Weary,perhaps, of trying to oppress fickle, headstrong teenage girls, the fashion industry has apparently moved on to an easier target: Dudes. In recent weeks, the New York Times, Time, ABC News, and various other media outlets have all featured enthusiastic coverage of mirdles. They eliminate inches in seconds. They’re surprisingly comfortable, flying off the shelves at trend-setting retailers.

What, you may ask, is a mirdle? It’s a male girdle, a constrictive garment designed to streamline a fashion-conscious man’s problem areas – his too-generous love handles, his silhouette-ruining belly. Manufacturers never refer to their products as mirdles, however, because girdles are feminine and mirdles are anything but. Equmen describes its Core Precision T-shirt as a “high-performance undergarment… engineered with HELIX-MAPPING technology” that “sculpt[s], tone[s] and improve[s] body mechanics.” The makers of the RipT Fusion mirdle call it a “classic men’s undershirt injected with steroids.”

So if you’re thinking that mirdles sound a little girly, well, relax, tough guy! Mirdles are totally masculine. They’re not girdles! They’re T-shirts with very, very firm handshakes!

The steroid-injected verbiage is needed because waif-like metrosexuals who have no trouble slipping into their junkie-fit skinny jeans don’t need mirdles. Nor do gay gym bunnies who spend so much time working out they make Michelangelo’s David look like Homer Simpson. Instead, it’s the guys who spend all day glued to the sofa pounding burgers and Miller Draft with their bros as they watch the game on ESPN, but still want to look good in their striped shirts when they hit the clubs at night in search of fresh flesh.

For years, Madison Avenue has been bombarding impressionable lunkheads with an incredibly limiting view of masculinity: To express your essential maleness, you must eat triple cheeseburgers laden with enough strips of bacon to reconstruct an entire pig and spend hours perfecting the art of beating up cartoon adversaries or pretending to dunk on Shaq. To affirm male autonomy, you must choose 12-packs of bland American beer over hot and compliant blondes. But despite your beer-swilling, videogame-playing lifestyle, you can’t take refuge in shapeless Dad jeans or sack-like camp shirts. You’ve got to look good in fitted polos and stretch twill chinos. Thus, the recent proliferation of torso-enhancing undershirts, one-piece body trimmers, waist eliminators, high compression singlets, and extreme chest concealer tanks. Finally, men get to take advantage of the constrictive, fat-binding garments that women have been using to present an idealized image of themselves for centuries!

Will today’s dudes really fall for such rhetoric? Forty years ago, New York Radical Women protested the Miss America pageant by dumping sacrificial girdles, padded bras, and high heels into a “freedom trash can.” “No more girdles, no more pain, no more trying to hold the fat in vain,” they chanted as they shed themselves of “instruments of torture” that enslaved them to “ludicrous beauty standards.” Men too have traditionally associated underwear with cultural as well as physical constriction. Iconoclasts typically favor boxers over briefs. The autonomous, most empowered choice is to go without underwear entirely, i.e., to “free-ball” or “go commando.”

Yet men are reportedly lining up to pay as much as $119 a pop for an Equmen Core Precision T-shirt. It’s an awful lot to pay for an undershirt – especially a clingy, emotionally manipulative undershirt that squeezes itself around your stomach and intestines like a hungry boa constrictor and claims to support you while sucking the life out of your self-esteem. But whoever said men were rational?

GREG BEATO is a contributor to Reason magazine.