Absolutely gorgeous man and a fucking FANTASTIC actor.
I have rarely ever thought of men suffering from this specific dysmorphia, since it’s such a traditionally female centric mental illness. But it makes sense in the way that we currently witness a proliferation of Male to Female Gender Dysmorphia, which I will guess is more common than Female to Male Dysmorphia. There’s also a specific Dysmorphia where the person experiences an obsession with removing a limb from their body, such as a leg, which is the most commonly reported, unnecessary limb, that these particular types of body dysmorphics tend to focus on.
Personally, I know a MTF who had been obsessed with cutting off all of his fingers from the time he was a small child, until he finally walked into his mother’s kitchen, where she was preparing a family dinner, grabbed a butcher knife, and just like that, he chopped off his pinky, ring finger, middle finger, the index, and the tip of his thumb, all in one chop on the wooden block used for the slicing & dicing of veggies, not multiple human phalanges!!! And he did this BEFORE the appetizers! This is how he tells the story. His words, not mine.
Almost immediately after satisfying that obsession, he developed the idea that he did not belong in his body. As he describes it, he felt that the barbaric chopping off of the fingers opened him up to a deeper truth: he was a woman!
He spent the next 10 years surgically altering his body, ultimately removing his penis/testes with a licensed, Gender Reassignment surgeon.
While females overwhelmingly account for eating disorders that originate specifically from body dysmorphia, as well as eating disorders without any presentation of dysmorphia, men who are also afflicted, overwhelmingly present with the desire to remove a body part or parts. Interestingly enough, most men afflicted with limb removal dysmorphia, & who actually succeed in removing said limb, express a deep satisfaction, and even a sense of peace, once they accomplish their goal. There are rare exceptions, in that the psychiatric community have come across body dysmorphics who seek to modify their bodies pathologically, such as the fellow I described earlier.
Dysmorphia truly is as much a fascinating condition to the observer, and devastating to the point of fundamental existence to the afflicted. I can’t imagine what it feels like to look in the mirror and not feel whole, because I have two legs instead of one. And that’s not me passing moral judgment on people who have this form of mental illness, coupled with a specific and pathological OCD.
He’s fortunate to have the ability to focus on a career and produce top notch work. Most people who are consumed with a dysmorphia cannot function normally in the long term and are rendered disabled if not treated.
