Man-Rule: No Tanning Beds

It's practically the epitome of Manhood -- a well-muscled, tanned Man, his face smudged by smoke, rescuing a baby from a burning building with one hand while cooking a six-course meal with the other and giving a firm yet gentle expert back massage to his wife or girlfriend with his third hand. 


Naturally, some guys see obstacles here. "Well, I'm not well-muscled," they think. "I can't cook. My wife says my back massages are 'worse than an all-body bikini wax.' There are never any babies in the burning buildings I see. And I don't have three hands. But by golly, I can be tan!"

The problem is, some guys try to use a shortcut to get a tan - namely, tanning beds. 

A real Man gets a tan the way God intended, by working in the fields. The downside to this is that it can cause what's known as a "farmer's tan," where the only parts of the Man's body that become tan are those that aren't covered by the cab of his air-conditioned John Deere harvester. This has given birth to the recent craze of farmers driving their harvesters without clothes on, or "combinuding." For this reason we strongly recommend that you not visit Nebraska or Iowa between the months of May and December. 

Other Men, lacking access to a harvester or Nebraska, get a tan by lying on a beach or by working in their yard wearing only shorts or a bathing suit. These are also acceptable tanning methods, assuming your body type isn't such that 

a) people who see you lying on a beach automatically assume a rare albino whale has washed up on shore, or b) people who see you working in your yard automatically assume a rare albino whale has washed up on shore and is now, for some reason, cutting your grass. 

For some guys, though, even lying on the beach is too much effort to get a tan. "I know," they think. "I'll use a tanning bed!" Stop and consider this for a moment. What they're really saying is "I'll drive to a nearby strip mall, go into a place that was called 'E-Z Tax' until April 16 and has now been renamed 'E-Z Tan', take off all my clothes in a closet-sized room, then lay naked in a bed of fluorescent tubes where countless other naked guys have lain before me, thereby exposing the family jewels to levels of radiation normally used to cook Lean Cuisine meals to temperatures exceeding 600 degrees. AND I'll pay them good money to do this. Sounds like a plan!"

See, the problem is, a real Man doesn't care enough about his appearance to put forth the effort to lie in a tanning bed. Even lying on a beach is better, because then the Man can tell himself he's just resting in case he's needed to rescue an albino whale, or save a child from a burning building. 

Plus, a real Man doesn't pay for something (such as sunlight) that's plentifully available for free. (For this same reason, a real Man doesn't buy bottled water unless he's heading into the desert, and even then he only does it because his wife nags him into it -- he would be happier chopping into the base of a saguaro cactus to get a drink.) 

But once you pay money to lie down in a tanning bed and irradiate yourself, you're committing heresy. It's not right. It's not economical. It's not healthy. And it's not Manly.

Really, the only good thing that can come out of all that radiation from the tanning bed is the resulting mutation in your DNA. Maybe the third hand you'll eventually grow will be better at back massages than you are now.

(c) 2014 John Puckett