It is no longer normal to see Hollywood men looking normal anymore. From the empty cheeks of Ozempic face to the puffed-out Brotox foreheads to the eerily-uniform veneers of Turkey teeth, no one seems to be aging, but no one seems to also be quite so attractive. Even Ryan Gosling, once my favourite heart-throb, has overdone the filler, and now looks like he is smuggling a pair of snooker-balls in his cheeks.
Boys and young men are being sold a lie
The same is true for male bodies; masculinity means muscularity. In our superhero-saturated age, audiences are inundated with images of male physical perfection: torsos like upside down triangles, shoulders that look like boulders, thighs that have their own gravitational pull, abs so shredded that they could grate cheese. Think Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House, Zac Efron in The Iron Claw, Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Hemsworth in well, just about everything.
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