OBSESSION FOR MEN.

BOYS ARE LEARNING WHAT GIRLS HAVE LONG KNOWN--IT ISN'T EASY LIVING IN A BAYWATCH WORLD

In a southern New Jersey gym, Alexander Bregstein lies on his back in the weight room, head down on an incline bench, gripping 85-pound weights in each hand. After a brief pause to gather himself, he muscles the dumbbells into the air with focused bursts of energy, each lift accompanied by a sharp exhalation, like the quick, short stroke of a piston.

At 16, Alexander is bright, articulate, and funny in a self-deprecating way. However, about a year ago, he made a conscious decision that those weren't the qualities he wanted people to recognize in him, at least not at first. He wanted people to see him first, and what they see these days are thick neck muscles, shoulders so massive that he can't scratch his back, a powerful bulge in his arms, and a chest that has been deliberately chiseled for the two-button look--what Alexander now calls "my most endearing feature."

There is a kind of timelessness to a teenager's battle with body image, but in most accounts the teenager is female and the issue is anorexia or bulimia. As any psychologist and most adult males know, however, boys have body-image problems too. While girls make up about 90 percent of the teenagers treated for eating disorders, boys traditionally feel pressure, not to look thin, but to be strong and virile, which increasingly seems to mean looking bulked up and muscular. And to hear some psychologists tell it, they may be catching up quickly in terms of insecurity and psychological problems related to body image.

As his spotter looks on, Alexander lifts the weights three more times, arms quivering, face reddening with effort. Another half-dozen teenagers mill around the weight room, casting glances at themselves and one another in the mirror. They talk of looking "cut," with sharp definition to their muscles, and of developing "sixpacks," crisp divisions of the abdominals, but of all the muscles that get a workout, the most important may be the ones that move the eyes in sweeping arcs of comparison and appraisal.

PICKED ON EVERY DAY

Between sets of his 90-minute routine, Alexander's eyes wander to the mirror again and again, searching for flaws, looking for areas of improvement. The gym rats here have a nickname for him, Mirror Boy, but that's a vast improvement over the nicknames he endured at school not long ago. Until recently, he carried nearly 210 pounds on a 5-foot-6 frame.

In seventh and eighth grades, Alexander says, he "was picked on in every single class, every single day. It was beyond belief. They would do things like hide your bag, tie your shoelaces together." Asked if he was verbally teased, he replies with a laugh, "Are you kidding? When I was fat, people must have gone home and thought of nothing else except coming in with new material the next day. They must have had study groups just to make fun of people who were overweight." Classmates called him Fat Boy and Chunk Style. They thought he was lazy, that something was wrong with him. He knew it wasn't true, but he also realized that his physical appearance made him a social outcast and a target.

CONFRONTING THE MIRROR

His day of reckoning came in April 1998, during a spring-break vacation in Boca Raton, Florida. As his family was about to leave its hotel room to go to the beach, Alexander, then 15, stood in front of a mirror and just stared at the spectacle of his shirtless torso. "I remember the exact, like, moment in my mind," he says. "Everything about that room is burned into my head, every little thing. I can tell you where every lamp was, where my father was standing, my mother was sitting. We were about to go out, and I'm looking in this mirror--me, with my gut hanging over my bathing suit--and it was, like: `Who would want to look at this? It's part of me, and I'm disgusted!' That moment, I realized that nobody was giving me a chance to find out who I was because of the way I looked." And so he decided to do something about it.

Alexander began what he calls his "drastic transformation." He started by losing 30 pounds in one month. For a time, he consumed only 900 calories a day, and ultimately got down to 152 pounds. He began to lift weights seriously, every day for three months straight. He started to read magazines like Flex and Men's Fitness. He got buff, and then beyond buff. By the time his sophomore year in high school began, he had repackaged his old self in a phenomenally new body.

TEMPTING SHORTCUTS 

There is nothing inherently dangerous about weight lifting. "It's great exercise," says Dr. Linn Goldberg, professor of medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University. But Goldberg says a recent study of more than 3,000 boys in Oregon and Washington showed that 78 percent of high school athletes use dietary supplements such as creatine, ginseng, ma-huang, and androstenedione, the supplement formerly used by baseball slugger Mark McGwire.

"Studies show that supplements are gateway substances to steroid use," says Goldberg. "Kids who use them are at greater risk for using anabolic steroids."

Steroids, natural substances produced in small amounts in the body, are used to treat medical conditions, and sometimes taken by body builders to add muscle mass quickly. Taken in those larger quantities, they can cause liver cancer, shrunken testicles, impotence, baldness, breast development, severe acne, and bad breath.

Asked if he ever felt tempted to try steroids while remaking his physique, Alexander denies using them but isn't coy about their appeal. "When someone offers you a shortcut," he says, "and it's a shortcut you want so bad, you're willing to ignore what it might be doing to your insides. I wanted to look better. Who cares if it's going to clog up my kidneys? Who cares if it'll destroy my liver? There was so much peer pressure that I didn't care."

Some of the research on body-image disorders suggests a connection to the culture at large; cultural messages about the ideal male body, if not new, have grown more insistent and widespread of late. Consider the images imparted by movies--of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Or by advertising. Pick up an issue of Gentleman's Quarterly or Men's Health or Teen People, and you'll see a boy removing his tank top for Guess jeans. Firemen dropping trousers for Jockey shorts. Even the ads for "Smart Start" cereals by Kellogg's feature a naked torso.

In subtle ways, the propaganda begins far earlier, however. Two Massachusetts researchers made a study of boys' action figures, comparing the waist, chest, and biceps dimensions of vintage toys, like GI Joe from the 1960s, with current-day models of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Batman, and Superman. While the original GI Joe corresponded to a man of average height, with a 32-inch waist, a 44-inch chest, and 12-inch biceps, the more recent figures have bulked up considerably. Batman today has the equivalent of a 30-inch waist, a 57-inch chest, and, unbelievably, 27-inch biceps.

"The feminist complaint all along has been that women get treated as objects, that they internalize this, and that it damages their self-esteem," says Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. "More and more, guys are falling into that same thing. They're getting judged not by who they are, but how they look." One result: the number of men undergoing cosmetic surgery rose about 34 percent between 1996 and 1998.

GIRLS LIKE THE LOOK

For teenage boys, some of the incentive for bulking up comes from girls. "Girls like it if [boys] have a six-pack, or if they're really ripped," admits Elizabeth, 14. "That's the most important thing. And arms too." "But not too much," adds her friend Kate, also 14. "You don't like it if the muscles are too huge." "It changes your perspective on them if they have a flabby stomach," Elizabeth continues. "And the chest is important too."

Indeed, more muscles often means more dating. "My quality of social life changed dramatically when I changed my image," says Alexander. Much of his life is the same, of course. He still maintains friendships with the guys in the computer lab, still programs, still plays Quake with his friends. But now he works out at the gym at least five times a week, has switched to a heavy protein diet, and pushes himself to lift ever-heavier weights.

Even so, he also recognizes how feckless, how disturbing, how crazy this all is. "I tell you, it's definitely distressing,"he says, "the fact that as much as girls get this anorexic thing and they're going through these image things, guys are definitely doing the same." True, he admits, his social life has never been better. "But in a way it depresses me," he says, "that I had to do this for people to get to know me."

For more information about body image, visit our Web site at www.nytimes.com/upfront.

Do boys and girls face too much pressure to look good? If so, who's to blame? Write us at [e-mail].

Stephen S. Hall is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.