Right here in New York City, home to many free basketball courts, men are instead devoting their athletic prowess to gymnastics! The New York Sun visits Aviator Sports & Recreation in Brooklyn, where the gymnastics students are mostly men, who reportedly "excel" at it. Up to 30 at once! No wonder the Knicks can't find any good players!

Even scarier is the situation in San Jose, California, where 18 year-old Kenyon Smith is reportedly one of the best synchronized swimmers in the country [WSJ], despite having testicles!

Comics think synchro is great material, and when the joke is on a person of the nonfemale sex, it's a sure winner. So let's all laugh at Kenyon Smith, the male synchronized swimmer.

If the article stopped there, we would not be aroused from the warm embrace of our daily status quo. But it goes on to expose Kenyon's tragedy, which is that he cannot win a college scholarship or go to the Olympics, because he practices what is assumed to be a female sport.

His predicament touched our heart! Is it possible that there may be other acceptable venues for male physical movement outside of baseball (the American pastime), football (the more violent American pastime), basketball (the urban American pastime), and heterosexual sexual relations (the acceptable political American pastime)? We must admit that the possibility exists. Although its implications for the Knicks still tear our heart in two. Below, video of Kenyon Smith at work [pic and video via WSJ].

Witness the strands of the thread come together into a bleak picture of the future. Armani is counting on huge billboards of metrosexual nominal soccer star David Beckham to boost its underwear sales in America by more than $100 million. Dolce & Gabanna is using naked images to sell underwear, a strategy whose logic resides only in the mind of the fashion elite.

Both of these campaigns are aiming to sell tightie whities, mind you. It's not like Calvin Klein trotting out Marky Mark to sell us slightly more fashionable boxers, simply providing men with one more place to show off a brand name. No, these companies want our underwear shrunken, white, and easily dirtied, so as to necessitate replacement more often. And they're succeeding. Selfridge's in London said that sales of briefs more than doubled after the Beckham ads started running. If it can happen there, it can certainly happen in LA.

Not even regular brands like Jockey are safe havens. That downmarket, everyman company is trying to pass itself off as an upscale choice to the poor people of India, and is even rolling out a "super-premium range" of underwear in the near future. So at the same time luxury briefs are coming in, our own cheap underwear is raising its standards. There are few places left to hide.

The most terrifying front of this war is Australia, where men are already so far gone that they are expected to enthusiastically purchase the forthcoming Wonderbum,"designed to plump the behinds of 'all the flat-arsed men out there.'" Well. It may already be too late for Australia. Here, according to The Age, are some actual hot-selling products that the male population there buys, as it climbs Ayers Rock with a pet dingo or whatever:

The Wonderjock, the "male equivalent of the Wonderbra."

The C-In2 Contour Pouch Brief with "profile-enhancing" Y-front. "Y" is for yuck.

The Cin2 Bamboo Mesh Racer Brief, for the Tarzan in you.

We beg you: do not allow yourself to be mesmerized by the perceived sexiness of these products. Think of the men. Underwear is one of our final refuges from the rampaging gods of luxury. America is not David Beckham; America is Ralph Kramden. And nobody wants to see Ralph Kramden's jock, wonder or otherwise.

[Agenda Inc.]