The Bold Return of the Bulge: Gay Men’s Fashion, Power, and the Defiant Rise of Visibility

Men have spent an astonishing amount of human history being told how to be men by other men who seemed deeply preoccupied with everybody else’s penis. Cover it. Circumcise it. Control it. Keep your legs together. Stop touching it. Wear loose trousers. Think about baseball. Marry a woman. Produce an heir. Live the rest of your life emotionally constipated. Patriarchy has always had a lot of instructions.

I have a different proposition for modern masculinity: wear the pants that make your ass look fantastic and leave enough architecture up front to remind everyone that a human male is actually inside them. Welcome back to bulge fashion.

The Bold Return of the Bulge: Gay Men’s Fashion, Power, and the Defiant Rise of Visibility — Men’s Style with artist, fitness model, and LGBTQ+ rights activist Maxwell Alexander

Patriarchy Has Been Staring at Your Pants for Centuries

Fashion manipulates bodies for pleasure. We broaden shoulders, cinch waists, expose thighs, lift asses, exaggerate chests, grow beards, shave heads, build pecs, wear cowboy boots, and occasionally spend forty-five minutes choosing a white T-shirt that looks indistinguishable from the twelve already hanging in the closet. Men understand vanity perfectly well. We have simply developed elaborate heterosexual terminology for it.

Then we reach the crotch and suddenly everyone becomes a Victorian aunt.

The penis creates an amusing crisis for conventional masculinity because men are supposed to organize half their personalities around possessing one while pretending nobody can see the evidence. Patriarchy loves the symbolic phallus: skyscrapers, missiles, lifted pickup trucks, corporate towers, rockets blasting billionaires toward space. Put an ordinary man’s perfectly natural bulge into a pair of fitted trousers, however, and civilization requires smelling salts.

Fashion history makes the panic even funnier because men have been playing with the crotch silhouette for centuries. Research from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum traces today’s anatomical underwear back through generations of menswear that deliberately emphasized the package. Renaissance codpieces evolved from practical pieces of fabric into padded, decorated displays of masculine presence; by the sixteenth century, men were effectively walking around Europe with architectural additions attached to their crotches. A University of Cambridge history of the codpiece notes that moralists were complaining about revealing male fashions as far back as the fifteenth century. Evidently the bulge has been offending somebody for at least six hundred years. I admire its work ethic.

Then Along Came Dr. Kellogg and His Very Unhealthy Interest in Other People’s Cocks

American masculinity acquired an especially surreal chapter in the nineteenth century through physician and health reformer John Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that Kellogg. Medical historians have documented his recommendation of circumcision for boys who masturbated, including performing the procedure without anesthetic so that pain itself would become part of the punishment. Kellogg was one voice within a much larger medical crusade against masturbation, but his writing captures the pathology beautifully: grown men with institutional authority became so preoccupied with controlling boys’ sexuality that permanently altering their genitals could be presented as medicine. The history is documented in the peer-reviewed social history of male circumcision.

There is also an anatomical irony here for an article celebrating beautiful bulges. The foreskin is living, mobile tissue covering the glans, with specialized anatomy that participates in the movement of penile skin. An intact penis also carries that additional tissue around the head, contributing to its natural profile beneath clothing. In fashion terms, the point is wonderfully simple: foreskin is part of the original male architecture, and that architecture contributes to the bulge.

The deeper problem is bodily autonomy. Circumcision cannot be reduced to a historical joke about Kellogg because men exist today who experience the childhood removal of their foreskin as an unwanted loss. Recent research has documented grief and psychological distress among affected men, while a study of 1,790 men pursuing foreskin restoration found physical, sexual, psychological and self-esteem concerns among their motivations. Neuroscience research on amputation also demonstrates that the brain can retain representations of missing anatomy, although that research concerns limbs and should not be treated as direct evidence about circumcision. For a man who wanted the body he was born with, grief over an irreversible childhood procedure deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed out of the room.

That brings us directly back to Modern Masculinity and the bulge. Men are endlessly instructed to be powerful, autonomous and confident while decisions about their sexual anatomy can be made before they can speak for themselves. I prefer a far simpler principle: boys are born with bodies that belong to them. I was born with a foreskin because that is part of normal male anatomy, and I reached adulthood intact because nobody decided that a healthy part of my penis required removal. I am proud to be an intact man, proud of the body I was born with, and very happy with the beautifully substantial silhouette all that original architecture creates in a pair of tight pants.

