Metrosexuality has also converted Hollywood to its persuasion. Films like "Fight Club" and "American Psycho" and "Spider-Man" exploit and/or negotiate the anxiety created by metrosexuality's impact on masculinity while of course employing all the advertising techniques that have been used to convert young men to metrosexuality in the first place. This can lead to an irony that loops back on itself: auto-fellatio with arched eyebrows. In "Fight Club," a film that looks like a feature-length glossy men's magazine fashion shoot, Brad "six-pack" Pitt, smooth Calvin Klein model turned Hollywood pretty boy, and one of America's most famous metrosexual males, leads an all-boys-together rebellion against ... Calvin Klein, or rather emasculating consumerism.

In "American Psycho," the antihero serial killer's problem is presented as his failure to recognize the woman that could civilize him: "Have you ever wanted to make someone happy?" she asks innocently. He doesn't hear her: He's too busy getting out his giant nail gun. Making someone else happy is of course an even more impossible quest than making yourself happy -- our parents taught us that. But in this case it is rather less likely to stain your white silk sofa.

The "Spider-Man" movie meanwhile offers us the kinky, fetishistic spectacle of a geeky ordinary young man whom no one notices transformed into a raving metrosexual before our very eyes. Apparently injected with steroids and ecstasy by a gay spider, he admires his new buffed body with widening eyes in the mirror, dresses up in a tight lycra gimp suit and runs around a lot on all fours with his arse in the air, after having setting up (Web?) cameras to record his (s)exploits. Peter Parker/Tobey Maguire employs designer drugs, clothes, perverse sexuality and multimedia technology to get people to look at him as he swings between the billboards and skyscrapers from what appears to be his own hardening jism.

In one memorable bondage/mummification-resonant scene he hangs upside down in his gimp suit while Kirsten Dunst peels off the lower part of his mask to kiss him, before replacing it: a perfect example of the new power dynamic between metrosexual men and women and how metrosexual men have to be the center of attention. We're supposed to believe that Tobey is motivated by old-fashioned virtues of social concern and love for Kirsten but we don't believe it for a moment. Nor does, in the end, the movie: Kirsten finally offers herself but Tobey declines, realizing that she would come between him and his real love: his metrosexual alter ego in the Day-Glo gimp suit.

American publishing meanwhile is effectively repeating the ironic formula of "Fight Club" and the Brit lad-mags (Maxim, FHM) exported to the U.S. from the U.K. (sorry, another bad habit we've passed on to you guys, along with Wang Chung and Ozzy Osbourne). In the editorial these magazines perform a kind of hysterical heterosexuality of tits, beer, sports, cars, and fart-lighting -- but the real money shot is the pages and pages of glossy, straight-faced fashion spreads and ads featuring glossy male models selling male vanity; that, after all, is what these magazines exist to deliver. Which is to say, the lad-mags are actually raving metrosexual but still in denial, which is the place that most men are at right now.

Mind you, denial has something to be said for it. It can take some interesting and creative forms -- such as Eminem, for example. The "faggot" boy bands that Mr. Mathers hates are definitely metrosexual. And yet Em, who like Beckham can't resist a big fat shiny lens, who loves to pose half-naked (and drag it up in his videos), and who also wears his children as accessories, is clearly and alarmingly metrosexual himself; we're all looking at him and he's meeting our gaze with his pretty, hooded baby-blue eyes. He bitches and moans about all the attention he gets, but succeeds in turning that bitching and moaning into another album.

Eminem poses dreamily for the cover of glossy magazines, but then has a hissy fit when they Photoshop his shirt pink and demands that they pulp their entire print run. The real "Eminem Show" is exhibitionism and passivity masquerading, very attractively, very seductively, as rap-ismo activity -- and is probably why most of his songs contain references to being "fucked in the ass." (And perhaps why his former bodyguard has alleged that Eminem's wife regularly beat up Slim Shady and not the other way around.)

By way of contrast, the relaxed, faggoty, submissive metrosexuality of David Beckham, posing for gay magazines and more than happy to wear pink shirts -- and even pink nail varnish -- may be less overtly pathological, and probably represents a more benign or successful adaptation of masculinity to the future, but is a trifle distasteful, not to say occasionally downright nauseating. The final irony of male metrosexuality is that, given all its obsession with attractiveness, vanity for vanity's sake turns out to be not very sexy after all.

But then, it's much too late for second thoughts. Metrosexuality is heading out of the closet, and learning to love itself. Even more.

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