How many men wear spanx

It was extraordinarily slimming and made me feel way more comfortable when slipping into my favorite shirts. With this tank, I feel like me again. With that all being said, I took the tank a step further and wore it under my gym tee. We love a good placebo effect. Let me start off by saying this: I am not a fan of v-neck tees. Never in my life, though, have I considered wearing a v-neck tee as my undershirt until I received my very own Ultra Sculpt Seamless V-Neck.

Upon unboxing, I was a little scared at this tee. I recently wore this with a long-sleeve button-down shirt tucked into my pants. Because the tee is v-neck, I was able to sneakily wear this while peeping a bit of chest hair and not blowing my own cover.

It had never occurred to me before that, but okay, yes, maybe I was. I was immediately overcome with self-consciousness about my appearance.

I started sucking in my stomach around other people, and have continued to do so every single day of the 30 years since. Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox. When I first heard about Spanx for men, I experienced the same 'That sounds horrifying, I really want to experience it' emotional roller coaster that accompanies every new Nic Cage movie. My weight has fluctuated wildly since then, and there's been times when it was really bad and times when objectively I might have looked okay.

But mentally I have never come to a place of acceptance. No matter what I weigh, how strict my diet is, or whether I'm going to the gym or not, I look in the mirror and think: I'm so, so sorry, world. I understand that how I feel about my body is not rational. I don't like it. But I've gotten used to it. You can diet and exercise to address physical things to varying degrees, but how do you fix the mental thing? That was the problem. Spanx has grown very quickly over the last few years to become a standard component of women's fashion.

When I first heard about this fashion-accessory-slash-torture-device that somehow magically smooths and shapes the unshape-able, I experienced the same That sounds horrifying, I really want to experience it emotional roller coaster that accompanies every new Nic Cage movie. But it was just for women. While my wife and many of the women I know online mention their Spanx all the time—no big deal, just a part of the uniform—I have never met or even heard of a man wearing Spanx. I've never seen them for sale at Target or Kohl's or Macy's or any of the typical stores where men in my demographic buy clothes.

Spanx for Men exist, so someone must be buying them, but it isn't something men talk about. I felt no small amount of shame for how desperately I coveted them. It's a slow process of wriggling and tugging it over your torso, an operation that feels like pulling a condom down over a cupcake. And price is a major factor. Spanx are not cheap and I hate spending money on myself.

I would check the prices on Amazon and add them to my cart and then shut my browser, sighing wistfully at the email reminder that I had unpurchased items sitting in my shopping cart. Then one day I got an Amazon gift card for my birthday and I sprinted to my laptop and put one medium black Spanx t-shirt in my cart and hit Purchase before I could second guess myself for the millionth time. I felt wild and wanton, leaping recklessly into uncharted men's fashion territory. When my Spanx arrived I was immediately taken with the fabric—stretchy, with a resolute, sinewy tension.

It feels oddly synthetic, the material covered in some kind of space-age layer of science that presumably solves all your problems. Getting the shirt physically onto your body is a multi-step process.

First you screw your head through the neck hole. Then you think: Literally how is this going to get on my body? Since the ultra sculpt T-shirt had the proportions of a babygrow, I instead opted for a sculpt T-shirt in black, which was still cut so tight that I struggled to pull it over my head on my own. Once my upper torso had finally been poured into the tee , my stomach acquired an unfamiliar sense of solidity.

Later on, ahead of an important Zoom meeting, I switched sweatshirt for close-cut poplin shirt which, as any yo-yo gainer knows, is unforgiving of anything other than washboard abs and the effect of the tee was positive, if not perfect.

The dense fabric was a smoothing buffer between belly and shirt, not removing the protrusion but more softly airbrushing it away.