Christine Layton
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One area where women are far ahead of men is in the world of insecurity-driven plastic surgery. You just don't see men getting breast implants, and there are not yet reliable ways to do penis enlargements. But the industry is catching up, and now there's a whole array of cosmetic surgeries available to help men look more masculine. If you have thousands of dollars to spend and are completely oblivious to unintentional comedy, you too can get ...
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There's a certain kind of feeling a man gets when his upper lip looks perpetually dirty and/or like it was bitten by a werewolf. It's a mustache feeling. Cowboys, arctic explorers, porn stars, private investigators, and 1970s police detectives all wear mustaches totally free of irony -- it's a universal part of the cool dude's dress code. But tragically, not every man can grow one.
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And some men just shouldn't.
So if you've been squeezing and grunting and pushing with all your might but can't manage to force out a Tom Selleck face badge, wipe that blood from your nostrils and/or eye sockets and get ready for some life-changing news -- you may be a prime candidate for mustache surgery. To the delight of hipsters and alopecic lumberjacks everywhere, this is totally a thing.
The Surgery:
Through a process called follicular unit extraction (which is a fancy way of saying "we pull your goddamned hair out"), dense groups of hair are harvested from other areas of the body and surgically crammed into your upper lip. It's essentially the same as scalp implants, only confined entirely to the space between your mouth and nose.
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"Without facial hair, I'm basically a dude in a ghost costume."
Mustache surgery is a growing trend in the Middle East, where thick mustaches are a sign of maturity, power, and prestige, sort of like a bushy "A+" you wear on your face. The way the mustache droops, curls, or bristles can even determine a man's political leanings, a system we feel should be incorporated into politics everywhere.
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Finally, a less ridiculous alternative to powdered wigs.
The bad news is that the surgery will set you back around $7,000, and you need to have enough thick patches of hair growing elsewhere on your body to provide sufficient resources to create your Frankenstache. You're sure as hell not going to find someone willing to donate their mustache.
Wait, so can you have hair just implanted anywhere you want? Does that mean we can have ...
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It sure does!
There is hope for those hairless men who have been cursed with the pink bird chest of Edward Norton, rather than the hirsute pectoral mane of Alec Baldwin.
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Hopefully they don't get their ass beaten nearly as often.
The Surgery:
As we alluded to above, hair transplants are normally performed by harvesting strands from the back or chest and implanting them in the scalp to combat male pattern baldness. But, if you are in the unlikely situation of preferring the scalp-to-chest hair distribution ratio of George Costanza to that of a Brad Pitt, you can have the opposite procedure done and remove hair from your scalp to cultivate a thick meadow of chest fur. Doctors can surgically implant enough strands to elevate your torso beard to Baldwin levels of hairiness.
Hair Site
And if your ass is hairy enough, you can get the full Austin Powers chest hair.
That photo is from a hair restoration clinic in Miami that boasts more than 9,000 such procedures. The only downside? Unlike normal chest hair, the implant hair behaves like head hair -- that is, it continues to grow. Let that shit go for a year and you can have a luxurious ZZ Top beard dangling from your nipples.
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Let's say you're a guy who runs into this situation every time you answer the phone:
YOU: Hello?
PERSON ON PHONE: Hello there, young lady! Can you put your dad on the phone? I'd like to speak to an adult man!
Yep, just because you now have the glorious chest hair of an Alec Baldwin doesn't mean you suddenly are rid of your high-pitched, dainty voice. You've tried to overcome this embarrassing physical flaw the good Lord saw fit to cripple you with from birth, but nothing seems to work. You do your best to sing along with Barry White albums, but it just ends up sounding like Barry has a pocket full of chorus mice. You try to mimic Darth Vader and Mufasa when you order a pizza, but it comes out like Verne Troyer being strangled to death by Herve Villechaize, and Papa John's is forced to call the police.
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Mini-Me and Nick-Nack. Just saved you a trip to Google.
It's a serious problem, according to the Texas Voice Center, the leading center for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of voice disorders: "In our society, a deep voice can convey strength and authority whereas a weak voice may suggest a lack of self-confidence." If you want to be taken seriously as a man, you're going to have to get voice-deepening surgery, because who are we to argue with the Texas goddamn Voice Center?
The Surgery:
The procedure is called fat injection thyroplasty, and it's meant for men with either weak, high-pitched voices that annoy the shit out of everyone they speak to or withered raspy voices that fill everyone in earshot with regret. During the surgery, fat is injected into the patient's vocal cords, bulking them up to create a deeper-sounding voice.
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"No, that's too much James Earl Jones. I'm looking for more of a Vin Diesel feel."
The Texas Voice Center's website is noticeably unclear on where the donor fat comes from, but they do allow you to hear samples of men's voices taken before and after a successful thyroplasty. To be fair, there is a definite improvement in vocal quality, although the surgery doesn't really give you the smooth baritone of an R&B singer, and it apparently does nothing for one's reading skills. Also, we're not sure how you will explain the sudden change to friends ("Dude, why are you doing that movie trailer voice?") or your confused mother when you call her for the first time ("What have you done with my Bobby, you powerful, masculine fiend!?")
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Imagine you are a man on a date with a beautiful woman. She takes a seductively slow bite of her hot dog (because you're a man who appreciates both sexual innuendo and thrift), then leans across the table, spilling her ample cleavage like a glass of breast-colored water, and says, "Let's skip the ice cream and go back to your place."
