A recently released book called “The Adonis Complex” says that, in increasing numbers, men are feeling pressured to achieve physical perfection in the same way that women have for centuries. Millions of men, the authors say, are lifting weights and dieting compulsively, taking steroids, jamming hair plugs into their bald pates and surgically altering themselves in the name of beauty.

ALL RIGHT. If this is true, it’s disturbing. But I’ll tell you what really gets me: Middle-aged guys who dress in slouchy, over-sized pants and a baseball cap worn backward. On a surly teen-ager, the look is questionable. On an aging suburbanite, it’s preposterous.

Are we talking about the same thing here? The authors of the book, who believe male body obsession, which often manifests as the official-sounding body dysmorphic disorder, has reached the proportion of a “silent epidemic,” certainly don’t think so. As evidence for their thesis, they point to a “landmark” survey of men done in 1997 by Psychology Today that found, for instance, that half were dissatisfied with their weight, 45 percent with their muscle tone and 38 percent with their chest.

Personally, I do think that men have taken the vanity thing a little too far. But is it correct to claim that there’s an epidemic’s worth of men who are suffering from a serious psychological disorder based on the above numbers? I don’t think so.

One big reason: More than a third of all Americans, half of whom are men, are clinically obese. If the survey cited is truly representative, then a third of the men in it are obese. And I doubt that many of them are happy with their weight, muscle tone or chest.

NIPS AND TUCKS

Of course, that still leaves another 10 or 20 percent of men who are unhappy with their appearance. But if they’re getting liposuctioned, tucked and surgically smoothed more than they did in the past, it’s because most of those procedures didn’t exist until recently. Men have always fiddled neurotically with their appearance: Just look at Louis XIV. And Popeil’s spray-on Hair in a Can has been around for decades.

The authors also look at what appears to be a rising incidence of eating disorders among men and conclude, quite sensibly, that it seems to be the latest manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Many psychiatric patients’ illnesses are characterized by cultural motifs — schizophrenics, for instance, in the 1930s were plagued by radio waves; by the 1950s they were tormented by UFOs. The arrival of AIDS in the early 80s turned many obsessive-compulsives into hand-washers (even though the disease is not spread through casual contact). Today, the authors posit, male OCD types are vulnerable to pervasive messages about ideal body type.

INCREASING VANITY

And what about the rest of us? “Men in general are becoming more vain,” says Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of “Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong.”

“They used to take pride in looking like they just got out of bed,” she says.

Now guys are more likely to have their own style and they’re spending record amounts expressing it. Men’s clothing sales jumped 4.1 percent last year to $57 billion, according to NPD Group, a market research firm. Sales of men’s fragrances rose 6 percent to $960 million.

“Research shows that nine out of 10 men who wear fragrance choose and buy it themselves, a significant change from 10 years ago, when men were influenced by and reliant on women to make this decision,” reports NPD director Veronica Lawrence. “The fashion-plate absorption can be the front stage for a shaky ego.”

The collective shaky ego, the authors of “The Adonis Complex” posit, has much to do with women’s increasing power in the world. “As women have advanced,” they write, “men have gradually lost their traditional identities as breadwinners, fighters and protectors. Women are no longer so dependent upon men for these services. Accordingly, as the importance of these other identities has declined, the relative importance of the male body appears to have increased.”

MORE SPLURGING

All of this has left men with more disposable income, too. “In the ’50s, by the age of 23 or 24, a guy would be a family man,” says Lionel Tiger, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and the author of “The Decline of Males.” “He would turn over money to his wife and children. Today, men may not have responsibilities for supporting children, so they have more cash to spend on themselves.”

The male beauty boom is also related to a shifting ethnic makeup of the country from Germanic to Hispanic. “There is a different cultural pattern,” says Tiger. Men are taking more pride in how they dress, he says.

And there’s nothing wrong with that trend — as long as it doesn’t involve underwear-revealing baggy pants and backward baseball caps.