Men get their own super-skinny mannequins - and a host of new body issues

Shape of things to come? Male mannequins with 27-inch waists are making their debut in Britain, as doctors report more male patients being treated for eating disorders.

A starved-looking male mannequin with a 27-inch waist, from British mannequin maker Rootstein, will make its debut next month, according to New York magazine. The super-skinny figure, dubbed the "Homme Nouveau," with a 35-inch chest and not a millimeter of fat to spare, may look great in tight-fitting clothes. But will “real men” now become fashion victims, aspiring to look like a male version of Kate Moss?

Male anorexia - sometimes jokingly called "manorexia" - seems to be on the increase, says Stuart Koman, Ph.D., president and CEO of Walden Behavioral Care, a treatment center near Boston.

“We are seeing men younger and younger, and we recently treated an 11-year-old,” he says. “It used to be just very occasional that we would treat a man with an eating disorder. Now it’s pretty constant, at a low level.”

And while only 10 percent of eating disorder sufferers were men in 1990, today that number’s jumped to 25 percent, according to New York magazine. Leigh Cohn, author of “Making Weight,” notes that the prevalence rates for men with eating disorders have risen.

Why the increase? Men face the same societal pressure to be thin as do women, Koman says. And whether they look at the fashion magazines or the muscle magazines, the message is the same: thin is in.

“The message is that not only do you have to work out hard to look like them, but you have to lose weight,” Koman says.

Manorexia’s definitely more prevalent in certain sub-cultures, says Dr. Jason Hershberger, chairman of psychiatry at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.

”It used to be just athletes but I am starting to see people in the fashion industry,” he says. ”It’s what happened with women in the last century. The ideal form for a man used to be big and muscular. Now it has shrunk.”

And as the size of the male mannequins shrinks, so do many of the clothes in which they’re attired.

“The body is on display more in men’s clothing today,” says Radford University psychologist Dr. Tracy Cohn. “The cuts aren’t as blousy and there is not as much fabric. Clothes cling to the body. The cuts are called close-fit or tailor-cut. And they taper into the body.”

The maximum waist size of American Apparel’s spandex-cotton denim Slim Slacks is 33 inches, notes New York magazine. Yet the average waist size for am American man in 2006 was 39.7 inches.

Whittling down to skinny proportions isn’t any easier for guys than for girls. Some 40 percent of binge eaters are men, reports New York magazine.

Men are emotional eaters just like women, Cohn says. “When men have sadness, they might consume alcohol but there’s usually a big bowl of potato chips there, too, for self-soothing,” he says. “It can make a man feel better until about the twentieth potato chip.”

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