Bad dad's dad bod

IWAS naked in our room after a shower one day when the wife said, “Wow, dad bod.” The naughty look she said it with was familiar, but the phrase was not.

I said, “What?” She said, “You can post that on the Internet. It's trending.”

I said, “What's trending?” She said, “Dad bod.”

Mixing up his consonants, the four-year-old butted in, “Bad dad.” Then mother and son laughed.

I was starting to get pissed by these two people obviously ganging up on me while I was digging in the drawer for underwear that would still fit.

She said, “Google D-A-D B-O-D later. Don't worry, you'll like it. In the meantime, let me take your picture.” She started setting up her phone camera.

“No,” I was screaming now. “Nobody takes naked pictures of me!” I grabbed my towel for cover.

“Bad dad,” the four-year-old said again, while his mother bit her lip to suppress a laugh.

I was serious. It's different now. Before, I had no qualms about stripping to the waist in public to display a tummy that had survived years of beer guzzling. My drinking buddies envied me for it because while my belly was flat, they could play chess on theirs.

And then I got married. Then we started having kids. And all those time I forgot to check my naked reflection in the mirror because I'd been too busy hunting for cheap diapers for my little boys. I just noticed that my pants and shirts had to be a couple of sizes bigger now.

At the office, I immediately googled “dad bod.” I knew dad for daddy and bod for body. But for the two to form a phrase and go viral was puzzling to me. I would have ignored it as another one of those useless details of the empty lives of celebrities dot com were it not for the episode with my family earlier.

The search showed it: 16,300,000 results, spawned by an article penned by a student and published in an online campus magazine in the US only last March 30. The article “Why Girls Love the Dad Bod” by Mackenzie Pearson opens, “In case you haven't noticed lately, girls are all about that dad bod,” and proceeds to list down reasons why girls are all about that dad bod, in case you haven't noticed lately.

The reasons: 1) “The dad bod doesn't intimidate us – We don't need a perfectly sculpted guy standing next to us to make us feel worse,” which is the same as 2) “We like being the pretty one.” 3) “Better cuddling - No one wants to cuddle with a rock.” 4) “Good eats – He eats just about anything.” 5) “You know what you're getting – If he already has the dad bod going on, we can get used to it before we date and marry him.”

It's a listicle, a portmanteau of “list” and article,” or “list” and “testicle,” depending on your level of derision for this type of writing. But it makes some interesting points, if only from a teenage girl's point of view. It says nothing about the real “dad bod,” the body of the real daddy, my body, for example.

The real dad bod is about experience, about family, about the wife and the kids, and about the beer in between. The real dad bod doesn't give an eff about having a dad bod. The real dad is too wise to care about abs now.

The real dad bod is about aging gracefully and yielding to the force of gravity when everything starts to sag and bend and drop. It's cute, it's charming, it's beautiful, but not in the heartthrob sense of a teenage writer.

“That dad bod is a scam,” I told my wife at home after work. “You should stop reading testicles.”

“Stop reading what?” she said, laughing.

“Bad dad,” the four-year-old said.

The real dad bod is about experience, about family, about the wife and the kids