the male spanx experiment
/I was so surprised to see Spanx in the men’s department at Nordstrom, I thought I would accidentally release the permanent suck from wearing Spanx to tidy up my own saggy middle.
“Is this a joke?” I blurted, as images of beer bellies and love handles morphed into superheroes shaped like a V. “Are guys buying these?”
“Spanx is a billion-dollar industry,” a trim and tidy salesman explained. Maybe a billion for women, I thought, but for bulging gents with a Captain America fetish, a few pennies dribbled here and there. Real men don’t give a damn.
“Men are wearing eye shadow too,” he whispered, trying not to embarrass me for being so out of touch. Then he finished his hard-sell pitch: “Not just gay men, straight men.”
Really?
With a convenient straight man at home, I decided to put this “expect more from your undershirt” hogwash to the test. If my straight man agreed to wear Spanx, nicknamed Manx for men, I’d march back in there and eat my shorts—I mean my Spanx—even the super-duper shapers with buttlets for added junk in the trunk.
I’d spent years trying to get the guy at home to put moisturizer on his dry skin, sunscreen on his red skin, whiten his teeth, use hair gel, wear skinny European suits, and lose the un-Spanx-ness that has settled around his waist. He won’t even let me use his pocket for gooey lipstick so I don’t have to carry a purse, while he refuses to use a man bag.
Would this kind of guy wear Manx?
Manx undershirts come in two helpful shapes, one with sleeves and one without. Since my token straight man gets hot wearing socks, I chose the hardcore Level 3 tank that firms the chest, narrows the waist, flattens the stomach, improves posture, and most critically, is made of breathable cotton.
If the tank can breathe, maybe Ray won’t notice he can’t.
There was one reason I thought this would work. In the past week, he had tried on seventeen wetsuits because he was jealous I have one. Me looking more buff than he does rubs his ego like tight clothes give him a rash. For days he’d been modeling these suits, primping and flexing, looking like Lloyd Bridges in that classic Sea Hunt show.
Trusting my thin-stincts, a Spanx-y term, I tried my luck getting him into Manx.
“So Spanx feels like a wetsuit,” he uttered, playing right into my hands. The fact you wear one underwater avoiding sharks and the other in a bar sipping cocktails did not immediately occur to him.
It did occur to him that he could look five pounds thinner so I’d stop nagging him, plus he’d get a layer of warmth should he flex his pecs in Iceland. He even called the experiment “our little spank-a-thon.”
With the strength of a weightlifter and the perseverance of an endurance athlete, he pulled the skintight Manx over his head, and lo and behold, I saw the V at his waist and fully expected an H on his chest: H for hunk.
“You look slim and trim whether or not you hit the gym,” I mewed, adding a little more Spanx verbiage.
Then he tried to get it off. I mean really, really tried.
First it was fun: “Did this come with insurance because I might hurt myself,” he said, laughing. Then this: “I can curl forty-five pounds in each hand, but I can’t pull this over my head.” Then this: “If I tear a rotator cuff, I’ll sue their buttlets.” And finally, this: “Get me the scissors, I swear, get me the scissors!”
The results of the test? The “fit was a hit” but the “hunk flunked.”
Maybe Spanx should sell wetsuits. For that, I believe he would suffer.