My thighs are still tingling.

It’s been seven days since the new pair of black skinny jeans arrived in the mail. Seven days of stretchable denim vacuum-sealed around my shins, thighs and the area of my body most sensitive to pressure. Seven days wearing what was once part of the hipster uniform, and is now the standard-style of pants for men of all stripes, according to no less august a source than the Wall Street Journal.

According to that report, Levi Strauss, Gap and other manufacturers of men’s skinny jeans are now making them bigger and stretchier to accommodate the average chicken-wings-and-Corona consuming American male. The brand True Religion has apparently incorporated a whole new “four-way stretch” spandex technology, aiming to democratize skinny jeans for those over 110 pounds.

Such efforts are directed at men just like me. I’m not skinny. Tight clothes do not flatter me. But if the jean-makers want to squeeze my thick thighs into a pair of impossibly tight pants, who am I to stop them? For one week recently, I donned a pair of skin-tight, crotch-assaulting skinny jeans to see how it could change my life.

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It also includes this nice bit, by Indie culture expert Kaya Oakes, on ubiquitous skinny jeans: “They’re really just a style some bands brought back a few years ago that’s stuck around for a mysteriously long time,” she says. “Skinny jeans represent the worst of the co-opting of indie by marketers. While they did look cool on various heroin addicts in the 70s punk scene, today they’re just a dumb fashion item that only looks good on a handful of people. Yet marketers keep pushing them on consumers, trying to make us believe they’ll make you fit right in at the Pitchfork Festival.”