Fiction surrounds our lives at every turn, of course. We take in course a dozen fictions before breakfast. We roll with the fiction that we are immortal, that what Jeff Glor reads from the teleprompter is, in fact, “news,” that our homes are not filled with toxins that are almost certainly shortening our lives… We roll with the fiction because it makes life manageable, at the very least. Or, in the case of homoerotic wrestling, it makes life that much more delightful.

Homotrophy recently posted these pics from the 2011 underwear/undergear collection of Victor Luis, in which model model body beautiful Ariel Bresky poses as fighter who appears to have just hit the locker room after man-on-man competition in motor oil. There’s some unmistakable truth evident in these very hot pics. There’s the truth that Ariel is a smoking hot male model with a long, lean torso. There’s the truth that the undergear products are quite provocative, square cuts alluding to a jock strap and painting a target across Ariel’s pouch. But there are a couple of fictions here that I find distracting.

Someone has drawn, as if with a grease pen, the outline of a six pack across Ariel’s already gorgeous abs. They have shaded with make-up underneath the expanse of Ariel’s broad, sexy pecs, as if to convince us that he’s packing more the meat of a competition bodybuilder than a lean and lovely male model. Now I’m not naive. I know that this happens ALL the time, across all media and mass marketing, in infinite numbers of ways. Body’s are smoothed out, plumped, flattened, stretched, and swelled by applications, surgical interventions, and digital technology. Blemishes are erased, asymmetries are reconstructed, colors are altered and textures reapplied ALL the time. But Ariel’s photo shoot for Victor Luis is just… well, just too ham-handed for me to manage to suspend my disbelief. While I applaud ever fight-kink allusion when a male model is posed as a full contact fighter, I must draw a line and say that crayon outlines of abs and pecs, no matter what your lighting challenges, are not sexy. Leave this hunk of gorgeousness with more modest overlay, that we may savor the truth enhanced, not distracted, by the stagecraft.