Achilles, Alexander, Jason, Odysseus - the fabulous scrapping, rutting warriors of the Ancient World fulfil every boy’s own fantasy. Now, says Mark Simpson, Oliver Stone’s spayed movie ‘Alexander’ and the recent crop of ‘epics’ confirms that Hollywood has abolished heroes - past and present.

(Originally appeared Independent on Sunday, 19 December 2004)

For some, the entry “Double Classics” in their school timetable might have been an ominous omen. For me and my classmates however it meant 80 minutes of bliss listening to a wonderful old gent called Mr Field recount, and frequently re-enact with his walking-stick, fantastic stories of male derring-do from the Ancient World. Spellbound and wide-eyed we listened to the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, Achilles and Odysseus. So great was the pull of the past in the mouth of Mr Field that hardly anyone fidgeted or played with their chunky 1970s LED digital watches.

Of all the epic tales recounted it was that of Alexander the Great that most gripped my pubescent imagination. The story of a scrappy, muscular little blond boy from the provincial Greek state of Macedonia who took on the world and won, carving out an unprecedented empire that stretched from the Adriatic to India. The story of a boy who never quite grew up; who quite probably assassinated his father; who certainly surpassed his extraordinary achievements, establishing himself as the greatest cavalry captain who ever lived, whose tactics are still studied today. A boy who never really cared for any woman except his terrifying mother Olympias (so terrifying that once he left home, Alexander never returned); whose great and constant loves were Bucephalus, his legendary war-horse, and Hephaestion, his legendary comrade in beefy arms. What boy wouldn’t love Alexander? What boy wouldn’t want to be Alexander?

The story of Alexander the Great (356BC -323BC) is the best boy’s own story ever told -the Trojan Wars may never have happened: hence the posters for Oliver Stone’s new movie Alexander announce: “The Greatest Legend Of All Was Real”. Alexander’s is a tale of passion, adventure, really big fisticuffs, masculine camaraderie, and running away from girls. And also, drunkenness, debauchery, mass murder and madness. His 12-year tour of the known (and unknown) world, and his long list of battle honours - Thebes, Heliocarnassus, Issus, Gaugamela, Tyre, Hydaspes, to name but a few - represent dates on the greatest rock ‘n’ roll tour in history.

Alexander is the timeless, ageless hero of boyish psychosis - a romantic disease which affects all men, though admittedly some more than others (well, I was at boarding school). Boys brim with enough energy to change the world, or destroy it - it makes no difference to them. This dangerous, sexy, passionate indifference is the basis of the mixture of fear and envy that causes adults generally to treat them so badly.

Alexander’s ambition was literally global, shaping the Ancient World; his Eastern crusades ended the ancient dynasties of Persia and Egypt. Alexander effectively invented the Western idea of Empire, globalisation and stamped his face on our idea of fame and success. He wanted nothing less than the whole world to be Alexander. For a while he came shockingly close to achieving just that, boldly going where no man had gone before (another boyhood hero of mine, William Shatner, played Alexander in a TV series before landing the role of Captain James Tiberius Kirk - which he played of course, in his wonderfully limited way as Alexander again). In part, his success was due to the way he succeeded in portraying his own ambition and self-interest as being for the benefit of Macedonia, pan-Hellenism or humanity itself.

In this Alexander could be seen as the ancient template for a neo-con America; he even invaded and conquered what is today Iraq and Afghanistan - as well as Iran. But like the neo-cons he could conquer but he couldn’t or wouldn’t administrate: rebellions broke out frequently and his Empire dissolved immediately after his death; Alexander, like contemporary audiences, had a short attention span. Certainly Stone’s epic new biopic could be subtitled: “Operation Persian Freedom”: his Alexander mouths platitudes about liberating Asia; the turbaned, bearded King Darius looks oddly like Bin Laden and, after his decisive defeat at Gaugamela, he is hunted down by Alexander in the mountains.

