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F08C8=6 C> 4G70;4 For less than $100, men can be as uncomfortable as women!

0]Pc^\h ^U P <XaS[T They’re men’s T-shirts with very, very firm handshakes By Greg Beato

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eary, perhaps, of trying to oppress fickle, headstrong teenage girls, the fashion industry has apparently moved on to an easier target: dudes. In recent weeks, the New York Times, Time magazine, ABC News and various other media outlets have all featured enthusiastic coverage of mirdles. They eliminate inches in seconds, the coverage advises. They’re surprisingly comfortable. And they’re flying off the shelves at trend-setting retailers. What, you may be asking, is a mirdle? A mirdle is a male girdle, a constrictive garment designed to streamline a fashion-conscious man’s problem areas—his too-generous love handles, his silhouette-ruining belly. Mirdle manufacturers obviously never refer to their products as mirdles, because girdles

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THE BOHEMIAN

are feminine and mirdles are anything but. Equmen describes its Core Precision™ T-shirt as a “high-performance undergarment . . . engineered with HELIX-MAPPING™ technologyâ€? to “sculpt, tone and improve body mechanics.â€? The makers of the RipT Fusion mirdle call their garment a “classic men’s undershirt injected with steroids.â€? So if you were thinking that mirdles sound a little girly, well, relax, tough guy. Mirdles are totally masculine. They’re not girdles. They’re T-shirts with very, very firm handshakes. The high-performance, steroid-injected verbiage is needed, one suspects, because waif like metrosexuals who have no trouble slipping into their junkie-fit skinny jeans don’t need mirdles. Nor do gay gym bunnies who spend so much time working out they make Michelangelo’s David look like Homer Simpson. Instead, it’s the guys who spend all day glued to the sofa pounding burgers and

Miller Draft with their bros as they watch the game on ESPN but still want to look good in their striped shirts when they hit the clubs at night in search of fresh f lesh. It’s ironic, isn’t it? For years, Madison Avenue has been bombarding impressionable young lunkheads with an incredibly limiting and destructive view of masculinity. To express your essential maleness, Madison Avenue insists, you must eat triple cheeseburgers laden with enough strips of bacon to reconstruct an entire pig, and spend hours perfecting the art of beating up tiny cartoon adversaries or pretending to dunk on Shaq. To affirm your male autonomy, you must choose 12-packs of bland American beer over hot and compliant blondes whenever such decisions present themselves. But despite your beer-swilling, burger-eating, videogame-playing lifestyle, you can’t take refuge in shapeless dad jeans or sacklike Tommy Bahama camp shirts.

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