January 05, 2004
Twinkies
Posted by nerdling | January 5, 2004 02:49 PM
I know you've heard the word before, but in case you ever wondered where it came from, now you know: the official appearance of the metrosexual phenomenon was in salon.com:
Well, perhaps it takes one to know one, but to determine a metrosexual, all you have to do is look at them. In fact, if you're looking at them, they're almost certainly metrosexual. The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis — because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere.
For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn't shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image — that's to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that's the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser's walking wet dream.
And further, why metrosexuality is a bad, bad thing:
Two decades on, and the hairless — perpetually adolescent and available — dazzlingly toothy, muscular, masculine template is still with us, simultaneously a cliché and de rigueur in an Abercrombie & Fitch world. A&F may be looked down upon as middlebrow and middle American by the most refined metrosexuals, but its alarming popularity with straight, beer-drinking frat boys is proof of how metrosexuality has gone mainstream — while its lusciously produced, semi pornographic quarterly catalogues deliver conclusive proof that male narcissism (in photograpic shorthand: Weber-ism), is only ever a post-workout shower away from homoeroticism.
Perhaps this is because nowadays straight men are also emasculated. Female "Sex and the City" metrosexuality has seen to that. Female metrosexuality is the complement of male metrosexuality, except that it's active where male metrosexuality is passive. No longer is a straight man's sense of self and manhood delivered by his relationship to women; instead it's challenged by it. Women are still monarchs of the private world, but increasingly assertive in the public world too. Series like "Oz," set in a male prison and featuring story lines that revolve around violent buggery, probably look like a kind of sanctuary for some men from the female voraciousness of "Sex and the City."
And, as the pages of the celeb mags reveal, the more independent, wealthy, self-centered and powerful women become, the more they are likely to want attractive, well-groomed, well-dressed men around them. Though not for very long. By the same token, the less men can rely on women, the more likely they are to take care of themselves. Narcissism becomes a survival strategy; apparently, some men actually buy their own underwear and deodorant these days.
