be published in Human Communication Research.