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The 'Daddy' of the Metrosexual, the Retrosexual, & spawner of the Spornosexual

'So Dan, what supplements do you use mate?'

JUNE 12, 2014

FROM METROSEXUAL TO SPORNOSEXUAL

– TWO DECADES OF MALE DELICIOUSNESS

‘Metrodaddy’ Mark Simpson on the evolution of male vanity

(Originally appeared in The Daily Telegraph June 10, 2015)

In a development which will probably have him running to the mirror yet again to
search anxiously for lines, this year the metrosexual leaves his teens and turns twenty.
How quickly your children grow up. Although it seems only yesterday, I rst wrote
about him in 1994 a er attending an exhibition organised by GQ magazine called ‘It’s a
Man’s World’. I’d seen the future of masculinity and it was moisturised.

‘Metrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or
working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are) is perhaps the most
promising consumer market of the decade,’ I predicted.

Two decades of increasingly out and proud – and highly lucrative – male vanity later,
and the metrosexual remains the apple of consumerism’s rapacious eye. In a recent
report HSBC drooled all over his ‘Yummy’-ness, breathlessly pointing out how
mainstream metrosexuality has become.

This was of course old news to anyone with eyes to see the extremely image-conscious
and product-consuming men around them – or in bed with them – frantically trying to

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attract our attention. Or the way that the glistening pecs and abs of Men’s Health
magazine have been outselling the glamor breasts of ‘lad mags’ for several years.

Or indeed anyone who saw the news last year that UK men now spend more on shoes than
women.

Hard to believe in such a fragranced, bu ed, ripped, groomed, sel e-adoring and social
ME-dia saturated world as ours now is, the metrosexual had to struggle to be heard in
an un-tucked ‘no-homo’ early 1990s. Most people were in New Lad denial about what
was happening to men and why they were taking so long in the bathroom.

Just as male homosexuality was still stigmatised and partly criminalised back then, the
male desire to be desired – the self-regarding heart of metrosexuality – was still
scorned by many. Narcissism was still seen as ‘essentially feminine’.

Or Wildean – and look what happened to him. The trials at the end of the 19th Century
of Oscar Wilde, the last dandy who famously proclaimed that ‘to love oneself is the
beginning of a life-long romance’,  had stamped, like a steam-powered die, a Victorian
division of sexual labour over much of the 20th Century. Male vanity was at best
womanish – but more likely simply passive and perverted.

The arrival of a shiny new Millennium, the abolition of the last laws discriminating
against homosexuality, and the arrival of the preening dominance of celebrity culture
with its Darwinian struggle to be noticed in a visual, ‘branded’ world nally blew away
the last remnants of Victorianism.

To illustrate this I only have to mention two words: David Beckham. The working class
family man England footballer who became much more globally famous for his
attention-seeking haircuts, unabashed prettiness and rampant desire to be desired
than for his footballing skills. Once the sarong-wearing, gay loving, cheek-sucked male
model mid elder was outed in 2002 (by me again, sorry) as amingly metrosexual,
everyone suddenly ‘got it’. All that Nineties denial turned into incessant Noughties
chatter about metrosexuals and ‘male grooming’. O en to little purpose.

In fact, the momentous nature of the masculine revolution that metrosexuality

represents has been largely obscured by much of the super cial coverage it got.
Metrosexuality is, in a paradox that Wilde would have relished, not skin deep. It’s not
about facials and manbags, guyliner and ip ops. It’s not about men becoming ‘girly’
or ‘gay’. It’s about men becoming everything. To themselves. Just as women have been
encouraged to do for some time.
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This uptake by men of products, practises and pleasures previously ring-fenced for
women and gay men is so normal now – even if we still need to be reassured with the
word ‘man’ or ‘guy’ strapped on the front, like a phallic paci er – that it’s taken for
granted by young men today who really have become everything. So much so that it can
be really too much for the older generation of metrosexuals.

With their painstakingly pumped and chiselled bodies, muscle-enhancing tattoos,

piercings, adorable beards and plunging necklines, it’s eye-catchingly clear that second
generation metrosexuality is less about clothes than it was for the rst. Eagerly self-
objectifying, second generation metrosexuality is totally tarty. Their own bodies more
than clobber and product have become the ultimate accessory, fashioning them at the
gym into a hot commodity – one that they share and compare in the online
marketplace.

This new wave of metrosexuality has hyped the ‘sexual’ part and become ‘spornosexual’
– the pumped-up o spring of those spornographic Ronaldo and Beckham lunch-box
ads where sport got into bed with porn while Mr Armani took pictures. But unlike
Beckham, whose attributes were possibly arti cially enhanced, today’s baby Beckhams
have photoshopped themselves in real life. Think Dan Osborne in a pair of glittery
Speedos. (And then have a lie down.)

Glossy magazines cultivated early metrosexuality. Celebrity culture then sent it into
orbit. But for today’s generation social media, sel es and porn is the major vector of the
male desire to be desired. They want to be wanted for their bodies more than their
wardrobe. And de nitely not their minds.

I suspect Wilde, who famously enjoyed feasting with panthers, would have approved. I
certainly do. Even if I’m a little bit frightened too.

    More

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The Metrosexual is Undead The metrosexual isn't dead,

How many obituaries will the press
write for the metrosexual before
they nally accept that he's
immortal? Or at least, undead?
That every time they cut o his
he's just power-napping on
the sunbed
The Times recently ran a feature by
Andrew Billen called 'Metrosexual
R.I.P.?' wondering whether the
metrosexual was now dead in the Metrosexmania: How America
wake of the recent closure of Conde Lost Its Mind Over
Metrosexuality

 

 MARK S

 JUNE 12, 2014 12:03 AM

 SPORNOSEXUAL

 20 YEARS OF METROSEXUALS, DAVID BECKHAM, FEATURED, HISTORY OF

METROSEXUALITY, METROSEXUAL, SPORNOSEXUAL, SPORNOSEXUALITY, SPORNOSEXUALS,
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

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