Topless men. What does that mean, then? I was opposite one on the tube the other day, heading north from Finsbury Park, and I just couldn’t stop -staring.
In terms of sheer comfort, I was quite jealous. There was me, sweating in my shirt and suit trousers, and there was him, open to the air in shorts and nothing else. He was sweating too, of course. As I watched, a rivulet of the stuff ran from his neck and through the thicket of his chest to hang as a globule from a thatch of hair above his right nipple. Frankly, that globule made me anxious. Any moment, I knew, our train would burst into the overland sunshine of Arnos Grove and I feared it might function as a lens, perhaps even setting him alight.
Men are stripping off. There’s no point in denying it, because it is definitely happening. Nor, really, even decrying it. The naked hordes of Oxford Street, alas, are not going to read a strongly worded column in The Spectator and put their shirts back on. It’s been coming for a while, but now it has incontrovertibly come. Male flesh has been set free.
The Panglossian in me wants to see this as a good thing. I was rewatching Zulu the other week. My God but a British man used to be expected to wear a lot of clothes, eh? Out there in the baking sun, facing an African army clad mainly in leaves, Michael Caine and the rest of them are trussed up like Beefeaters.
This is pure class, and I don’t mean that in a good way. A topless woman has connotations of a different sort, but a topless man has always suggested manual labour.
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