I am trying to get back into the swing of things at the gym.  Friends of the Blog may recall I left BSC to join the Y last winter.  I thought I could revisit the '70s, with their seedy splendor, something the Y has managed to hold onto for the last forty years, but in the end... well, you can't go home.

I unjoined last month, and went back to BSC Fenway.  It's a clean, compact facility, with equipment that's been updated since the stone age. 

I've been just a couple of times since I re-joined, and while I have not been lacking for physical activity outside of the gym, I'm leaner than when I was pumping iron regularly, and have traded in my big guns for Madonna arms. 

I don't really like working out, per se.  I'm lucky that a 45 minute super-circuit three times a week is about all I need (for the guns, at least).  But I do feel like it's kind of a waste of time I could be using to look at porn on the internet.  Truth is, we all need a little eye-candy as incentive. 

I don't need it to be sordid and sexual, either, if that's what you're thinking.  (Again, if I wanted porn I'd stay home.)  In real life I prefer a naive (even faux-naive so long as it falls somewhere short of ironic) display of flesh to a forced sexually provocative one.  I don't need you to come sit on my face - show me, don't blow me — I just want a little peep to remind me why I'm here.

False modesty is always preferable in fashion, if nowhere else.

But there's a limit even to false modesty. 

Take men's thighs.  When was the last time you saw them?  It's no secret in certain circles I loves me some rugby thighs.  I even loves me some rugby shorts on or off of 'em. 


Years ago I had the enormous good fortune of sharing a triple-decker in JP with a burly blond rugger who was also responsible for washing the team's uniforms in our shared laundry room in the basement. 

If you happened to go down there just after a match, piles of not-yet-laundered jerseys, shorts and jocks, the scent of young men and fresh-cut grass, well, it was let's say... evocative.

Helen Keller — and who's gonna argue with her? — once said: "In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness."

Here, here.  I second that emotion.

I mean, these weren't the rancid frocks of your average high school locker room (and the local Y, which is another reason I bailed) — this was the scent of victory and Irish Spring. 

And sure, at the gym you might get a whiff of "something elemental" — and no complaints from me on that count — but I'm talking about eye-candy, not nose-candy, here. 

These days — all I'm saying is: what's a guy gotta do to get a glimpse of the gams?  I'm not even talking inner thigh, I am talking a glimpse of anything north of the kneecaps.

Oscar Wilde — and who's gonna argue with him? — once said: "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." So it is one of the enduring mysteries of modern fashion that men's shorts have been so frickin long for so frickin long.  

I think gay culture has to bear some of the blame, and ghetto culture the rest.  I mean, let's be perfectly honest here, gay and ghetto are the two major forces in fashion.  Both are frankly obsessed with masculinity — one views it through the gauze of eroticism while the other sees it through a scrim of violence (not that the two can be strictly separated). 

While the gay fashion MO is easy enough to tease out — less is more unless more is more — what else but mimesis can explain something like the surprisingly enduring "saggy draws" phenomenon?  Sociologists have been hard at work for the last decade trying to puzzle out the meaning of that trend.  Alas, with little to show for it.

(Snopes has exploded the myth that saggy drawers that leave the buttocks exposed originated with an enterprising prison bitch [once thought to be the missing link between gay and ghetto styles].  Could the limited physical mobility of this fashion simply be an expression of the difficulty of social mobility in our increasingly stratified society?)

Long shorts, legend has it, were popularized by Michael Jordan, who in his heyday requested his be lengthened.  Now, he may have had his reasons, but basketball shorts went from "a 3-inch inseam in the '60s to 4 inches in the '70s, 5 inches in the '80s, 7 to 9 inches in the '90s, and now it's 11 inches," according to sports uniform manufacturer Jesse Lee.

Depending on the rise of the shorts, and the height of the player, they can hang down four inches below the knee or lower.

...[T]he leg opening... has also grown over the years.

"It used to be more like 12 inches," Lee said. "Now it can be 15 inches, which gives you a 30-inch opening. They're almost of the size of a player's waist."

In other words, skorts.

Which makes it all the more vexing that teens today apparently think that shorts that venture above the knee are... you guessed it: "gay". (Others are deluded into thinking that anything less than a 12-inch inseam would risk exposing their massive manhood — because, of course, briefs and jocks, which could keep everything nicely in place, are too "gay" to wear, too).

And so it is in these topsy-turvy times that skorts become a symbol of manhood by concealing the, er, most obvious symbol of manhood.  This is the kind of false modesty that fashion abhors. 

How did heterosexual men become sexual reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries?  Are upper-body strength — "guns" — displays of dominance, and the sublimation of sexuality in violence, hallmarks of heterosexuality?   In obscuring not just evidence of manhood, but the true dimensions of the body itself, is there a rejection of a physical ideal that has come to be associated with a tradition of oppression?  Is race and racial culture a factor?

Take saggy draws again.  Could accentuating the buttocks be a way of rejecting the classical ideal of physical beauty that heirs of the European tradition take for granted but which can seem as oppressive as Triumph of the Will or an Abercrombie & Fitch ad? 


The self-imposed physical impairment wearers of saggy draws impose on themselves (even walking in them is a challenge that requires a physical transformation) certainly seems like a rejection of not just an idea of fashion's function but of seemingly settled issues of human physiology.

Long shorts are not so extreme, of course, but the common association of shorter shorts with homosexuality seems to indicate that, as is the case with fashion, there's more to it than initially meets the eye. 

Or less. 

If they have their way, we'll never know.