Do women hate their bodies more than men?

The women who were ultimately selected were shown the images and then asked, “How would you feel if somebody said you looked like that?” The brain-imaging results were startling, Allen says. “Their activations were really close to the bulimics,” Allen says. Bulimics did have some additional activity in a part of the brain involved in extreme negative thinking (the ventral anterior cingulate gyrus), but otherwise there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the supposedly “normal” women and the bulimics, Allen says.

One of his graduate students, Tyler Owens, suggested looking at men’s brains as well because they generally have fewer problems with body image than women. “We saw absolutely no activity in the medial prefrontal cortex,” as we did with women, Allen says. But he doesn’t think that there’s something special about men’s brains that immunizes them from body issues. “I don’t think it suggests a biological difference,” he says. In fact, he originally included a few men in the study who were “obvious bodybuilders—big muscles, very low body fat.” Their brains behaved much like those of the bulimic women (they were removed from the study). “They have that same obsession that the bulimic might have,” Allen says. “They are highly vigilant about their intake. They will purge and do all sorts of things. That kind of suggests that it’s not a genetic disposition but is just a social and cultural environment.”