Obviously this, in addition to the rediscovered fashionability of sword-and-sandal epics (Gladiator, Troy, King Arthur, The Last Samurai), is why Hollywood has rediscovered this chippy little man and remembered his story as the ultimate road move, the classic story of boundless boyish all-American ambition, lighting out for the territory. In addition to Oliver Stone’s effort, Baz Luhrmann is rumoured to be developing his own version, with Leonardo Di Caprio in the title role. Even The World’s Only True Catholic, Mel Gibson, is planning to make a 10 episode HBO TV series about this pagan arse-bandit who whipped the world’s butt. Suddenly, Alexander really does appear to be conquering the world again.

There is another reason why the epics are back though: they offer reassuring, if utterly fraudulent, nostrums about masculinity in an uncertain, metrosexual world. The Ancient World was a time when men were men (and boys were nervous). In fact, warrior chic has been the fashion statement of 2004. This is the same year, after all, that a US presidential election was fought largely on the basis of who would make the best warrior president - and won largely on the grounds of who saluted best on camera and looked most fetching in 1960s uniform.

And likewise, what Hollywood is really offering us in these modern epics is not hairy retrosexuality but just more metrosexual pleasures, this time in a rather gorgeous, ancient setting; models playing at being rough boys - metrowarriors. In The Last Samurai, the Tom finally grows facial hair, and renounces the unmanly military machinery of modernity for the harsh-but-tender camaraderie of Samurai life - but only to make him more glamorous; Mr Cruise’s Western otherness actually makes him the female lead of the movie. In Troy pretty boys Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom are the real beauty pageant entrants and Diane Kruger (Helen) - and the audience - sit in judgement. The fields of Ilium become not a backdrop for the glorious feats of ancient warriors, but an expensive pretext for ogling Brad Pitt’s body, and also a half-hearted attempt to make it look practical, purposeful: when in fact his flawless, untested physique is the very definition of look-don’t-touch. In Alexander Irish boy-band actor Colin Farrell, with bottle-blond hair and eyeliner, stands in for charisma and passion.

The main reason for the return to the epics is this: Hollywood is emasculating the past. It isn’t raiding it, but paving it over. Telling us there never were any heroes. What other explanation could there be for foisting Pitt as Achilles and Farrell as Alexander on us in the space of a year? These stars who have risen without a trace are stars because of their bland insubstantiality not despite it. We live in a crowded world which is offended by talent, terrified by genius. The Irish pipsqueak Colin Farrell was destined to become King of the Knowing World, aka Hollywood, because he is so inoffensive. He’s the anti-Alexander. Like Robbie Williams doing an album of Frank Sinatra songs, Farrell as Alexander, or Pitt as Achilles, serves to reassure a generation that might have some dim, uneasy ancestral memory of a time before the mediatisation of everything - relax! - there were no great men and there was no era of greatness. There are just different styles, man. Masculinity is a game of dressy-uppy. Like the CGI armies of modern epics, and the digital wars of Pentagon planners, contemporary masculinity is simulation and number-crunching technology. Shock and Awe without the draft.

Hence Farrell’s Alexander isn’t haunted, or driven, paranoid, or threatening, terrifying or charismatic: his eyes are just too close together. When wearing his giant war helmet in the battle scenes his beady little eyes look blinking out like Marvin the Martian. He is utterly lost in Stone’s movie. Farrell’s face is as blank and thoughtless as the world that has made him a “star”. It’s difficult to believe that anyone would follow him to the corner shop let alone the edge of the world.

Just as I and countless other generations of boys before me worshipped Alexander, Alexander hero-worshipped Achilles. It is said he kept two items under his pillow at all times: a dagger and a copy of the Iliad. He yearned to emulate flame-capped Achilles’ achievements; in fact he far surpassed them (Farrell, by contrast, turns in a performance below even that of Pitt’s Achilles). He was terrified that his father would leave nothing left for him to achieve, and is one of the reasons why he is suspected of a hand in his assassination. Alexander wanted fame - but he wanted it for his worldly achievements not his profile. There was another reason why Alexander was fascinated by Achilles: he was interested in the story of his warrior-lover Patroclus (Homer doesn’t actually say they were lovers, but by the time of Alexander they were widely regarded as such). Patroclus was a year older than Achilles, just as Hephaestion was a year older than Alexander; Alexander must have worried that the world might think him Hephaestion’s boy.

