Shirtless Men Have Gotten Me Through The Pandemic
Yes, men are trash, but we’re talking about their chests, not their full person.
I do not thank shirtless men enough. Truly, I love them so much.
Look, I scream-text WHY ARE MEN just like the rest of us, but if a shirtless tattooed suburban pops open the Subaru hatch to change into a fresh shirt — who am I to not wipe the misandry from my brow and let it evaporate until it rains down later in the week after a new supreme court decision.
Yes, men are trash, but we’re talking about their chests, not their full person. My aim here is to be one-thousand percent exploitative and lady-gazy.
Let me clarify: I do not mean shaved and tight-bodied men who roll monster truck tires on Instagram. I mean the kind of guy who has a shirt off and I can see it. I will take a dad bod, a Steve Carell hairy chest vest, saggy pectorals as a canvas for tattoos, and most definitely anything even remotely resembling Kurt Russell.
The Internet judges movies by the “Bechdel Test” which is a set of loose guidelines determining if women are represented accurately in fiction (think: at least two women talk to each other, but not about a man). But for me, I judge real life men by the “Russell Test” — how close, on any given day, is the man candy coming across my eyeballs to resembling Kurt Russell in the outrageously misogynistic 1980s classic, Overboard.
Let me tell you how much shirtless men mean to me that I can overlook the plot of this movie, which goes against everything for which I stand. I wear a ring on my right hand that if I actually punched a man in the forehead it would leave him with the imprint FEMINST right between his eyeballs. This movie is so bad, I should punch myself.
Overboard is the story of a very rich heiress who, after stiffing a local carpenter for a cedar closet job she considers subpar, falls off her yacht, bangs her head and experiences amnesia; and is then abducted by the hunky carpenter who, seeking revenge, hoodwinks the “rich bitch” into caring for his four children and — as if playing mom for a set of discarded misfits wasn’t enough to even the score — pleases said single-dad carpenter, it is implied, sexually.
All of this I look past because Kurt Russell gathers the straps of his a-line tank top into one hand and moves them back and forth, revealing his tanned chesticles, and I just about die from a hot-a-attack every single time I think about it. If I actually see it? I’m drowning in rising tides.
That, folks, is the “Russell Test.”
In the thick of the pandemic I turned not to Real Housewives like every other person who is Very Online, but instead to shirtless men. In particular, the shirtless men of wrestling. My thought process went like this: If I want to watch campy, overblown scripted drama, then it might as well be shirtless, bare-chested men, oiled and spray-tanned to a fine leather hue, flopping around on a padded square.
Y’all, wrestling did not disappoint in the Russell Test. Not for one minute. And there is a shocking amount of it on television. Like, so much of it that I could replace the amount of news-watching I do (which is embarrassingly exorbitant) with a range of bare-chested man types leading with “we’re drama nerds, but with muscles.”
There is Monday night RAW and NXT on Tuesdays and then Friday night Smackdown. Three nights is not enough so I started streaming the WWE network, which, if you are not aware, is like Netflix but includes professional wrestling matches going back to the 1980s — and can now be found on Peacock.
Hitting the archives haaaaaard had me feeling like maybe I’d survive this thing if I stayed indoors inhaling shirtless men. As a child, wrestling lit my ass right up and no one could tell me it wasn’t real. Bret Hart, in his pink and black tankini, set a path for my sexual awakening with his always moist, curly dark hair and his ever present reflective sunglasses that adult me still needs in her life for those mornings when I hate everything and the sun is back on her bullshit. (So, every morning.)
Then there was the Ultimate Warrior. As a little, I would have thrown my whole ass Teddy Ruxpin on the train tracks and danced over its dismembered stuffing to get so much as a wave from this nuclear explosion of energy who entered the arena to the chugging of heavy metal guitars, neon fringe strangling his biceps, and a level of rope shaking that can only be described as the most intense seizure I’ve ever seen that was not actually a seizure.
I felt spectacular, from the comfort of my own home, drooling like a Labrador over an endless parade of indecent stretched out chests. Make no mistake all of the men were intimidating ogres, but all five feet of me in compression sock anklets and Lane Bryant shape wear could take them — with a tack, a bobby pin, fuck, even a retractable eyeliner and deflate their impressive assets, if it came down to it.
But why would I? From a distance, aren’t men great. With all of their promise and third-shelf reaching. That lake of muscles next to their necks, right above their collar bones. A dude could be barking at the moon uggo and flash me some bare neck meat and I’d be slip-and-sliding spread eagle as an introduction.
Obviously I am talking only about my husband. He’s my one and only.
Unless Slasher dies an untimely death. Then my new husband, Kyle Chandler, will remind me that showering together is never sexy, it is waterboarding, and all the movies showing otherwise can go ahead and rot in an algorithm.
See, sometimes, that’s what great about men, they can save you from yourself. Emphasis on sometimes. Mainly they just blow through the front door with seventy-five thousand reusable totes, knocking shit into the stratosphere rather than make more than one trip to the car. Or, they build a dick rocket for one trip to space. It’s tough to know which kind you’re getting. But when they’re shirtless, and it’s a pandemic, and I have Kurt Russell on the brain and lust in my eyeballs, yes, absolutely, I love them.
CURRENTLY
On my nightstand: Every Body Shines
Reading: White Women Storm the Capital
Watching: Peace, Love and Rage (HBO Max)
Listening: Showroom of Compassion // Cake
Coveting: This #FreeBritney outdoor flag
Funsies: Room sprays that smell like Disney World
The right side of my body is currently engulfed in flames because vacation sun, so do me a solid and share FLOP ERA with the kind of person you trust to apply sunscreen. THE RIGHT WAY.