Gym carnies: Boobie

Gym carnies is an irregular series about the curious characters and intriguing individuals that people my local gym.
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Male cleavage is unavoidable in a gym. There are far too many jacked up guys, pumping far too much iron, in far too clique wifebeaters to miss the occassional guy checking out this pecs. (And if you live in Michigan, you have Nitmos flaunting his herculean pecs on the street, so there is no where you are safe from gratitous man cleavage.) Just like the stinky old men and the people who sweat too much, it's something you accept as part of the gym environment.

However, there are boundaries of acceptability, and my gym just happens to have someone that crosses them: Man Boobs, but we'll call him Boobie--cause it's funnier.

The first tenet of man cleavage is the depth of cleavage. In all my years of being male, I've come to the conclusion that maximum acceptable depth of visible cleverage for a guy is the nipple line. The nipple line is the imaginary line that stretches from one nipple across your chest to the other nipple, as illustrated by the red line in the figure below:


Conversely, the acceptable maximum acceptable depth of visible cleavage for women, at least according to celebrities, is the ankle line, illustrated below:


The second tenet of man clevage relates to chest hair. Essentially, if you have the typical amount of chest hair,


and particularly if you have excessive chest hair,

then you cover it up. If you have no chest hair,

then it's acceptable to show it off, because you are prepubesent and don't have body-image complexes yet.

There is also the recent trend of the trimmed chest hair:


You don't like your chest hair, but you're not comfortable enough to take it all off. So you're left with a manicured lawn of half-grown hair. It's weird, but acceptable to show off.

These are all pretty basic male cleavage guidelines that I think all men would agree with. Except for Boobie.

I must admit that Boobie does indeed have an impressive chest. I see him at the fly machine or the bench press while I'm on the treadmill. He'll do an set of reps and then sit at the machine, stare at the floor, contemplate life, go over his grocery list...and then do another set. He is completely focused on building his chest and nothing else. He has therefore become disproportionately busty. Now enter the cleavage. Here you have a guy with big ol' man boobs wearing a tank top cut way south of the nipple line exposing copious amounts of hairy man cleavage.

It's a little perplexing. But what's really puzzling is that this is not an isolated incident. Every time Boobie goes to the gym he wears the exact same tank top, which is gross and makes me wonder why anyone would do that. But then again, I wonder the same thing about all the gym carnies and their odd little traits which they are obivious to.