At Ilium, Alexander and Hephaestion laid wreaths on Achilles’ tomb, stripped naked, anointed themselves with oil and ran races around the grave. Strangely, this scene didn’t make Oliver Stone’s movie. We do however hear Aristotle lecture the young Alexander on how Achilles and Patroclus were lovers and how such a friendship between men “produces virtue” and is “the basis of the city state”. But this dry history lesson on Greek patriarchy isn’t quite what the teasing tagline “Alexander was conquered only once: by Hephaestion’s thighs” might lead you to expect. In fact, we never really see Hephaestion’s thighs let alone Alexander between them. Stone hints heavily they were lovers, and uses Alexander’s life-long devotion to Hephaestion - Alexander was besides himself with grief when Hephaestion died and lay on his corpse for a day and a night - to make him more sympathetic, but can’t quite bring himself to show sex, kissing or even very much affection. By contrast, the on-screen romance between Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Ringpiece is positively pornographic.

There is only one sex scene in the film - but it is a wedding-night tryst with Roxanna, a wife that Alexander took after invading Persia (but didn’t get around to impregnating until years later, and only after Hephaestion’s demise). Alexander, by the way, was not “bisexual” in the way that publicity for the movie has carefully suggested. Stone’s Alexander is bisexual in the way that Elton John was “bisexual” in the Seventies: Stone is worried about losing his mainstream, American audience and wants to give them at least half of Alexander to identify with/desire. Of course, terms such as “heterosexual”, “homosexual” and especially “bisexual”, with its sixties ‘free love’ associations, are anachronistic and misleading in an Ancient context where the gender of a male’s partner was of much less importance than the public observance of certain rules of engagement based on age and rank (adult male citizens, for instance, were officially forbidden sexual relations with one another but encouraged to have them with unbearded teenaged youths).

Nevertheless, according to many accounts Alexander’s preference was for the same sex; and there is evidence that in regard to Hephaestion at least he disregarded the ban on sexual relations between adult males.

His mother and father were so frantically worried about the teenage Alexander’s lack of interest in ladies and what this augured for the royal line that they hired a beautiful and famously talented courtesan. The fact that his mother is recorded as pleading with him repeatedly to sleep with the courtesan suggests that this approach wasn’t very successful (and a mother’s pleading, let alone Olympias’, was likely to have been slightly counterproductive). He was to marry, more than once, but mostly for political reasons, or to satisfy demands for an heir. For most of Alexander’s life, boys were for pleasure; Hephaestion was for love; women were for heirs and alliances – and effeminates like Paris. Though, perhaps to confound our modern interpretations, or at least mine, there is evidence he took a mistress towards the end of his life.

Alexander disdained a chance to inspect Paris’ famous lyre, dismissing it as having been used for “adulterous ditties such as captivate and bewitch the hearts of women.” But, he added, “I would gladly see that of Achilles, which he used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men.” This early example of the public school mentality seems to us now like a kind of queeny misogyny, and perhaps it was, but the fearsome queeniness of hyper-masculinity, a queeniness that literally subjected the world (arguably not once, but three times: under Alexander, under the Romans and under the Brits). Alexander’s father Philip may have invented the modern state with his innovation of a standing army, but it was his Empire homo son who proved to be his most potent martial innovation of all.

According to some, possibly mischievous accounts, Macedonia - even by Greek standards - sounds like a giant, jumping, open all hours Ancient leather bar. In fact, the Greeks were scandalised by the “barbaric” and “beastly” behaviour of the Macedonians. Sniffy Greek sources complain that the members of Philip’s court were selected for their prowess at drinking, gambling, or sexual debauchery. “Some of them used to shave their bodies and make them smooth although they were men, and others actually practised lewdness with each other although bearded… Nearly every man in the Greek or barbarian world of a lecherous, loathsome, or ruffianly character flocked to Macedonia.” Actually, Macedonia was the kind of place that most leather queens would be terrified by.

