As every Australian knows, this is by far the more serious crime. Mick wasn't the only one. Even at school, there were allegations of certain boys trying self-enhancement using a wad of tissues, much in the way that teenage girls would stuff their bras. Presumably, for both genders, if the tissues didn't work they could be fished out later when one was back home after the party sobbing on one's virgin couch. But what if they did work? This is the part of the technique I never understood. The deception would be revealed in the very moment of its triumph. It would be like inviting people to the Sydney Opera House for a performance of Wagner's Ring and walking on stage with a ukulele. In all the books about marketing, the principle is to "under-promise and over-deliver". The stuffed-tissue technique is the opposite. Disappointment is an inevitable result. There's another problem. In the Marks & Spencer catalogue, the "enhancement underwear" is always photographed side-on. Presumably, it is from this angle, and only this angle, that the 38per cent visual enhancement is achieved.

This is all very well but when approaching someone at a party, one rarely does so sideways. "Hello, I'm Ralph," spoken while executing a crab-like crawl across the patio trying to hold one's champagne flute aloft, is unlikely to cut it with the more discerning sheila. Perhaps this is the way you can tell if someone is wearing enhancement undies: he'll be the guy standing side-on to the rest of you, hands on hips and groin thrust forward, positioning himself so as to be backlit by the porch lights. A future civilisation will, I hope, look back at this time and wonder why we all hated our bodies so much. Why has it come to pass that men are wearing fake underpants because they feel so insecure about how they measure up, while women teeter about on heels so high they can hardly walk? Even more bizarre has been the return of the corset, that metaphor for Victorian repression. Who would have thought that was possible? This body hatred of 2010 will one day seem simply laughable; a satire designed to amuse. As I have noted before in this column, in Hollywood people are now having fat sucked from their bottoms and injected into their lips. It's impossible to satirise. At social functions, they are literally kissing each other's arses.

More bizarre still, they then have the paralysing agent, Botox, injected into their forehead lest they form the sort of wrinkles that we used to associate with wisdom, age and a life that had experienced its fair share of laughter. So the top half of your face is injected with Botox and the bottom half with Buttocks. Get the order wrong and you end up with a fat forehead and paralysed lips. Remember that moment in the 1970s when the body was momentarily free: clad in a pair of loose jeans and a cheesecloth shirt as the breeze undulated a whole forest of body hair? And that was just the women. Any chance of returning to that time? Or do we need to continue to discipline our bodies? Pushing, prodding, slicing, shaving, inserting, plucking and branding. Really, the Middle Ages had nothing on us. What's next: Chinese foot-binding? Hair shirts? Hair undies? Walking around with a whip with which to punish ourselves?

I know that the fashion industry and the medical industry need to make their money but could we at least organise a bit of resistance to this festival of body hatred and chronic insecurity? Sure, feminists never burnt their bras — that's a bit of a myth. But that shouldn't stop the men of 2010 from burning their undies: a mass protest over the commodification of our bodies by MrMarks and Mr Spencer. Elvis went commando. So why can't you?richard@richardglover.com.au.