This article was originally published on Healthy Debate.
A popular meme circulates the internet every time actor Hugh Jackman does another Marvel movie. It features a side-by-side comparison of Jackman the first time he played Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men and whichever movie has just come out, the most recent being 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
In both images, Jackman is topless with fists clenched in a fighting pose. He is undeniably buff, but the 2000 photo looks soft and even doughy compared to the later images in which Jackman’s muscularity is exquisitely defined, his veins and eight-pack abs standing out in sharp relief against his tight-looking skin.
The meme highlights the increasingly distorted male beauty standards that celebrate visible dehydration as a physical ideal.
Rather than promote this aesthetic in our media, we need to associate it with physiological and psychological danger for men and boys.
Social media and fitness magazines abound with advice on how to attain Jackman’s shredded look. In normalizing the pursuit of this unhealthy physique, men and boys are encouraged (directly or indirectly) to adopt unsafe practices like excessive use of performance enhancing drugs.
A 2002 study noted that body dissatisfaction in teen boys was connected to consumption of media promoting “an increasingly muscular male body ideal.” The more than two decades since have seen climbing rates in young men of body dysmorphic disorder, a mental health condition linked to Hollywood’s obsession with the so-called “dry look” of Wolverine and other action movie heroes.
Pop culture reporters have noted the migration of the aesthetic long associated with competitive bodybuilding into Hollywood movies. The oiled-up skin, the protruding veins, the sharp contours of muscle – all intended to achieve a certain “chiselled” physique, as though the body were carved from stone.
In the arms race (pun intended) to look more ripped than the competition, a key technique is severely restricting water for multiple days, which thins the skin and makes muscles and veins look more prominent and defined. This dangerous practice is routine in bodybuilding competitions – after all, why sink countless hours into weight training just to have your own hydrated skin hide your hard work?
Over a decade ago, Jackman opened up about the extreme measures he goes to in preparation for appearing topless as Wolverine, telling the Los Angeles Times that “when I’m going for a ‘shirt off’ shot, everything changes the month before, and I’m timed down to the day. There is water dehydration for 36 hours before.”
More recently other actors have made similar disclosures about what it takes to get ready for a shirtless scene. In 2019, Henry Cavill revealed that tapering down his fluid intake over multiple days for his Netflix show The Witcher was the hardest part of the role: “Like, diet is difficult, and you’re hungry, but when you are dehydrating for three days, you get to the point on the last day where you can smell water nearby.”
Yet, instead of setting off alarm bells, media framing of these practices tends to be laudatory and glamourizing: look at how devoted Hollywood men are to making our eyes happy when they take off their shirts. Even worse, dehydration risks becoming normalized as a practice necessary to achieve male beauty.
These articles often pay lip service to the dangers of restricting fluids, but rarely is this more than a brief mention between thinly veiled drooling over cheese grater abs and big, veiny biceps.
Consider the opening paragraph of a 2022 Men’s Health article about actor Zac Efron: “Well, there they are. After Zac Efron removes his jacket and drapes it over the chair beside him, my eyes immediately zoop to his biceps peeking out from beneath his T-shirt. I spot a vein so protuberant that it looks like it’s about to exit his skin. I had seen Efron’s biceps earlier, while on set for his photo shoot … The sharp lines of his arms were apparent even through a dust tornado and even from a safe distance away.”
Dehydration risks becoming normalized as a practice necessary to achieve male beauty.
In that same article, Efron talks about how “devastating” the process of filming the 2017 Baywatch movie was for him. Not only did he limit water, but he also took Lasix, a prescription diuretic, to further dehydrate him in preparation for wearing those signature red Baywatch trunks. Efron tells the interviewer (who feels “louche” for staring at his body, yet also can’t seem to stop), that it took six months just to start feeling normal again after the movie wrapped and he stopped taking Lasix.
So, what are the risks that seem to be elided by the media in their celebration of the dry look? When actors describe having headaches or feeling exhausted, dizzy and confused while restricting water for multiple days, they are not talking about trivial symptoms but potential red flags for serious health problems.
Kidneys are very sensitive to how much fluid the body has and can be majorly harmed by dehydration. The heart can also be damaged by lack of fluid or the electrolyte imbalances that often come with dehydration. Prescription diuretics like Lasix can compound the harm done to kidneys and worsen electrolyte problems.
The consequences can be fatal, as was suspected in the 1992 death of famous bodybuilder Mohammed Benaziza. The brain is also adversely affected by dehydration, so symptoms like headache or confusion should never be ignored.
Magazines like Men’s Health are contributors to what’s been called “bigorexia” or “muscle dysmorphia,” a fixation on muscle mass that results in the distorted self-perception that one’s muscles are too small.
But when it comes to taking accountability, men’s magazines are well behind women’s magazines, which have at least acknowledged and taken some (albeit small) steps to address their role in the rise of eating disorders in women and girls. A 2010 Express article about male fitness models notes the widespread expectation that models will show up to photo shoots in an unhealthy state.
“Among models and many others in the industry, Martin says, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that the pre-shoot regimen is standard. ‘There is a sense that magazines expect you to turn up dehydrated and dizzy,’ he says.
‘I’ve been on castings where there are six or seven models who are so groggy that they need to grab a chair to sit down and literally can’t speak.’ ”
Some 15 years on since that quote, seemingly nothing has improved – in fact, as astute observers have captured through Wolverine side-by-side memes, the dry look seems to only have grown in influence and become the standard Hollywood aesthetic for leading men.
And while there have been public conversations about male body image and the health risks of performance enhancing drugs, the quest to look ripped also has elevated toxic manosphere figures like Andrew Tate, who combines rhetoric about mental discipline to build masculine strength with openly violent misogyny.
His peak may have passed since the more sinister revelations about his treatment of women, but behind him are countless other up-and-coming influencers eager to build an audience.
Anxiety over perceived physical flaws is a major feature of the manosphere, as can be seen by the rise of the “looksmaxxing,” a mostly online phenomenon of men and boys advising one another how to improve their appearance, generally with the goal of attracting female attention.
A recent study of looksmaxxing boards where posters lobbed harsh critiques at one another’s selfies found that “the community subjects users to masculine demoralisation, wherein they are seen as failed men and encouraged to self-harm.”
The significance of making the dry look a male beauty standard isn’t small and shouldn’t be dismissed as pop culture excess. Normalizing this aesthetic and the extreme behaviour needed to achieve it risks serious damage to the physical and mental health of men and boys.
And beyond individual harms, the social ripple effect of the manosphere’s fixation on muscularity threatens to distort and negatively impact broader societal notions of masculinity, strength, sexuality and health.
In the space used to celebrate actors and models who can (temporarily) achieve this visual fantasy, let’s turn the conversation toward its real-life risks and how we might find a path back to a healthier ideal.
