Last night, I exited my Pilates class, checked my phone and found a series of frantic text messages from my usually cool, unfazed husband. Had the house burned down? Was one of the kids running a fever? No and no.
His first text read: "WTF?! Dad bod? What. The. [Expletive]."
It seems, while I was "boomeranging" my "mom bod" into the more ideal "single woman's bod," my husband had fallen down the internet rabbit hole and had made an interesting discovery: His body was suddenly in hot demand, according to several news outlets. He, Seth Rogan, Leonardo DiCaprio and a random selection of dads (and non-dads alike) had gone to sleep on Wednesday night and awoke Thursday to find they were the new Gisele Bundchens.
My husband was not amused.
Apparently, women all over the planet are lusting after guys with "dad bod," which, as you're about to read, sounds like the body type shared by 99.9 percent of men on Earth. If a man is in his late 20s, 30s, 40s and even 50s, he probably has "dad bod." If he's a dad, he most undoubtedly has "dad bod." If he isn't employed as a physical trainer or stunt double for Marvel Studios, doesn't spend 18 hours of his unemployed day inside of a gym and likes a few French fries with his protein shake (because he's cool like that): You got yourself a total "dad bod."
To truly have a "dad bod," you have to have a bit of paunch and a devil-may-care attitude about it. The total "dad bod" experience is about being both physically imperfect and mentally perfect enough not to give one iota of a f*** about your "dad bod."
Allow my husband's next text to sum up what this actually is: "It's fetishizing a body type, just like we do with women, and in just as creepy a way. It's our MILF. Creepy and gross."
There's a good reason why I married this man.
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Many women may be thinking: Oh, here we go again, yet another way we allow men to age and be "hot," while society demands we morph from teenagers into MILFS. I agree. But men aren't benefiting from this nonsense any more than women benefit from feeling like we have to live up to lofty physical expectations.
Any time you attach "mom" and "dad" as adjectives for a body type, you imply that life is over after kids. The stereotypical "mom bod" is one that is too soft and fleshy for its own good. Obviously, no one is writing trend pieces about the hotness of "mom bod" because we don't value women who are at ease with their "imperfections." We should be laid back enough to kick back with a beer and steak, but our asses better hit the treadmill the next day to burn up those calories.
More: Secrets to having a positive body image
There is no "dad bod" or "mom bod," the same way there is no "college bod." Stop putting people into neat little boxes and telling them dads have guts, moms have big hips and 20-year-olds have abs of steel. Anyone who has spent more than an hour outside in the real world knows people come in all sorts of beautiful shapes and sizes — even those of us who have chosen to (gasp!) procreate.