Needless to say, it scares the bejesus out of Hollywood. In Stone’s film (financed mostly by German money), we get occasional, almost subliminal flashes of the real, raucous nature of Macedonian masculinity, with warriors and their boys glimpsed in the background almost necking each other. But despite these hints, the pre-Christian, barracks erotics of Macedonia ultimately defeats Stone precisely because it is too masculine, too pagan. Stone is a liberal Judeo-Christian pussy. Stone the macho director of films about macho men in which women are very thin on the ground wimps out in Alexander. Macedonian masculinity is just too… masculine. But then, this is the contradiction of all these metrowarrior epics: the Ancient World is just too ancient and rough and real and beastly and male - and, well, Ancient - for contemporary America.

So the warrior sodomy of Alexander is turned into something modern and harmless, something simulated: Queer Eye for the Macedonian Guy, as one critic dubbed it. In addition to the creepily spayed relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion, which is presented as a kind of contemporary gay marriage (sexless, boring, respectable), there’s a strong smell of Sixties unisex androgyny, like rancid jossticks: Stone has Hephaestion portrayed by the spoilt-girlish Jared Leto, complete with hippy-chick wig, plastered in eyeliner applied by Dusty Springfield. The masculine side of male love is as taboo today as the effeminate side is popular.

There is a strange kind of poetic irony here: after all, in JFK Stone told us that his virile Irish Catholic hero Kennedy was punked by the hissing conspiracies of New Orleans fags. Here Alexander and its director are punked by Stone’s own fear of masculine homosexuality.

But there is, admittedly, a lot to be afraid of. An entire season of Jerry Springer couldn’t come close to one evening’s male jealousies, passions and intrigues in Macedonia. Although Stone makes much of Philip’s assassination he draws a veil over the details. The assassin, one of his bodyguards, was a spurned lover called Pausanias. Noted for his youthful beauty, he had been usurped in the royal bedchamber by another attractive young soldier. Pausanias denounced Philip’s new lover as a male tart and “whore”. The boy then proved his virility and virtue by saving Philip’s life in battle, at the cost of his own. His brother and friends then, as you do, drugged Pausanias and gang raped him before handing him on to their grooms and muleteers who also raped him and then gave him a good beating as thanks. For political reasons Philip refused to punish the wrongdoers and restore Pausanias’s honour. Olympias and Alexander probably then used Pausanias’ fury as an instrument for removing daddy and gaining power. Alexander became king and Emperor of the World because his father was murdered by a neglected male lover. Warrior sodomy is a terrifying, fearsome-fearless thing - don’t mess!

It’s tempting to see this current obsession with the Ancient World as a function of our search for new pagan lights in a chaotic, darkened, post-Christian, post-ideological world in which Posh and Becks have replaced the Holy Family. Tempting, but probably mistaken. None of these films have any gods – except the pathetically democratic, earthbound ones: the celebs that star in them. Real worship, whether of heroes or gods is definitely not on offer. It’s just too messy and dangerous for our safe, sterile, simulated modern lives. Boys today don’t worship or want to be Alexander or Achilles, who both regarded themselves as sons of gods. They want to be Colin or Brad. Or their stylist. Although it is difficult for someone like me to accept, maybe this isn’t all bad. After all, as we’ve seen in present-day Mesopotamia, there really isn’t much room in the world for Empire building these days.

Besides, we’re all too busy playing with our digital watches to care about warrior virtues.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

By Mark Simpson

The makers of BBC2’s ‘The Tudors’, know which side their Irish buns are buttered. They recently announced that Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s Henry will not be allowed to get fat in the third series, currently in production.

In case anyone’s interested, the actual, historical Henry VIII became a big porker in later life and needed a crane to hoist him on to his poor horse.  Quite rightly, the makers of ‘The Tudors’, now half-way through its second saucy series, have decided that Henry’s historical obesity is a little bit too proley for BBC 2.  “We still want him to be appealing,” explained Morgan O’Sullivan, an executive producer. “We don’t want to destroy his good looks. An exact portrayal of Henry is not a factor that we think is important.”

