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Are Six Packs the New Size Zero?
If you’re not toned and taut, are you even a man anymore?
I write this on the island of Corsica where it is a balmy thirty-five degrees celsius and the dress code is beach casual.
The women, in the French style, bare their breasts and flirt with the pool boys.
Most of the men parade the soft, plump bellies of the well-nourished, too rich to care about breathing in.
But, by the looks of it, their twenty-something sons care very much indeed. They sip water and eat kale and disappear for hours at a time, presumably to use the resort’s gym and to take photos of their toned torsos for Insta.
My older friends tell me it was not always like this. Male beauty used to mean something much more rugged, and less precise.
It is true there is something carefully calibrated about today’s six pack aesthetic. It’s not the sort of muscle you build up lifting boxes around an Amazon warehouse or fixing people’s leaking roofs for a living. It’s the manicured look of a sculpture.
