Does anyone else think it's really ironic that our society's solution to the objectification of women wasn't to stop objectifying them, but rather to start objectifying men?

You can see it on the pages of any magazine or newspaper: sleek, ropy muscles; oiled chests shaved completely smooth; nipples jutting out like pencil erasers.

As a kid, I remember when they use to airbrush the bulges out of underwear ads (I know because I was, uh, looking). But now they must airbrush the bulges in. Either that, or they're keeping photography studios a lot warmer than they used to.

Same for television. Honestly, One Tree Hill, The O.C., and Smallville are just a couple of steps away from Bel Ami porn videos, except with worse acting.

And it's not just that there's more male flesh more openly on display; the flesh itself is sleeker, buffer, and more ripped.

Compare the masculine ideals of yesteryear to the physical specimens of today. These days, Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, and Burt Reynolds would be the scrawny kid on the beach in that old Charles Atlas comic book ad.

Back then, not only was there no word for a “six-pack,” no one even knew such things existed. How is it possible, in the space of ten years, to create an obsession for whole new body part? Who knows, a decade from now, we might all be envying some model's “ripped” elbows.

Young men, both gay and straight, have clearly taken the new “himbo” ethic to heart. Go poke around Youtube.com. It seems like every other video is a young man showing off his muscles. I made movies when I was teenager too, but virtually none of them involved me and my friends stripping down to our briefs and flexing. No, we resigned ourselves to movies with plots (at least if you can call a story about a man-eating wig a “plot”).

Straight men who shave their backs: it's not an unappealing combination. And straight teenage girls everywhere must surely appreciate the fact that it's not just gay boys who are flossing and wearing a good deodorant. (But when it comes to body sprays, a little goes a long way, guys.)

Why has all this happened? In fact, we can pin-point the exact date it started.

It was that 1983 Calvin Klein underwear ad featuring Brazilian Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus leaning back against a phallic looking white obelisk. Designed to appeal to gay men, it debuted first in Times Square, but was then emblazoned directly onto a blank spot in our collective unconscious.

In other words, blame Calvin Klein. For good measure, you can also point fingers at Scott Madsen, the original Soloflex guy in all those late-night infomercials.

No, seriously. It's all their fault.

Anyway, this is, of course, all totally gay. The weird thing is, most straight guys don't see it as particularly gay.

True, Abercrombie and Fitch had a brief public relations disaster a couple of years ago when word swept high school campuses across the country that the store was “gay.” Hmm, I wonder what clued them in -- the pairs of hot young men grunting and writhing around the football field in state of frenzied pre-orgasmic rut, or the piles of naked male bodies draped together in a post-orgy exhaustion?

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