"I've always loved comics," Rebecca Burch enthuses. “I still have a huge box of them from my childhood. I love the Marvel and DC movies. But I really worry when I see my nephew, who has a closet full of superhero suits, with abs and biceps stitched in. What will he think of that when he's an adolescent trying to attain these in the real world? And he's a little guy, so I don't think he's going to get there."
Burch, Associate Professor of Human Development at New York State University, is joking, but her concern is real. When she conducted a study three years ago of the physical dimensions of 3,752 Marvel comic characters, she found not only that-as measured by body mass index female superheroes tended to be underweight, but the male ones tended technically to be obese. More particularly, their ratios-notably of shoulder width to waist, creating that classic inverted triangle-just weren't realistic.
"More than that, they're unattainable," she says. "They're absurd. You might imagine that they're just bodybuilder big. But these proportions are not possible in reality. On the one hand that lets people off the hook to know that. But the problem is that they shape our conception of the physical ideal now, and with it the idea that this level of muscularity is what a 'hero' should look like."
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