The Bulge Has Fashion History, Darling

So let’s give bulge fashion the fashion credentials it deserves. The V&A’s history of men’s underwear documents a wonderfully persistent relationship between masculinity and crotch enhancement. The codpiece exaggerated the genital area centuries ago; closer-fitting trousers revived the visible male profile in the twentieth century; and by the 1980s, men’s underwear had decisively moved beyond pure utility into fashion and erotic display.

Then underwear designers stopped pretending they didn’t know what they were doing. The V&A documents modern pouch construction, padding and integrated rings specifically engineered to lift the genitals forward. Australian brand aussieBum introduced its Wonderjock in 2007 after customers expressed interest in looking bigger, applying essentially the same visual logic to men that the Wonderbra had already made perfectly respectable for breasts. Civilization survived.

I have explored the practical side of this evolution throughout HVSM’s men’s underwear coverage, including my adventures with anatomical pouch underwear, where the male package finally gets clothing designed around the body rather than requiring the body to negotiate with a flat piece of fabric. There is a delightfully obvious design principle hiding underneath all the jokes: men have anatomy. Good menswear can accommodate it.

That history also destroys the idea that a visible bulge represents a sudden decline in civilization invented by horny gay men on Instagram. Menswear has repeatedly enlarged, framed, supported, concealed and rediscovered male anatomy according to the politics and aesthetics of each era. Even the V&A connects contemporary enhancement underwear directly to the codpiece and to what one twentieth-century observer called an overt bulge of masculinity. Gay men did not invent the bulge. We may, however, have improved the lighting.

My Cock Has Never Prevented Me From Reading a Book

Which brings me back to Modern Masculinity, because clothing reveals the comedy beautifully. Toxic masculinity spent generations teaching men to occupy enormous amounts of social space while taking up remarkably little emotional or aesthetic space. Be powerful, but never beautiful. Be sexual, but never sensual. Desire women constantly, but display too much interest in your own body and somebody starts checking your heterosexual credentials. Build enormous muscles, then become strangely nervous about a Lycra seam.

As a gay man, artist, photographer, and bodybuilder, I find the whole arrangement exhausting. I have a brain, feelings, muscles, a pair of substantial balls, and an uncut cock. Miraculously, they have learned to coexist within one human organism. None has yet overthrown the others.

I have been circling this contradiction throughout the Modern Masculinity series. Emotional intelligence entered the conversation through men’s mental health; The Rainbow Was Never the Story pushed masculinity beyond rigid gender categories; and my earlier examination of hypermasculinity in competitive bodybuilding asked why a culture obsessed with gigantic male bodies becomes so nervous about acknowledging their sensuality.

The balls have entered the editorial record too. In Bodybuilding, Testosterone, and the Art of Longevity, I wrote about hormonal health, bodybuilding and my own changing relationship with masculinity over a decade of training. The broader men’s-health conversation becomes especially funny when our culture demands that men perform endless symbolic masculinity while remaining embarrassed by the actual biological equipment involved.

That is where my idea of Modern Masculinity keeps returning: integration. Strength can live beside tenderness. Intelligence can share a body with eroticism. A man can lift heavy weights, appreciate beautiful fabric, cry when something hurts, cook dinner, photograph another man’s body, hike through the Catskills, wear tiny shorts, read philosophy, love another man, and still possess whatever masculine energy feels authentic to him. Masculinity becomes far more compelling once we stop treating it like a nervous little club with a bouncer checking everyone’s pants.

The Bulge Is Back, Darling

Bulge fashion takes that integrated man and gives him a silhouette. Fashion designers have understood forever that clothing can exaggerate, support, reveal, redirect, compress and sculpt the body. A shoulder pad creates authority. A tailored waist alters proportion. Denim frames the ass. Underwear changes the line beneath trousers. Fabric tension determines which pieces of anatomy become visible and which dissolve into abstraction. The crotch participates in exactly the same visual system.

A visible bulge can read athletic in compression tights, decadent in swimwear, rugged in denim, elegant beneath tailored trousers, wonderfully slutty in tiny shorts, or almost sculptural in a fashion photograph. That versatility is precisely why I consider it fashion rather than exhibitionism. Silhouette carries meaning, and men deserve the same freedom to manipulate their physical proportions that fashion has enthusiastically granted shoulders, breasts, waists, hips and asses.

