One unexpected feature of my wife’s recent pregnancy was that I began to gain weight. Some would call it: an empathy belly that was indicative of the healthy co-parenting that was to come. Others would call it: a massive tum caused by watching The Good Wife while eating Ben & Jerry’s straight out of the tub, you fat bastard. The internet has decided to term my body type (essentially, a pear with eyes) a “dad bod”. Writer Mackenzie Pearson defined it as someone who goes to the gym occasionally, but also “drinks heavily on the weekends and enjoys eating eight slices of pizza at a time”. New York Magazinenamed Jason Segel its ultimate ambassador.
Although this sounds alarmingly close to just being in your 20s, the prefix “dad” has gradually crept into popular culture, in a decidedly non-hip way. In fashion terms, Gap introduced the unofficially named “dad shorts”, which looked suspiciously like the denim cutoffs your brother wore in the 90s. Much better wasGolf Wang’s recent reappropriation of the T-shirt tucked into jeans look. Suffice to say the whole normcore movement is based around dressing like your dad.
The “dad” trend, of course, mirrors the “mom” prefix that lingered around pop culture for a while. There were mom jeans (high waist, slightly cropped, very 1993), soccer moms (Sarah Palin in a baseball cap looking terrifying) and tiger moms (Joan Crawford brandishing a coathanger while reading her daughter’s French GCSE coursework). These all put moms/mums/mothers in the worst light possible. They were basically emotionally manipulative control freaks who may or may not have been members of Wilson Phillips.
Similarly, in the lexicon of youth-oriented, ever-changing pop-culture worlds, the “dad” prefix has come to denote the death of vitality and relevance. The dad thing popped up first with Simon Cowell. During the first season of The X Factor in 2004, his dad jeans were a gravity-defying, nipple-high marvel. Tucking his shirts tightly into his trousers, this was an all-black look that said to the world: “I’m a mime in Covent Garden at the weekends.”
You could say he set the dad template for the decade to come. In 2007, Pitchfork eviscerated Wilco in a review of Sky Blue Sky with the description of their music as “dad rock”. Similarly, the Mirror singled out Robbie Williams’s “dad dancing” after his strange performance on The X Factor in 2009. While, in 2013, Urban Dictionary defined a “dad crack” as: “an attempt at humour … usually made by a dad or out of touch 40+-year-old”.
Unsurprisingly then, the dad bod is the tragic opposite of the current male body type. In this brave new world, if you don’t look like Michelangelo’s David (see Poldark and David Gandy’s new line for Marks & Spencer), you have failed. The knock-on effect on the high street means that you can’t go far without meeting a bro wearing an ill-fitting deep V, whose body looks like the Hulk, mid-morph. In contrast, dad bod is its soft, more undisciplined cousin. It’s a torso that says: “I am having chips with my pint. You hear that gym bunnies? I CAN HAVE IT ALL!”, then wheezes when it has to run for the night bus. New York Magazine went on to provide a three-day diet involving orange Gatorade, buffalo wings and white bread.
The truth is that the narrative of the dad bod is not couched in shame and even has a whiff of arrogant privilege about it. As Time and Lindy West both noted, an equivalent “mom bod” would never be accepted by the mainstream. At the same time, in the context of wall-to-wall six packs, the existence of the dad bod feels like a bit of a victory for body positivity – and those of us with a close attachment to ice-cream.
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