No, what is important today is that HD Henry be shaggable.  In TV’s TudorWorld, no king can expect to hold the loyalty of his subjects if he doesn’t look like he would serve them faithfully in the bedroom.  In other words, TudorWorld is a lot like the one we live in.  As Rhys Meyers put it himself, actors ‘don’t get famous for being pug ugly, do they?’

They certainly don’t.  And I certainly don’t tune in to ‘The Tudors’ for the dodgy history, or the campy script (Henry to Thomas More, author of Utopia: ‘Your ideas are a bit… Utopian’).  Nor, frankly, for Rhys Meyer’s acting – though admittedly there is some enjoyment to be had in watching the wife-axing Pope-baiting founder of the Royal Navy and in fact England as we understand her today played as a young Captain Kirk with anger management issues.

No, the only thing I really want to see him do with his pouty face with that Billy Idol perma-sneer is snog.  Oh, and spasm during those orgasmic close-ups.  Which is fortunate, because both these things happen about every three minutes.

Maybe the Tudor thermostats were set too high, or maybe it’s those leather pants, but even when he’s not snogging or coming, he seems to be allergic to shirts.  On the rare occasion he has to wear one he seems unable to button it up.  Which is probably just as well, as the naughty lad would only stain it.

Yes, there are lots of comely, busty ladies in TudorWorld and their bodices keep ripping, and Jonathan keeps shtupping them.  But the fact that they’re usually rather better actors than him just underlines the fact that HD Henry is the real sex-object in his sex scenes, whichever wench he’s deflowering.  His tits and ass are always the first out and the last in, and the widescreen camera makes sure his body is always, very vulgarly, on display. In fact, Rhys Meyers’ looks more rent boy than royalty.  Maybe that’s why his King of England speaks – on the rare occasions when he doesn’t have his mouth full of wench – like an escort ordering in a posh restaurant (which he is – it’s called BBC2).

Besides, the lovely young ladies in TudorWorld are outnumbered by the number of slutty young males in tights, every one sporting one of those cloney, immaculately trimmed Beckhamista beards no self-regarding metro can be seen without (Henry Cavill of course could wear a Yak on his chin and still be smoothly irresistible).  And while the occasional plain woman appears to be tolerated in TudorWorld, plain men who don’t happen to be smelly old Chancellors or Archbishops most definitely aren’t (and even they usually end up in The Tower).  And the ancient Holy Father, played by a surprisingly-still-alive Peter O’Toole, appears to have had more bad plastic surgery than Joan Rivers.

Unlike the bigger-budget, better-directed and scripted ‘Rome’, which in its Imperious second series almost succeeded in convincing you that its very trashiness and tartiness was probably the truest, most accurate thing about it – that Ancient Rome really was like this – ‘The Tudors’ is just Footballer’s Wives in codpieces.  Or, what is the same thing, Footballers Wives for BBC2.

Not that I’m complaining.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

I’m still in shock after watching the handover to the London Olympics in Beijing. Please tell me it was a bad dream and that on your goggle-box you saw something much less horrifying.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson looked like he’d put on his worst suit - sorry, someone else’s worst suit - and slept in it all the way to China.  Adding to his impact, he generally behaved like someone from a Home for the Terminally Bewildered on a rare day out.

As for the show the Brits put on, featuring a morphing red London bus, hordes of annoying dancers - it looked like a Cliff Richard film directed by Brent Council, but less fun.

And then the climax: David Beckham popping out of the top of the bus like Samantha Fox out of a birthday cake, to the tunes of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ warbled by crummy TV talent show winner Leona Lewis in crinolene, stuck on the end of a pole like a dodgy Christmas decoration.

How the world went wild as he showed us his latest cosmetic surgery! (My tranny friend Michelle tells me he’s had his eyes done, the upper bags - and I never doubt her judgement about these things).  Before expertly kicking a ball into the wrong part of the stadium.

It was a complete and utter disaster and embarrassment.  A comedy of errors with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Welcome to London.

