As long as I have been a pediatrician, boys have told me — usually in not so many words — that they feel the exact same body pressures girls do, just in different directions. This body-sense emerges earlier than we might expect thanks to the younger onset of puberty, which has moved squarely into the elementary school years, yes for both boys and girls. The difference is that female body changes tend to be obvious from the start; not so for the male ones.

Naomi Wolf’s 1991 book “The Beauty Myth” claims that efforts to be thin and pretty undermine women. But one of the biggest myths about the beauty myth is that it’s female. Boys suffer from unrealistic beauty standards, too, and the problem starts early.

In the tween years, as puberty begins and testosterone starts to surge, boys generally don’t notice much of anything happening to their bodies. At least nothing outwardly visible. Fair enough, because it will take years for this hormone to transform them into men. What they do notice is the endless parade of perfect male imagery in front of them, across screens and billboards and magazine pages, too: broad shoulders beneath chiseled jawlines; six-pack abs above bulging genitals hiding beneath tight shorts or underpants. And those who have viewed porn (that would be half of all boys finishing middle school, maybe more, depending upon the study you read) see extra large examples of manliness.

Despite the omnipresence of these images, multiplied by professional athletes, superheroes and gaming avatars, it’s a lot to ask a tween or teen boy to share feelings around body goals. That’s because when guys enter puberty, they also tend to get quiet . The connection between surging testosterone and shrinking sentence length among boys has never been studied — at least as far as I can tell, and I have scoured the literature — but it’s a phenomenon almost every parent of a boy comments upon at some point.