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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Meanwhile, the herd of smoothies elsewhere on the TV dial are straining their hamburgers just to keep the camera interested in their empty himbo lives. Take Alec, 29, of SoapNet's "I Wanna Be a Soap Star": "I was blessed with pretty good abs to begin with, and I take care of them," he tells the camera. Then, when pressed, he adds: "Girls often come up to me and ask me about my abs, yes. Yeah, they might want to touch them, too. They're out there, they're there to be seen and touched."
Remember how, in the late '80s and early '90s, the camera was attracted to almost any tall, big-breasted blond, and we often had to sit through their rambling thoughts as well? Thanks to the work of pioneers like Fabio, today the camera loves the smoothie even more.
Men who indulge in careful grooming and enjoy showing off their bodies aren't limited to reality TV shows, of course -- anyone within spitting distance of a college campus or an Abercrombie & Fitch chain can see that. But to really get up-close and personal, rent a copy of "Guys Gone Wild" and check out a steady flow of ripped abs and meat Chiclets, punctuated by the occasional flash of some completely hairless genitalia. After a few such visions, you'll start to think that every guy under 30 gets regular Brazilian waxes.
Jonathan of "Blow Out" may be the most shameless smoothie of them all. What he lacks in pumped-up physique he makes up for in behavior, parading his petty grievances, temperamental outbursts and crying jags like a pampered diva. But all that matters to Jonathan is "beautiful hair" -- a fact that he reminds us of over and over as he travels from his West Hollywood salon to his Beverly Hills branch to his therapist's office. Whether he's pitching a fit about the low quality of his product samples or insulting a member of his design team or refusing to follow his fashion-designer client's plans for a fashion show, Jonathan is only doing it, you see, because he cares so deeply about beautiful hair. The world is a tough place for Jonathan -- we learn this at his therapist's office, where he wipes away tears and says that he feels like he's being pulled in a million directions at once.
But it's not the tears or the narcissistic streaks or those tweaks he gives his gelled hair constantly that make Jonathan such a rubbernecker's dream. He's a thoroughly modern character that many of us haven't met before: the swaggering sensitive guy, all raw nerves and sculpted ends and tight T-shirts. He's an unfamiliar type, a sniffling, bossy princess who makes Jessica and Ashlee Simpson look like stoics by comparison. Even his girlfriend is in on the joke: When Jonathan climbs the stairs on the way out of his girlfriend's office and quips, "We're just like Romeo and Juliet!" his girlfriend responds, "Goodbye, Juliet!"
So, how did the gay male ideal get adopted by so many straight guys, or more important, how did the smoothie upstage the metrosexual? Well, first of all, the smoothie is actually an exaggeration of the gay male ideal: He's more buff, more hairless, more tan, and yet there are little bits of macho "whatever" clothing thrown in as a hedge, a little signal that he's not, in fact, gay. In a recent New York Times article about the rise of this gay-vague look, Alice Eisenberg, who works the doors at several gay bars in New York, asserted that she can still tell if a guy is straight or gay, from this telling "whatever" hedge: "The jeans were right, the loafers were right, and he had a good body," she said of one gay-vague customer, who turned out to be straight. "But the shirt was completely untucked, and I think it was Old Navy."
If you're David Beckham, of course, your job is your hedge. British soccer god Beckham, the poster boy for both metrosexuality and smoothiedom, is so confident of his macho image that he has confessed to wearing his wife's panties, he was recently photographed frolicking in a Speedo on a beach in St. Tropez, and last week he lamented that Gavin Henson was supplanting his place as the favorite among gay admirers. "I think I have lost a lot of my gay fans to Welsh rugby star Gavin Henson," said Beckham. "It is a shame as I really love them."
Now, maybe Beckham and Jonathan and the guys on "Strip Search" represent a new, more flexible form of masculinity that's wild and free and unafraid of seeming gay. Maybe the smoothie can show off and enjoy being objectified without feeling self-conscious about it. Women have had far more freedom to express themselves or hide in masculine clothing for years; it makes sense that men would follow suit eventually. We should probably applaud the newfound freedom and the joy these young men take in being objectified; we should probably stand up and cheer when these shiny boy toys shake their asses and pout like Britney; we should encourage them to dress with flair and enjoy those spa treatments and dream their big Chippendale's-style dreams.
We should, but we can't. Because these men might be looking for visual perfection, but we're not. There's just something a little bit unappealing about men who spend far more time on themselves than most women do. When the previews for next week's "Average Joe" flashed an invasion of blond ab monkeys in matching red sports cars, flashing white teeth and spiked hair and shiny, tan six-packs, all I could think was, Where's the variety? Who wants a bunch of pumped-up clones with the exact same body type?
And what's so wrong with a little chest hair, anyway? Doesn't anyone remember Tom Selleck, with his perfect, dark hair-patches that accented his fit-but-not-too-fit barrel chest? To plenty of women and gay men, chest hair gives the bare chest a signature touch or adds a unique feature to an otherwise featureless landscape. Sure, we loved that hairless, buff body in the black-and-white Soloflex ads when we were teenagers, but that was before every third jerk on the street had one.
Plus, it's more than a little unnerving to feel disheveled and style-less and hairy in comparison to a man. Even if you're neat and fashionable, there's still something disturbing about the idea of your boyfriend rubbing self-tanning lotions on his biceps, or lying on his back with his legs spread, getting a Brazilian wax.
But then, maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
