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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
In an interview (with himself) the man who introduced us to the term "metrosexual" explains why it conquered the culture, bemoans his own "lesbosexual" style, and critiques "Queer Eye," Howard Dean and Schwarzenegger.
Jan 5, 2004 | In July of 2002, Mark Simpson introduced Salon readers -- and the U.S. -- to his impeccably turned-out love-hate child the metrosexual. Here is his definition from that now infamous article: "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 modelling, 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."
Since then the metrosexual has become even more ubiquitous. In this accelerated age he's grown up in a matter of months and become something Very Big in marketing. Thousands of newspaper, magazine and TV items on metrosexuals have appeared around the globe. There are now more than 25,000 hits for "metrosexual" on Google. Books have been written about him. Several well-known men have "outed" themselves as metrosexual, including Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean (to prove metrosexuality has no political preference, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has also accepted the label). TV has also gone gaga for male narcissism: This summer's biggest hit TV series was Bravo's metrosexual makeover program, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Metrosexuality even appears to have conquered Middle America, at least on "South Park" -- in a recent episode, all the town's males turn metrosexual after watching an episode of "Queer Eye."
Here Simpson answers some of the many questions he has been asked in the last year about what he has called his "Frankenstein monster with perfect skin, terrorizing and sashaying the globe."
Why has your term, which you first used 10 years ago, caught on so widely now?
When I wrote about metrosexuality back in the dark days of 1994 most were in denial about this new social problem. Metrosexuals themselves didn't want to confront who they really were. They were ashamed, not of their love for themselves, of course, but of what the world would think of it. They feared, probably correctly, that their partners and friends wouldn't understand, didn't want to understand. Although the media at that time was already full of metrosexual males, all of them were in the closet. There were no open, well-adjusted metrosexuals willing to be role models to young, isolated metros wrestling with their deep yearning for scruffing lotion and Lycra-rich underwear.
So when I returned to the subject on this Web site last year I decided it was time to be ruthless and name names: I outed several leading metrosexuals, including David Beckham, Brad Pitt and Spider-Man. After the initial shock and protests subsided it became apparent that my recklessness had shattered taboos and brought about, if I may say so myself, a seismic shift in social mores. Suddenly, decades of accumulated steam has been released. People now feel able to talk -- endlessly -- about a subject that couldn't even be acknowledged before. A chain reaction ensued as hundreds of thousands of metrosexuals around the world who had been cowering in their walk-in closets felt empowered to out themselves -- or at least their friends and partners felt empowered to do so on their behalf. In the place of the pathological, slightly pervy-sounding "male narcissist" of the inhibited 20th century, there stood the out-and-even-prouder metrosexual, urban and erotic and very 21st Century Boy. And everyone wanted him.
In the 18 months since that article appeared online, the word "metrosexual" has become almost as ubiquitous as the phenomenon it described. Maybe more so. Metrosexuality is now a textually as well as a visually transmitted disease.
Much of the responsibility for this global epidemic of metrosex-mania, however, lies not with my irresistibly contagious prose, or even Salon's worldwide e-popularity, but the very canny trend-spotter for a giant global advertising company who picked up the concept and, with the help of some research that seemed to show that metrosexuals really did exist, made over the metrosexual into a marketing tool with which to seduce the world media. Snarky sociology, which is no good to anyone, was transmuted into highly profitable demography, which everyone wants a piece of.
How did you first come up with the term and what did you mean by it then?
When I first deployed the word in 1994 in the Independent, a British newspaper, I did so to describe a new, narcissistic, media-saturated, self-conscious kind of masculinity. This was the version of masculinity produced by Hollywood, advertising and glossy magazines to replace traditional, repressed, unreflexive, unmoisturized masculinity, which didn't go shopping enough, and which thought -- ha! -- that it was enough to earn money for wives or girlfriends to spend. In the '80s it had seemed as if this kind of man only really existed in ads. By the early '90s, it was already alarmingly clear that life was imitating bad art. At least to someone like me, who had spent too much time thinking about such things.
The concept grew out of my 1994 book "Male Impersonators," which analyzed the effect an increasingly aestheticized and inauthentic world was having on masculinity. I meant "metrosexual" as cheeky satire, but also as sober social observation. I think it's unlikely that I was the first ever to utter the word, but it appears that I was the first in print and the first to elaborate a concept behind it. Something I will have to learn to live with.
How do you feel about some people using the term without crediting you?
Relieved, in many cases. In the U.S. I've almost been credited too much -- at least after Warren St. John at the New York Times took the trouble to "contact trace" and finger me as the source: Patient MetroZero. In the U.K., however, it doesn't appear as if a single journalist writing about metrosexuals -- and there have been scores of them -- has bothered to even Google the word. Most have lazily -- and cravenly -- attributed it to "New York admen." Which does make you suddenly much more proprietary about your concepts, much less inclined to see ideas as homeless, delightfully fickle, promiscuous things. Maybe the dramatically different response on opposite sides of the pond has something to do with American journalistic professionalism and the fact your country was founded on a literally religious investment in original texts. Or maybe it's just that it's much easier to sue in the U.S.
Is there really such a thing as a metrosexual? Or is it just a convenient pigeonhole?
Well, "metrosexual" is a rather ludicrous category, but no more ludicrous perhaps than "heterosexual" or "homosexual." I'd say he's as real as either of those categories. Arguably more so. The metrosexual is a recognizable species; you can point to one. Pointing to a heterosexual or homosexual is generally not as easy, without following them home to check. Not least because of the proliferation of the metrosexual.
What do you think of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"?
Clearly it's meant to be "Metrosexuality: The Reality TV Show." In a makeover culture it's the ultimate makeover show because what is being made over is masculinity itself. However, the basic premise is, it has to be said, a lie. I know this will come as a shock to millions, but gays are not necessarily more stylish than straight men. Exhibit A: the gay fashion "expert" on "Queer Eye" [Carson Kressley] who dispenses sartorial advice while dressed like the Children Snatcher in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."
And Exhibit B? Well, me. The queer daddy of the metrosexual, ladies and gents, is more of a lesbosexual -- though this is no doubt a terrible slight on the stylishness of lesbians. I hate shopping and make one trip a year to a huge out-of-town sportswear warehouse to buy my year's supply of manmade-fiber clothing. Yes, I go to the gym, but mostly because it's the only club that will let me in, in my lesbianwear. Urban, fashion-conscious gays accessorizing masculinity and desirability may have provided the prototype for metrosexuality, but they're the discarded, beta version.
Ironically, part of the reason for the popularity of "Queer Eye" may be that it reassures the audience that the "queer eye" belongs to queers, rather than to the millions of nongay men at whom metrosexual advertising is aimed.
