This is a recent development. Short shorts on men endured a brief Dark Age between the 1990s and today. They were shorter before – my father was the picture of American gentility in his 5in navy adidas and aviators back in the 1970s. Mr Larry Bird’s little Larry was practically popping out of his basketball shorts in the mid-1980s. But by the 1990s something had shifted. NBA players’ uniforms began to resemble individual floor-length gowns on each leg, a heavy nylon that lugubriously circled their shins. Mr Andre Agassi was a pioneering fit god in his racy, acid-washed denim, but he was transgressive. It was only allowed because by overstepping boundaries, he confirmed those boundaries were indeed there.

Perhaps it was the conservative response to the Aids crisis that rendered anything remotely homosexual dangerous, thereby stamping out all flouncing potential from shorts culture. We might blame the backlash to feminism, too. At some point, we realised legs were a women’s thing, and men shouldn’t be prancing about. And oh, how ladies got to show them off. Ms Tina Turner in her fishnets. Bardot in her mini dresses. Ms Jessica Simpson in her Daisy Dukes.

The Larry Bird era was a natural evolution in a centuries-long eroticisation of the male leg. Colonial men would stuff their tights to make their calves look bigger (a precursor to today’s calf implants). Good calves could mean you had stairs in your home, or that you were a good dancer – and what lady doesn’t want a man who can waltz?

British historian Professor Karen Harvey argues rather convincingly in her 2015 article “Men Of Parts” that the arc of men’s fashion, from medieval robes to 1950s suits, is one where legs, and their gradual reveal, became a stand-in (pun-intended) for maleness. Having an outfit with separate tops and bottoms (as opposed to a dress) became synonymous with masculinity. As we left The Renaissance, the rejection of poofy silhouettes in favour of increasingly sober and form-fitting attire was not just a workaday evolution, but one that fetishised the leg itself:

“Projection had long been ‘the fundamental principle of masculinity’,” wrote Harvey. “This phallocentrism was manifest in the closely dressed male leg that appears to have connoted not just beauty and strength but male reproductive power.”

The leg as a phallus. Makes a lot of sense when you think about the shape. And unlike the phallus, you can actually improve it. Even better, there are two of them. Men seemed to know this. “As a book of maxims informed its readers in 1753: ‘It is natural for a man, even for an Englishman, to have a certain serenity settled in his eyes, when there is no further doubt about the fine shape of his leg,’” said Harvey. Ah yes, that tranquil feeling when you realise your quads are completely ripped. Today’s gym rats would surely agree.

As the age of the selfie has commodified every inch of our physique, increasing the laundry list of parts to be perfected, the bare leg has re-emerged: no longer the site of immaturity, but the measure of a man. What was once deemed too gay, too sexual, too fraught with attention seeking, is now a welcome sight at the coffee shop. Every day is leg day. Modern man has located, in that sinewy band of muscles between the groin and the ankle, a new locus of power, where popping veins trace a treasure map for erstwhile gold diggers and sensual persuasion arrives with a faint ripple on taut skin.

Wolfson argues there is something safe about the male thigh, a more agreeable erotic totem for women in the post #MeToo era. “They are sporty, useful, athletic, deeply revealing, lightly erogenous, ultimately unthreatening,” he says. “They are often covered in softer hair and blemishes. Displaying them has a strange vulnerability – a state of nature, rather than one of undress.” If truth is perception, women seem to perceive cuddly, non-aggression in the soft-boy stars of today. But the thigh is no sleeper cell. It’s an alpha. A raging stallion of sexual energy. And what better saddle for a stallion than short shorts?

I will never forget walking – no, strutting – down the dirt streets of Cairo in 2008 (this was before the revolution), in some downright slutty denim short shorts. They were woven up the sides – braided denim on denim – which revealed even more of my thigh, all the way up to my white briefs. As I sauntered, the men of Cairo, sitting at their tables, playing dominoes, began wolf-whistling at me. The more they cat-called, the more feline my gait became, my hips swaying, sinking into each step. Egypt is so conservative a country, it was like they didn’t even see homosexuality, just bodies, especially if they weren’t the implied receptive partner. There was something implicitly feminine about my short shorts to those men, something scandalous. Their gaze trained on me, I felt alive, vivacious. I imagined how Ms Anne Boleyn must have felt when Henry VIII first cast his gaze on her, and in that moment she wondered if the King of England might alter the course of history just to press his hands on her naked flesh.

Masculinity, you see, is intrinsically bound not just to fashion trends, but the physical experience of wearing those clothes. In the Victorian era, thin stockings allowed onlookers to judge the contours of the male calf. To feel the gaze of the other penetrating your tights – how could it not make you feel yourself? Today’s urban warrior, strutting out of the gym in his 5in baggies, is undoubtedly more aware of the contours of his body, the attention it receives. He’s excited by it. He cultivates it, knowingly or not. Might we all be so humble as to embrace our desire to be seen. And to meet the searching gaze of the other with something considered and confident: not just our legs, but ourselves.