These are confusing times for sportsmen. You only have to look at the little-boy-lost faces on Andrew Castle and Mark Foster during Strictly Come Dancing. Doing sport for a living used be the most virile profession on earth. But then David Beckham went and muddled everything with his metrosexual appeal.
No longer does the spectrum of machismo chart a linear path. In the old days it was easy: effeminate; blokey; stud-like; rugby league player. Now it is more of a parabolic curve. In other words, carry too far along the scale and Macho Man starts heading straight back towards camp. If you've seen a single one of Becks's Armani adverts, you'll know how this works.
Of course, sport has always had strange ideas about virility. The first ever athletes were Greek blokes who were taught that their sporting exertions - wrestling with fellow men in the nude and the like - were a nice warm-up for erotic behaviour with women.
Obviously the olive oil days are far behind us - I believe Johnson's baby lotion is now considered better for the skin - but, when you watch footballers piling on to each other in an ecstatic goal celebration, you can't help but wonder if it's all part of the legacy.
Now rugby is a prime candidate for the new when-does-macho-stop-being-macho confusion. Once the ultimate manly man's sport, it's currently looking as confused as a pubescent teen with a same-sex crush on the PE teacher.
Take the Stade Français kit, which was outré enough two seasons ago when it was merely hot pink. Last year they added a floral pattern that I think I recognised from a Laura Ashley catalogue.
Now, I'm not sure what I'd like to be wearing when I pack down to face 140-stone of barely contained male aggression but I'm pretty sure it's not this season's offering, a skintight pop-art melange that Little Britain's Dafydd would give his eyeteeth for. Still, courage in all forms.
Actually the preening element of modern rugby was not a surprise to me. I noticed a few years ago that rugby lads are the dressing-up kind. My college had a hearty rugger tradition, complete with a naked quad run that took place once a year for the first XV to showcase their tackles.
Far more frequently, however, they held drinking evenings that required every squad member to turn up in women's clothing. I always knew when it was rugby night because, having the rare privilege of size nine feet, I would find a queue of lads at my door asking to borrow a pair of heels.
Machismo is moving on and the muddied oaf is shifting his goalposts accordingly. Once the slightest chink in your studied masculinity was likely to result in you getting your teeth knocked out in the next ruck.
Now Kyran Bracken can dress up in spandex, strap skates to his feet and swoon around the ice to Ravel's Bolero and no one bats an eyelid. Thanks to pioneers such as Bracken and Strictly Come Dancing's Austin Healey, rugby camp will soon cease to be somewhere you send your kids for the holidays and become a genre in its own right.
Healey, if you haven't been watching the show, has taken to the dance floor like a child actor to cocaine. There has been no more exhilarating TV moment of 2008 than watching the former England wing snapping his fingers at the judging panel as if Len Goodman was his bitch.
He has the bounce of the Andrex puppy and the biceps of a Norse God. Admittedly even Arlene Phillips hasn't yet explained how important big guns are to the quickstep but that hasn't stopped them swelling magnificently with every week that passes. Soon they will require a dressing room of their own.
The sportsman's competitive instinct has taken over and Healey has thrown himself heart and sole (see what I did there?) into the contest. Last week his dance partner, Erin Boag, revealed that even at home, between rehearsals, he pours over YouTube's greatest flamenco hits to research new moves.
And it was Healey who insisted that everyone turn up for a group dance rehearsal dressed up like the cast of Fame, topping the bill in some butt-clenchingly tight black leggings and pink anklewarmers. This, lest we forget, is the man who called Justin Harrison a plank.
If I were rugby league, I'd be getting worried. With so much determinedly heterosexual manflesh on the field at the World Cup, they must be teetering on the edge of a machismo meltdown. It's only a matter of time before someone goes into a tackle shouting "Not the face! Not the face!"
