I KNOW someone who knows someone who knows someone who had a calf implant. Apparently it’s the 40-something male equivalent of the boob job. The procedure bulks up the calf muscles in a suitably manly way to give the look of someone who spends their life in the gym, but wants a short-cut.
This news elicited very different responses, varying from loudly declaiming that said person should be sectioned for the crime of overweening vanity to wondering what the down time is on the procedure – and does it qualify for tax relief? And that was just me in the space of five minutes.
For men of a certain age (40-something) these are very troubling times. You’re supposed to go gently into that good night where all you have to look forward to is type II diabetes and erectile dysfunction. But that’s not what it says in the brochure. There’s more technology on one of our iPhone Apps than it took to land a man on the moon. There’s hair transplants, so surely face transplants and a new waistline can’t be that far behind. Maybe then the people in Boots will stop laughing when we ask for a bottle of Hai Karate.
It’s a necessarily low-carb, high anxiety existence for men of a certain age. They become “invisible” – neither one thing nor the other. Too old to shop in Urban Outfitters – skinny jeans and tight T-shirts are “age inappropriate” clothing – but not old enough for “comfortable” fleeces and footwear with good arch support. These are men on the brink of a generational breakdown.
Go to your local indie dive to “check out” the latest sounds and you feel like a dirty old man among the (what appear to be) 12-year-olds. Try rolling back the years in the gym and you end up in accident & emergency, convinced you’ve just had a combined stroke/brain haemorrhage.
The bitter irony here is there has never been a better time to be a man of a certain age, but you must subject yourself to indignity heaped upon acute personal embarrassment to avail of the “cheats” out there. I know someone who used to home dye his hair the deepest shade of boot polish black (which made him look like he had a weird illness), but now he avails of professionally applied “lowlights” which give him a “Mocha Java” hair colour which costs him the same amount as it would to feed a family for a week. Someone else – let’s call him “Botox Bob” – got the “smoker lines” around his mouth removed courtesy of multiple injections of a “filler”. He can now talk knowledgeably about people’s perioral region.
I know people who sit down with complicated-looking charts which work out precisely how many kilometres they must walk in order to walk off all the wine they slugged in front of last night’s television, and people who order “bread scooped out” sandwiches. Half the calories apparently. A paradigm shift was reached when a colleague described his hair transplant as no more painful than getting a tooth filling.
There are people who meet up and exchange the download links for the cult US TV drama series Men of a Certain Age. Accurately, if somewhat annoyingly, described as Sex and the City"for 40-something men", the show features three male leads – one happily married, one just nastily divorced and one still single. Episodes treat of such subject matter as receding hairlines, expanding waistlines and protein shakes as our heroes not just have to look after themselves but also wait on bratty, sullen offspring and cranky elderly parents. The correct dosage of Viagra is discussed.
A radical show in that it was the first to deal with this benighted cohort and their hidden concerns, the show certainly wasn’t without an audience, but it has just been unceremoniously cancelled to make way no doubt for a show with the word “idol” in its title.
There was a desultory attempt among men of a certain age to launch Facebook and Twitter campaigns to save Men of a Certain Age,but this was somewhat ignoring the fact that this particular demographic treat Facebook with suspicion and Twitter with derision. They just took their beating and flicked over to Top Gearinstead.
And that’s the stark choice facing men of a certain age – get some lowlights and calf implants and try to run with the metrosexuals, or just give up on life entirely and turn into a flabby, grey hair-flecked, irascible Jeremy Clarkson type. Is the lesser evil the greater good?
Vincent Browne is on leave