Photo by Milton Bradley/Hasbro, used with Permission

Stevenson was closing in on 60 years old. Who was this old man staring back at him in the mirror?

“I remember looking at myself,” he recalls about that moment from last year. “We’d just finished converting some old VHS tapes onto DVDs, and I saw myself 10, 15, 20 years ago. And I looked at myself and I said, ‘Boy, have you gotten old.’ I didn’t feel old, but I looked old.”

An engineer by education, a Motorola executive by trade, Stevenson is a results guy, the sort of man for whom every circumstance, every dilemma, demands a tidy set of solutions. That was how he ended up in the Scottsdale office of Dr. John Gibney, getting a consultation about a facelift. And liposuction. And a little cleanup work beneath his chin.

“You know,” Stevenson says with a chuckle, “my turkey neck?”

One night in the hospital and approximately three weeks of healing later, Stevenson looked at himself again through the practical eyes of an engineer. What he saw was the younger version of himself captured long ago on those DVDs. Problem solved.

“All of a sudden, I don’t know if it’s my own perception or what, but people find me attractive. Women find me attractive,” he says. “It’s a whole new awakening. My wife says she has to put a leash on me now.”

Not that his wife, Jane – they’ve been married for 42 years – was at all opposed to her “new” husband.

“She’s extremely pleased. She can’t believe the difference,” Stevenson says. “Literally, after I healed completely, she said, ‘We’re going on a second honeymoon.’ We went to Sicily. She said, ‘You know, you look good enough. We’ll do this again.’”

Stevenson’s tale of rejuvenation through surgery is more than simply one 60-year-old’s happy ending. It appears to be one story followed by a million more like it, an anecdote indicative of a new upswing among men. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the last decade has been extraordinarily busy for medical professionals who specialize in wiping away years and imperfections from faces and bodies – even men’s faces and bodies.

Back in 1997, America’s collection of “rugged guys” who were busy “aging gracefully” had about 287,000 cosmetic procedures, an ASAPS stat that includes both surgical and non-surgical fixes.

In 2000, that number grew to 640,000.

Last year, the figure topped 1 million for the first time, clocking in at 1,098,550.

Stratospheric numbers like those are enough to make a guy wonder what’s going on. When exactly did the Marlboro Man go soft? Too much Sex In The City? Have women – who comprise 51 percent of America’s population but still get 90 percent of its plastic surgery – rubbed off on the allegedly coarser sex? Or is this one of those complicated medical science-meets-economics-meets-culture kind of things, like the stuff they write about in fancy academic journals and The New Yorker?

According to Dr. Alan Gold, president-elect of the ASAPS and a professor of surgery at Cornell University, the more complicated answer seems to be the correct one.

“There’s much greater variety of [procedures] available today compared to 10 years ago, and therefore much greater access to those things,” Gold says. “If you couple all that with the continuing social consciousness regarding appearance and the ease of access to non-surgical, comparatively less expensive procedures, I think that accounts… for the increase.”

Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, who studies popular culture and television for a living, takes Gold’s analysis several steps further. As Thompson sees it, the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s redefined the boundaries between the sexes. This reshuffling of gender roles not only gave words like “tolerance” and “diversity” an exalted place in the culture, over time this change also beat back some long-held stigmas, like the idea that plastic surgery was only for vain Hollywood types and accident victims.