How did the six-pack win its place as such a potent erotic trigger for 21st-century woman?

I blame Marky Mark. As far as I can recall, the six-pack didn’t much register on the female sex radar pre-Marky (aka Mark Wahlberg) and his Calvin Klein pants ads in the early Nineties. Marky’s ripped mid-section was all over posters, not to mention Smash Hits, and it excited teenage girls. Then came the age of the boy bands, and they followed Marky’s precedent. Now, all women, of whatever age and demographic, seem excited by the six-pack. There is a woman in this very office who has pictures of them all over her workspace, like garages used to display glamour calendars. A recent Dolce & Gabbana ad featured the (impressive) six-pack of a model named Dave Gandy. The feral whoops that echoed through the Times features section when my female colleagues first spotted it chill me to this day.

Acquiring a six-pack involves eating lots of protein and doing hundreds of sit-ups, daily. Not being in prison, I’ve better things to do. So I got a Slendertone System-Abs (£117.44; www.slendertone.com), which uses electricity to flex your abdominal muscles so you don’t have to. For about three weeks I was loving my System-Abs. I cranked it up to 99 – the highest charge – and ploughed through Generation Kill (which features a lot of six-packs). Being abdominally electrocuted is a not unpleasant feeling, and I did, eventually, notice a slight difference. But I wasn’t Marky Mark. So I got bored and stopped using it. Who wants to be objectified, anyway?

tokenmale@thetimes.co.uk