Firstly there was a contestant on the game show ‘Take Me Out’. Before you ask I went to school with one of the contestants and watched it in the hope he’s make a complete tit out of himself. He did of course, but was overshadowed by the contestant before him: a short personal trainer, with crazy hair and an opaque shirt revealing his bulging muscles beneath.
For those that haven’t seen the show, thirty women are lit up, and have to turn their light off if the single male contestant doesn’t turn them on. The man then chooses which of the remaining contestants to take on a date. This little chap was doing alright until they ran a VT of him oiled up, flexing and growling. All thirty lights turned off. In short, a decent looking man who spends hours every day perfecting his appearance could not persuade even one of thirty slappers to go on a free holiday with him for this very reason.
The second was a trip to the gym yesterday. I dread the rush hour gym even more than my commute home. It’s as busy as a train but infinitely more painful, and of course you have that nagging knowledge that you don’t really have to be there. As unbearable as the sea of sweaty, pumping flesh is the conversation. Usually I put my ipod on full blast and get it over with, but today was different.
My ipod was nicked on the weekend for one, but earphones of any strength would not have protected my ears against the guy I unfortunately encountered. “NINE, TEN, ELEVEN!…TWELVE!! RAHHH!! He threw his massive weights to the floor, looking around for admirers before flexing at his angry red reflection in the mirror. No more than 5ft 4 in height; veins bulging; testosterone leaking from his eyeballs, here was a prime example of the cube in his natural habitat.
With no headphones to save me, lying on my back, pinned to a bench with weights I could barely lift, I was easy prey. “Here we go,” I thought, at his little sweaty hands grabbed my arms. “EIGHT, NINE, TEN…ONE MORE!!...ELEVEN…ONE MORE!!!” Just fuck off. I was in enough physical and mental pain before you arrived to alert the whole gym to my struggle. What then followed was a lecture on arms, or core strength, or some other mindless crap that contributes to the endless flow of gym changing room bollocks heard on every visit.
I digress. The point is that no woman on earth would have wanted to be crushed in this human vice of self-consciousness and not so well hidden complexes. Having little man syndrome is understandable, but by gaining more and more muscle and becoming increasingly wider these testosterone-fuelled shorties merely make themselves appear even shorter. One of the golden rules of fashion is that horizontal stripes make the body appear shorter as they draw attention to width and not height. Thus small men, while they do not want to appear skinny of course, do not do themselves any favours by becoming too wide.
Personally, I go to the gym to avoid being labelled as lanky and to make myself more attractive to women, so I suppose I have similar motivation. But there is a limit between keeping fit and self-obsessed vanity; between cuboid and cube, and unfortunately the shorter you are, the lower that limit is. If anyone passes this limit, like the two men above, to a level at which most women no longer find them attractive, are they doing so for themselves, or to impress other men? Are they unaware of the limit in the first place? Either way it’s not doing them any favours. For their own sake these cubes need to look in the mirror, as I’m sure they often do, and tell themselves that enough is enough.
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