No, really, you’re welcome to it.

Is the husband of the world’s most famous ‘gay man trapped in a woman’s body’ a homophobe?  Or a conflicted homophile? Or both?

Promoting his new book, Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone has been claiming that absurdly straight acting Guy Ritchie’s homophobia is one of the reasons why he and his slightly more famous sister are no longer on speaking terms.

You don’t have to buy Ciccone’s memoirs though to unearth evidence that Guy has some ‘issues’. Just watch his homoerotic homosocial and homophobic gangbanger movies - all the ‘homos’ are here.  As luck would have it, there’s another due out shortly, called ‘RocknRolla’.  I’ve yet to see it, but apparently, it’s even more ‘homo’ than his previous films - and no less confused.

In the meantime, here’s a diagnosis I penned for the Independent on Sunday eight years ago when Ritchie’s second film ‘Snatch’ was released. Like Eminem, another gangster/gangsta groupie who came to prominence around the same time as Ritchie in the early Noughties, the homophobia in his work seems like a kind of highly conflicted and highly erotic homophilia.

Actually, it’s more like homomania - literally being unable to stop thinking and talking about bumming and practically drawing pictures for us. (Which is probably what I have in common with him - though I’d like to think I’m slightly more self-aware.)

In Ritchie’s world - as in Em’s - buggery is the only kind of sex there is. The only ’snatch’ in ‘Snatch’ belongs to men.

Just what sort of a guy’s guy is Guy Ritchie?

Mark Simpson wonders whether Madonna’s husband is a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body

(Independent on Sunday, August 27, 2000)

`Do you have big brave balls,” asks human Rottweiler Vinnie Jones in a stand-off moment in Guy Ritchie’s new movie Snatch, “or mincey faggot balls?”

We don’t entertain any doubts about the circumference of Vinnie’s testicles - and not just because he flashes a gun big enough to make Linda Lovelace gasp. What’s more, with the birth of Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco, the whole world knows that the 31-year-old writer-director of the spectacularly successful Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels has balls big and brave enough to impregnate Madonna.

But is this middle-class gangster-groupie so sure about what kind of balls he himself dangles? On the basis of his curiously sexually ambivalent output, it seems Ritchie - like his vast, appreciative young male audience - is more than a little worried about the possibility that he might have “mincey faggot balls” after all.

Let’s not beat around the bush here: the Lock, Stock and Snatch genre - and the lad magazine culture from which it seems to have sprung - is a kind of gay porn for straight men (or, rather, straight boys). As with his first film, Snatch is obsessed with buggery. Its “mockney geezer” dialogue is thick with references to “‘aving me pants pulled down”, being “bent over”, “full penetration”, and being “f–ked”. This isn’t very surprising since, as in Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and the spin-off TV series he executive-produced, women are conspicuous by their absence - the only snatch in Snatch belongs to other men. Hence the obsession with “hard men” and “pussies”; those who take and those who are taken. The erotics of Ritchie’s cinematic universe seem to be that of the prison showers (or the public school dormitory).

Ritchie is a hot ticket at the moment because, in an age of masculine confusion, he is the pre-eminent example of a rising phenomenon: the homohetero. Exclusively and adamantly heterosexual in the bedroom, the homohetero is nevertheless entranced by masculine images, forever fantasising about a world of homosociality that is just a dropped bar of soap away from homosexuality. Could it be that Guy Ritchie - who lives with the woman famously described as a gay man trapped in a woman’s body - is a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body?

Perhaps this is why Snatch begins with a jokey disavowal of homosexuality. “Turkish”, the central character and narrator (played by the very handsome “man’s man” Jason Statham), introduces himself and “me partner, Tommy”, adding quickly, “I don’t mean `partner’ in the sense of ‘olding ‘ands.” And there’s certainly a lot to disavow. The nearest thing to a sex scene in Lock, Stock was the lovingly shot, soft-focus, all-male pub party where the lads get very drunk, wrestle and light each other’s farts, before falling into a blissful, exhausted post-orgasmic sleep. In the first episode of the TV series, they try to flog some dodgy porn to a fence. “It’s not gay, is it?” he asks, worriedly. “Do we look like a couple of rear-gunners?” the pretty boys retort.

