Image via Flickr cc license.
Beards and man buns can step aside because the latest dude trend is the dadbod. It all started about a month ago when Mackenzie Pearson wrote an article called “Why Girls Love The Dad Bod,” on The Odyssey. Then last Thursday New York Mag’s The Cut tried to figure out what exactly a dadbod is and whether or not women are into it. This all-important line of inquiry was then continued by Salon, The Atlantic and just about everybody else.
Dadbod is exactly what it sounds like. It’s what the male physique typically looks like after clocking 40 hours in a cubicle and ten hours of commuting to and from the burbs every week. It’s what happens when you’re finally grown up enough to consume however many beers and burgers as you damn well feel like, and the only reason you wear athletic gear is to coach a t-ball game.
You don’t actually have to live in the suburbs, or even be a dad to look like one, of course. In fact, the term usually refers to young men who manage to rock a dadbod even though they are not actually dads. You just need to be kind of soft around the middle. You have arms like saplings and no part of you could possibly be described as “cut.” Chances are pretty good that manscaping is also completely off your radar.
If this is you, then congratulations. You have a dadbod and, yes, chicks dig it. But it’s not because we appreciate your laid back attitude, and it’s not because we want to raid your fridge, as The Cut suggested. Pearson was more on the money when she wrote that girls love the dadbod because, “We like being the pretty one.”
The reason I’m all about the dadbod has nothing to do with what is says about you and everything to do with what it says about me. Your dadbod makes my mombod look better, basically.
When I squeeze into my tummy-controlled one piece at the beach and douse myself in baby powder to prevent inner-thigh burn, I like to look over at my male companion and think, “Oh yeah, baby. We could look worse.”
Nobody wants to play Lyle Lovett to their partner’s Julia Roberts, know what I mean. For one thing, just standing next to a smoking hot guy with actual abdominal definition is going to make us look dumpy by comparison. What’s more, it makes us feel less attractive.
It’s not that we’re more attracted to the dadbod, you see. Do you really think we watch Olympic swimming because we care about whether some guy can shave a fraction of a second off his butterfly? Of course not.
The reason I dig a dadbod is because how your body makes me feel about myself is more important than how it makes me feel about you.