You are appreciably excited, but suddenly you become gripped with a paralyzing uncertainty -- what will she think of your comically oversized scrotum? The deflated bat wings sagging below your baby injector are sure to be an instant turnoff, and with your confidence suddenly obliterated, you stand up from the table with your napkin still awkwardly tucked behind your belt buckle and wordlessly leave her in the restaurant, your massive nut sack fluttering in the wake of your shamed retreat like the topsail of a pirate galleon.
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Your sad balls didn't just rob you of sex -- they robbed you of ice cream.
Luckily, help is out there, and it exists in the form of cosmetic scrotum reduction surgery.
The Surgery:
Scrotum reduction surgery offers men the opportunity to tighten and raise their ball sacks, because the road to physical perfection is occasionally paved with hunks of ragged skin slashed from a droopy nutbag. The plastic surgeons who offer this service describe a variety of enticing justifications, including better-fitting underwear, unchafed thighs, and a certain je ne sais quoi of ball attractiveness.
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"But not too much. We don't want it looking like Ponda Baba's chin down there."
Jokes aside, Dr. Boris Volshteyn of Atlantic Surgical Associates angrily insists that this procedure is no laughing matter, dedicating a section of his website to addressing legitimate medical reasons to have a scrotum reduction. This is another way of saying that a board certified plastic surgeon wrote about the anguish of your mutant ball sack getting caught in bicycle seats and splashing down into fecal toilet water in broken English on the Internet to argue the validity of coin-purse-shrinking surgery.
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Plus the extra money you now have to spend on a beanbag chair.
The procedure involves cutting away excess skin and repairing the muscle that connects the scrotum to the penis. Your testicles can be tucked and tightened in a simple two-hour outpatient surgery, although doctors warn that you will experience some discomfort for the next several days, possibly related to the fact that your genitals have just been dissected by a foreign national.
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So let's say you work out from time to time, you manage to keep yourself from eating pizza four times a week, and you can still fit into most of the clothes you wore back in high school. All things considered, you're in pretty good shape. But are you in awesome shape? You long for glistening washboard abs, but those take extra time and energy. And what if you put in all that hard work only to end up with one of those weird stomach blocks like an old-timey circus strongman, or a set of weirdly mismatched bodybuilder abs instead of the perfect six-pack?
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Mismatched or not, we'd still hit it.
Fortunately, guys can bypass all that hard work and uncertainty and just schedule an appointment to have a set of abs etched into their stomach, like an ice cube tray pressed into a Jell-O mold.
The Surgery:
Abdominal etching, also known as a "suction six-pack," is the precise extraction of lines of fat around the abdomen. However, it isn't a procedure for overweight men, merely devastatingly insecure ones. See, you can only undergo abdominal etching if you exercise regularly, but have 1 or 2 centimeters of "pinchable body fat" left to go. Rather than doing the amount of exercise required to slim down those 2 centimeters of belly fat, you can pay a plastic surgeon $5,000 to $7,000 to rip it out of your body with a vacuum. It's slightly less extreme than full-on liposuction and just a step or two above drawing hot dogs on your stomach with a magic marker.
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Just remember to draw them upside down. Otherwise, you'll just look silly.
For some reason, ab etching is generally not recommended for bodybuilders or athletes, presumably because those are two classes of people who traditionally depend on muscles to actually perform feats of strength, rather than simply look good covered in hickory body paint and a tie-dyed grape holder.
But that's just the abs -- how do we get the rest of our body ripped without all of the, you know, effort? Well, there's ...
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If you've never watched Predator and wished you could join in on the rampant and totally unironic flexing that populates the majority of that film, you are not being honest with yourself as a human being. If you've never watched Predator at all, get out.
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"And take Jingle All the Way with you!"
Building that kind of muscle mass takes a lot of work, though -- at his bodybuilding prime, Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing 710-pound deadlifts and 440-pound bench presses, which is the type of training typically reserved for battling mythical creatures. Most of us aren't going to lift that amount of weight in an entire month, much less 30 times in an afternoon. Mercifully, there's another option -- surgically inserting muscle-shaped objects into your chest and calves to give the appearance of strength without any of its actual benefits.
The Surgery:
Whether you call it pec implants or chest enhancement, a male boob job is still accomplished by carving up your chest meat and shoving in the traditional pair of silicone bags. The end result creates the impression of rock-hard pectoral muscles sculpted from countless hours at the gym.
Pec Implants
An impression that lasts until someone asks you to pick up a bag of dog food.
And if you get the pectoral implants, you'll have to get calf implants as well to complete the ensemble or else you'll just look like a fucking lunatic. You might also need the leg implants as a counterweight for your giant fake muscle titties to prevent yourself from falling over in social situations.
Calf Implants
From zero to Adonis in two easy surgeries.
The calf implants are accomplished in pretty much the same way -- the doctor slices the back of your legs open and crams in a wad of silicone to balloon your skin out in an appropriately attractive manner. Again, we hasten to point out that, beyond making you look like a bulbous Frankenstein assembled from a drunken alien's Daytona Beach body harvest, these vanity muscle implants will not bestow you with any actual strength. Should you be trapped in an emergency situation and your fellow survivors call on you to lift a boulder off of some trapped kindergarten teacher, you are only going to disappoint them all and embarrass yourself, and they will likely conspire to have the shortest straw find its way into your hand when it comes time to figure out who's going to get eaten.
But goddammit, you'll look like a Greek god right to the end. And isn't that what matters?
Related Reading: What's that? You need more ridiculously unnecessary cosmetic surgery? Replacing your eyebrows with tattoos might be just the crazy operation for you! Still a little short on insane medical procedures? Clicking here will teach you the wonders of bone stretching and fecal transplants! And if all this talk of surgery has you feeling self-conscious, maybe its time you invested in a knee lift.