Well, now that you ask, yes.  After a fashion. Certainly, as shown in his films, Ritchie’s relationship to masculinity is a bit “gay”. Like Loaded and FHM - lad mags selling a commodified, aestheticised masculinity back to a generation of young men alienated from it in their own lives - it’s the supplicatory, nerdish and slightly masochistic perspective of the wannabe. Take Ritchie’s idolatrous, near-erotic camera-worship of “hard man” Vinnie Jones. The most memorable scene in Lock, Stock features Vinnie repeatedly slamming a car door on a man’s head in slow motion to uplifting music. The power of this religiously intense scene stems from the way that much of it is shot from the point of view of the victim - Ritchie and the audience are looking up admiringly at Vinnie “doing his nut”. It’s a moment which Jean Genet could have directed.

Ritchie can be touchy about his image. Asked a few worshipful questions recently about his taste in clothes by FHM, he became a tad defensive, spraying about the words “fruity”, “queeny”, “f—ing fruit-tree” and “mincey”, and declaring that he would be happiest “in a gladiator outfit” (a leather skirt?).

But then, Ritchie’s disavowal is deep-rooted. Though he now denies claiming anything of the sort, Ritchie is famously said to have reinvented and relocated his past: “I’ve lived in the East End for 30 years,” he was quoted as saying last year. “I’ve been in a load of mess-ups … I’ve been poor all of my life …” It was subsequently revealed that he spent much of his childhood at Loton Park, the 17th- century home of his baronet stepfather. Coming from this background, Ritchie understands that “street” is sexy - and that, conversely, middle-class balls are “mincey faggot balls”. “They’re poofs. Soft as shite … faggots” is the verdict of one of Ritchie’s crims in Lock, Stock on the clownish public-schoolboy ganja growers - who are humiliated and dispensed with early on in the film.

It’s not just the nice middle-class boys, though. In a post-feminist era, most men are wondering what a masculine world might look like. As Brad Pitt puts it in another homo-hetero movie, Fight Club: “We’re a generation of men raised by women. Maybe another woman isn’t what we need.” (Appropriately enough, Pitt makes an appearance in Snatch, reprising his Fight Club role as a bare-knuckle fighter.) No wonder a generation of boys is so interested in seeing “big brave balls” at the cinema.

But this fascination doesn’t come without its own anxieties. And, ironically, it’s the squeamishness of Ritchie in particular - and homoheteros in general - about actual homosexuality that gives the lie to their lowlife fantasies. In Lock, Stock, one of the lads explains the perfect scam: place an ad for “Arse Ticklers Faggot Fan Club anal-intruding dildos” in gay magazines, and wait for the cheques to roll in. Then, send out letters saying that you’re out of stock and enclose a cheque stamped “Arse Ticklers Faggot Fan Club”. “Not a single soul will cash it!” we’re told. (Obviously Ritchie didn’t know many fags when he wrote that.) It could be said that Ritchie and lad culture have been running that scam ever since the appearance of Lock, Stock - selling us a promise of something titillating that never quite arrives.

All in all, it seems both a paradox and entirely apt that big brave ball-fixated Ritchie lives with the ultimate gay icon: a woman whom many men would consider to be the biggest ball-buster in the world; an older partner whose own success and fame easily dwarfs his. But watching Lock, Stock, Snatch et al, maybe Ritchie’s interest in Madonna isn’t so surprising. As he puts it himself: “I like her, because she’s ballsy”.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Mark Simpson on how protests over male make-up are just fake-tanned hypocrisy (Guardian CIF, 13 August, 2008)

Oh, the gnashing and wailing of (bleached) teeth and pulling of (gelled) hair recently in some sections of the UK press over male make-up after UK High Street Superdrug’s launched a new line of male cosmetics! The way some commentators went on, you’d think that instead of selling concealer, ‘manscara’, and ‘guyliner’, Superdrug were actually selling home castration kits.

