Listen, guys, I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

Draw your curtains and lock your door. I don’t want your girlfriend to find out about this.

Ready?

It’s not worth it. Stop the manscaping, the bicep curls, and for godsakes, leave your genitals alone.

For some insane reason, the rise of feminism did not stop the objectification of women, but led to the objectification of men.

Some women have celebrated this. Finally, they thought, men are getting a taste of what we go through on a daily basis—the pain, the pinching, the discomfort, the self-criticism.

But really it isn’t worth it. No amount of effort can turn a Tom Arnold into an Andonis. All these aesthetic tricks do is raise the bar—suddenly you aren’t allowed out of the house unless your brows are tweezed.

I was horrified by news that male corsets were flying off the shelves. Called “Shapewear” or other sex-neutral names, the garments compress the body, producing what consumers hope is a more streamlined profile.

“The inside joke? Spanx for Men has been a huge retail hit. We are selling them as quickly as Spanx can make them,” said Nickelson Wooster, the men’s fashion director at Neiman Marcus, which was until recently the only department store carrying them. “Men may not be talking about it, but they’re buying it.”

Don’t do it! These things are insidious. While they might look like an innocent t-shirt made of elastic, they are actually one of the most soul-destroying garments you will ever purchase.

When you take it out of the package, it will look small, tiny even. Did you accidentally buy the child’s size? You wonder. Alas! You are actually supposed to squeeze into it. After much grunting, groaning and contorting you finally get it on. You notice that it does make you look smaller, tighter. Of course, you can’t really move in it. And it is quite hot and sweaty. And really tight.

And yet you will suffer through it, day in and day out, convinced that you look good—entirely unaware that you now appear permanently constipated.

“Spanx for Men is all good, until you meet a chick,” one skeptic warned on Twitter. “You gain forty-five pounds when you get naked.”

If you have higher standards, you realize that a real man has a six-pack when he takes his shirt off. Bursting out of a man-corset at the end of the night is not the most effective seduction tool. But don’t worry, you have help!

It seems that every men’s magazine on earth devotes every issue to how to achieve that hallowed goal. Robert Crampton took a crash-course in six-packs. He had twelve weeks to pump it up and had this to say about them:

“The models on the cover of Men’s Health, one of the publishing successes of the past decade, circulation rising in a declining market, have something like 9 percent body fat. An average man, in decent nick but not absolutely ripped, to use the jargon, has probably between 15 and 20 percent body fat. Also, the models are dehydrated. Like a boxer before a weigh-in, they don’t take on any liquid from at least the evening before they are photographed. Plus, it’s amazing what you can do with make-up and lighting. I should know….
I look at the guys in Men’s Health and I think, wow, impressive achievement, I salute your patience, your discipline, your persistence, your diligence, I couldn’t do it myself, well done… but tell me: what exactly is the point?”

The thing is, women don’t really care about abs. Sure they look good, and we would rather you have them than not, but they take an excessive amount of effort. Instead of hours at the gym, we would prefer you spend hours with us on the couch, massaging our feet.

But there is more pain in store for the aesthetically inclined. It appears that men are embracing the genital wax. It makes your penis appear bigger, makes blow-jobs easier, they say.

“My first ever waxing was, at times, a horror, incomparable to anything I’ve experienced in life. Each time Barker tore the hair from me, I gasped in shock. One small tuft proved particularly stubborn. Tears in my eyes, I pulled my willy as hard as possible, stretching the skin to make it easier for the hair to come away. When it did, in a yank that shook my very soul, the pain reached a level I hadn’t imagined possible.”

Nirpal Dhaliwal opted to finish his treatment by getting a diamanté butterfly stuck to his groin, hovering above his newly stripped manhood. Overall, he said that he enjoyed the experience, but given the description above, I can only assume he was delirious from the pain.

As beauty standards get higher, they get more ridiculous and more painful. It is almost like a series of dares where each person tries to out do the other. The difference is that children have no expectation that you will continue to eat bugs for the rest of your life.

But with beauty, you have to do maintenance. Worried that your natural bush looks silly? Well, try dealing with one slowly growing back. Nature did not intend stubble to grow in certain places, like your balls.

Keep it up and it will reach the point where dropping trou without a waxing will be considered a major faux pas.

So please, boys—step away from the wax and put down the tweezers. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.