If you think women can finally live a day without being reminded of their place in the pecking order (if you’re a woman, you’re laughing right now) – think again.

All you need do is look around, and you will find countless examples of bog-standard, thoughtless sexism. The comforting sort that we grew up with. A tepid bath of double standards, if you will.

Under the headline “Getting married? Get strong”, the New York Times enlists the help of stern-sounding personal trainers to offer you the chance to get in great shape for your wedding day – and, reading between the lines, this probably means you need to get as far away from your normal, slobby self as is physically possible.

There are all kinds of exercises suggested: for the women, toning regimes to make sure your mottled sausage arms whittle down appropriately to fit through your classic white princess dress.

For men, a variety of squats and lun– oh no, wait, there are no exercises suggested for men! It’s an article aimed entirely at women who only wish to wear a traditional white dress when they get married (I know this because, helpfully, all the illustrations show thin women in white dresses) and who also imagine they can just buy one and – how dare they? – enjoy themselves.

But the New York Times is here to tell how how pitiful and wrong you are. A man can put on whatever he wants to get hitched (I suggest a kilt with an accompanying neon sporran) but women have to earn the privilege. Wearing a sheath dress? You’d better be thinking about “exercises that tone your core, hips and legs” – and not wasting your time thinking about the lifelong union you will be entering, or getting excited about all the memories you will be making.

Equally, I hope you’re not spending too much energy on thinking about whether marriage is an institution that can ever truly work for women if you’re planning on going strapless on the day. Because trainer Kit Rich, who was consulted for the article, needs you to know that it’s not worries about the patriarchal structures in our society that will tone up your shoulders and arms. It’s push-ups and a jump-clap, dammit.

If you’re going for an open-back dress, then you’d better know that nobody cares about you, your beloved or your carefully curated table plan designed so that your cousin Jack and your mate Nadia will finally hook up. No! Everyone will know that “your back is the star”, says Laura Posada, another trainer who appears in the piece. It turns out that your back, an area of your body you cannot even see, must be worked and trained.

Once you identify which shape of dress you will be shoving your disgustingly normal body into, there’s also diet advice to consider. The article has a cute bit at the beginning about eating right “whether you want to lose weight or gain weight or you like your self just the way you are” which is almost like the terms and conditions we all click yes to, impatiently, but know will come back and screw us one day. Nobody asking you to consider your underarm shape seriously thinks you like yourself just the way you are.

Women cannot win (there’s a sentence for the ages). If we care about our appearance, we’re branded shallow. If we dare to assume that we can throw on any dress we like to get hitched in, someone will tell us we’re deluded.

There is one bit of the piece that they nailed: the headline.

“Getting married? Get strong” is a solid nugget of advice. If you’re going to enter into a union with another human being, you should be as strong as possible. It’s hard to live with someone day in, day out. It’s hard to compromise, to have enough empathy, to not lose some of yourself. Sometimes it’s really hard to love your partner when they repeatedly wear your neon sporran without asking.

Lift weights as much as you want in the run-up to your wedding. But don’t do it because a newspaper tells you to. Journalists are some of the least fit people in the world, and even they manage to get married. Anyway, you don’t need biceps for the wedding – you need them for the divorce. Mazel tov!