Look at my face

Summer’s clearly on the way this week – despite dingy skies, Soho yesterday was full of gay men proudly parading their gooseflesh in tight little T-shirts. Sitting drinking bad coffee outside Costa on Compton Street in the early evening, half the men walking past looked as if nature had suddenly provided them with a slightly wrinkled second skin of gaudy cotton.  My friend Jon and me started counting nipples (we got to 12 pairs), as the slightly crisp evening air meant that a fair few were all standy-uppy and pert, looking like possessed jelly tots trying to bite their way through prison walls made of fabric.  It passed the time pleasantly (so thanks guys) but it did leave us wondering what had happened to understatement.

What, I hear you ask, is the problem with showing a bit of handsome flesh in warm weather? Nothing in particular, I suppose – I like looking at nice bodies as much as anyone else.  It’s just that if you don’t underplay what you put on show, you end up looking a little obvious and oversold.  I personally get more excited when I have to guess a little of what lies under someone’s clothes – in the street at least, if less so in a club or online.  Seeing an arse in jeans that make it look like two hard-boiled eggs squeezed in a hankie means you needn’t fantasise about what it looks like unveiled.

How does this guy walk?

For a lecherous old goat like me, skin-tight clothing on buff bodies is also maddeningly distracting in social situations.  If someone with a body I like wears skin-tight clothing, I too often find myself having long conversations with their pecs rather than their face.  This isn’t necessarily about sexual attraction – I can be similarly transfixed by low-cut cleavage on a woman.  She might be talking to me about the budget or the death of a much-loved pet, but I can’t stop my eyes straying downwards and thinking about is what it would be like to bury my face in them and go blubble, blubble, blubble.

That said, criticising the way other people display their bodies and you risk overstepping a line into sour judgement.  I’ve met plenty of men who affect to sneer at guys who put their bodies on display, when secretly they really fancy them and are just put out because they suspect they  couldn’t pull the owner of the goods on display.  I don’t want to be one of these ­– people have the right to enjoy being in their own skin.  I might also grudgingly admit that I’d be more indulgent to overt muscle display if I had a bit more to show myself.

I still think, however, that wearing clothes that act as a form of sexual marketing all the time can make you look a little two dimensional.  It must be nice to come across as a hot piece on a summer evening, but if Jon and my reactions yesterday are anything to go by, it means people are too busy checking out your chest to focus on your face.  Could it be that a world where you had to work a little harder to see how other guys were built might be a little more sexy, not less?

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