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Now that summer has arrived, it becomes absolutely necessary for those of us in Canada to spend as much time as possible over the next three months lounging at the beach, the cottage, or just on your deck pretending it's the beach or a cottage.

Unfortunately for me, however, the approach of shirtless weather has coincided with an injury that has grounded me from the usual workout and running regime that maintains the perimeter known as my gut. Hence, I recently found myself inconveniently coming face to belly with the fact that whatever miracle metabolism equation was in place on the slim side of 30, it's now gone and is not returning. As I viewed my midsection begin its inflation, slowing rising like a balloon towards the blazing sun, I wondered how this was going to affect my attractiveness to the already fairer sex. Will women turn away in horror?

But then, as I selectively scanned through my memory banks, I remembered all those pudgy men I've seen with women in better shape than them. Women, those benevolent creatures, are less “visual” than men – God bless them – and so are more interested in the man located somewhere beneath all the flesh. Of course, if you read through the evolutionary explanations for why this is so, you'll discover it's because women have historically had to be less concerned with how their prospective mate looks and more invested in whether he'll just stick around. (Way to set the bar low, cave dudes.) So why should I worry?

Kathleen Martin Ginis, a behavioural scientist at the department of kinesiology at McMaster University, studies male body image and says when it comes to the state of a man's corpus, in general, he simply has other priorities than his appearance.

“With regards to the body, men often tend to be more focused on the function and the health of it,” she says. “So they think, ‘Yeah, I've got a beer belly, but you know what, I don't have diabetes or heart disease, and I'm a construction worker and I can lift stuff.'”

Okay, but what if his woman decides it's high time to shake off the old evolutionary directive and instead hints that he could lose a few? I mean, I once, um, had “a friend” that received this advice.

Dr. Martin Ginis suggests that while women who heard such a comment from a man might cry or stop eating, this isn't generally the case with men. “Half would probably dump the girlfriend and the other half might think about doing something about it,” she said. “The other half would go out and have a beer. That's three halves, but anyway, it depends on the guy.”

Obviously, some guys do have more serious body-image issues and it's a trend Dr. Martin Ginis says is growing with the increasing prevalence of ripped male bods in the media and in advertisements. And when it comes to male insecurity with the body, she says it's not as straightforward as it is with women.

“If you look really closely at body-image data, about 40 per cent of men want to be thinner. About 40 per cent want to be heavier. And then within that group that want to be heavier, some of them want to be heavier in terms of muscle mass and some want to be heavier in terms of having more body fat,” she says. “I think it's the one sex difference where women are less complicated than men.”

Well, finally – I suppose.

Tom Hildebrandt, director of the Eating and Weight Disorders Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, did some studies on what women look for in men's bodies and some of his results show that – gulp – women do have some standards, at least when shown pictures of men in the lab. Interestingly, just like guys, he says, women are influenced by the collective opinion of what is attractive, which is shown to them in media and ads.

“When women are alone, they pick that normal-looking guy, attainable by human standards without drugs,” he says. “They still lean more towards muscularity but not ridiculously. But put them in a group, and all of the sudden they're endorsing as attractive this more muscular, more lean male figure, which is probably not attainable without drugs or excessive exercise.”

Which leads to the advice that women have been trying to tell themselves forever. For men, it would sound like this: Sadly, you're never going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Probably not even Wolverine. So stop trying.

“If we all had to look like that lean muscular ideal, none of us would ever have partners. And that's clearly not the case,” Dr. Hildebrandt says to reassure me that women can't maintain those standards outside the lab. “There'd be like six guys who were dating half the planet. And they'd be too busy modelling and would be dehydrated all the time from all the diuretics.”

So it seems to me that men should continue to stand up – or rather, sit down – for their exceedingly wise valuation of attributes other than appearance. Exercise enough in order to not have a heart attack and then let your inner beauty, which is dying to emerge from beneath the pudge, draw in the ladies.

Let's take down all the ads of ridiculously ripped male torsos and too-thin women and love each other not for our forms, but for our functions! (That sounded sexier in my head.)

Maybe it's just the heat making me feel lazy, but that cold beer waiting for me on my deck is looking a lot more attractive than those running shoes right now.

Micah Toub's memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks, will be published in April, 2010.