HELP, I’VE GOT… MAN BOOBS!
WHENEVER Alan Ash would take off his shirt in his own home, he’d first make sure the blinds were closed. If they weren’t completely shut – if even a sliver of light could creep into the house – he’d tug them down the rest of the way. Alan, who’s 38 years old, lives in the country, about 45 minutes outside Louisville, Kentucky. It wasn’t as if there were many neighbours around who could catch a glimpse through the windows, but Alan needed to be sure. Meanwhile, his fiancée, Rebecca, had no problem walking around the house nude. “If someone sees me, so be it,” she’d say.
Alan went to great lengths not to be seen shirtless. He’d been in other serious relationships before he started dating Rebecca at age 31, but he never really felt comfortable with those women seeing him without his shirt, even in the most intimate moments. Rebecca was the first to see him in full, he told me.
When Alan was a schoolkid, other boys would sometimes tease him about his appearance when he took off his shirt – “but I didn’t let that go on too long,” he says. He was a big kid, 188cm, 97.5kg. Classmates learned not to mess with him. He also resorted to making fun of himself to neutralise any incoming jabs. And he figured out how to hide his condition or at least fool himself into thinking he was hiding it. He wore two or three XXL shirts at a time, even at the height of summer, so they’d drape over his form like heavy curtains. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward. At restaurants, he’d always sit in the back so fewer people would walk by and possibly look at him and snicker. Alan had gynecomastia. Man boobs.
Gyno, as it is called among people who talk openly about it, is a real physiological condition – a proliferation of breast tissue, not just an awkward distribution of fat – caused by an excess of estrogen relative to testosterone. Millions of men have gyno – at least 30 per cent of males will be affected in their lifetime – but it’s impossible to get much more specific than that, because most people