Contemporary menswear has already been loosening its old rules. Runways have played with skirts, abbreviated shorts, sheer fabrics, exposed bodies, exaggerated proportion and softer tailoring while the old uniform of emotionally unavailable man plus navy suit gradually loses its monopoly. The body underneath menswear has become part of the conversation again. Thank God. We were running out of things to do with lapels.

Queer men have been doing this visual work for generations because we learned early that clothing can communicate desire before language catches up. A tank top, a handkerchief, a leather jacket, a pair of Levi’s, a harness, a crop top, an exquisitely engineered swimsuit: gay fashion repeatedly takes objects from the surrounding culture and teaches them a considerably sexier dialect. Bulge fashion belongs comfortably within that tradition. The body communicates before the wearer ever opens his mouth.

And perhaps that explains why it still makes people nervous. A man who shapes his own silhouette has already made a decision about who owns the gaze. He can be looked at because he chose to be looked at. He can enjoy his body without converting it into dominance over somebody else’s. He can be masculine without spending the afternoon proving it. For a patriarchal system built around policing who gets to look, desire, dominate and display, a happy man in tight pants can become surprisingly subversive.

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Research & Further Reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum — A Brief History of Men’s Underwear. Fashion historian Shaun Cole traces the evolution of men’s underwear, the codpiece, twentieth-century crotch-conscious tailoring and contemporary enhancement underwear, including pouch construction, padding and designs intended to lift the male genitals forward.
• University of Cambridge — What Goes Up Must Come Down: A Brief History of the Codpiece. A cultural history of the codpiece from its practical origins through its transformation into an exaggerated feature of Renaissance male fashion, including contemporary moral anxieties surrounding revealing menswear.
• Fashion Institute of Technology, Fashion History Timeline — Codpiece. FIT’s fashion-history resource documents how the functional front of men’s hose developed into the padded and highly conspicuous codpiece of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century menswear.
• Reproductive Health Matters — “Just a Snip”?: A Social History of Male Circumcision. The peer-reviewed historical analysis documents nineteenth-century medical arguments for circumcision and reproduces John Harvey Kellogg’s recommendation that circumcision be performed without anesthetic when used as a punitive intervention against masturbation.
• Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience / PubMed Central — The Solitary Vice: The Superstition That Masturbation Could Cause Mental Illness. A medical-history review examining the long-standing belief that masturbation produced mental and physical illness and the interventions physicians promoted in response, including circumcision.
• Victoria and Albert Museum — Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear. The V&A’s broader scholarship on menswear places underwear, bodily display and the construction of masculine archetypes within the history of fashion, demonstrating that masculinity has always been visually manufactured rather than biologically delivered with a complimentary navy blazer.
• Reproductive Health Matters — “Just a Snip”?: A Social History of Male Circumcision. Peter Aggleton’s 2007 peer-reviewed study examines the medical and cultural history of circumcision, including John Harvey Kellogg’s advocacy of circumcision without anesthesia as punishment for childhood masturbation.
• International Journal of Impotence Research — Foreskin Restorers: Insights into Motivations, Successes, Challenges, and Experiences with Medical and Mental Health Professionals. A study involving 1,790 respondents across 60 countries documents the physical, sexual, psychological, and self-esteem concerns motivating men to pursue foreskin restoration, including experiences of dismissal by healthcare professionals.
• NeuroImage — Brain (Re)organisation Following Amputation: Implications for Phantom Limb Pain. A 2020 neuroscience review explores how the brain maintains representations of missing limbs following amputation, offering broader scientific context for understanding bodily loss and identity. The research concerns limb amputation rather than circumcision.
• PubMed — Research on Circumcision-Related Grief and Adult Mental Health. A 2025 qualitative study examines grief and psychological distress reported by men who experienced childhood circumcision as an unwanted bodily alteration. Its findings illuminate the experiences of affected individuals rather than establishing the prevalence of trauma among all circumcised men.

Continue the Modern Masculinity Series

Read Modern Masculinity, Mental Health, and the Courage to Feel, The Rainbow Was Never the Story: Gender Fluidity, Modern Masculinity, and the Human Search for Identity, What Happened to Bodybuilding Competitions?, and Bodybuilding, Testosterone, and the Art of Longevity for more of the ongoing HVSM conversation about bodies, hormones, desire, emotional intelligence and masculinity after patriarchy.