Rather clenched articles by male journos in liberal metropolitan newspapers such as the Guardian and The Times decrying the trend reminded me, in a mealy-mouthed way, of the uglier farm boys in the North Yorks market town where I live who call prettier lads ‘faggots’ for wearing make-up (though the farm boys mean the word more affectionately).

The fuss wasn’t so much about cosmetics being used by men - we’ve been here many, many times before over the last few years, and what men today don’t use moisturiser/conditioner/mousse/teeth whitening toothpaste/fake tan/eye gel - or Immac for Men? Especially farm boys and journos. No, male make-up brought out some in a rash because it’s out-of-the-bathroom-closet male cosmetics. Shameless metrosexuality. Metrosexuality without hypocrisy or apology. Metrosexuality that literally gets in your face.

Most metro cosmetics until now have been about enhancing male beauty behind closed doors, leaving at least a notional amount of discreet deniability that saves everyone’s sensibilities: ‘Oh, no, I don’t use product: I just wake up looking like a million dollars’. Maintaining, however laughably, the fiction that male attractiveness, unlike the female variety, is entirely unselfconscious and unaffected. Like metrosexuality, male make up smudges consoling stereotypes about what is ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘normal’ and ‘freaky’. It outs the masculine need to feel pretty. After all, once they’re given permission, men who prefer the ladies are probably more likely to be interested in make-up than the kind who prefer men - which is why some of them protest so much. They know that if they give in to their urges they’ll look like Louis XIV.

Besides, the future is already made-up. While ageing journalists raged against the abomination of male make-up in the (dying) print media, the pretty, pumped, usually half-naked young male celeb wannabes on Big Brother were regularly flaunting foundation, eyeliner and black nail varnish, just like their Emo heroes. Meanwhile at the Olympics in Beijing the 14 year old Brit diver Tom Daley was showing off a fake tan so dark it looked like foundation.

The arrival of male make-up on the British High Street shows that in the age of metrosexuality nothing that women do or use to be beautiful can be considered off limits to men. In a post-feminist, mediated world, today’s young males aren’t going to allow the ‘fairer sex’ any unfair advantages - including being able to look fabulous after the morning after a heavy night out. Or being the only ones that can leave their face on someone’s pillow.

© Mark Simpson 2008

If you’ve been watching the noble Olympics in a slightly pervey way, treating all that lycra and fit young firm flesh on your HD screens as a form of illicit spornography then you deserve to be spanked soundly with a spiked running shoe.

But you’re not alone.

America’s prestigious NBC no less are doing it too.

With an online splurge of swim-boy nakedness called ‘Ab-Fab’ it asks you to ‘Guess the Swimmer’ - by identifying the headless topless torsos of selected Olympic totty.

In other words, it presents photos of top-flight swimmers as if they were headless naked profile pics on Manhunt or Gaydar. At the very least, it takes it for granted that you’ve been studying their bodies rather closely. They should really go the whole hog and provide a ‘MESSAGE ME!’ button to send those naughty athletes our phone numbers.

Someone with more morals than me might be inclined to huff and puff a little at this non-consensual spornographic exploitation of the golden swim-boys. But then, they are encouraging it, those devilish rascals, with their low-slung pants showing off their storm-proof ‘cum-gutters’ and saucy ‘come-hither’ pelvic tatts. They know exactly what kind of world we’re living in - and they seem determined to give it a semi.

And when you see NBC’s full-length pic of multi-Gold-medal-winner Phelps - the slim-hipped superstar whose seismic popularity might just overcome America’s deep-seated Speedophobia - you realise that, like so many young men today, he’s already practically stripping for Fratmen TV , even when he’s wearing jeans and underpants. (And why he deserves yet another Gold - for tarting.)

Meanwhile, two US National wrestlers have permanently lost their place on the team and their scholarships for actually doing just that.

Tip: D.A. Krolak

by Mark Simpson (Arena Hommes Plus, Spring 2008)

Do you wish your wealth was so massive, your purchasing power so dense that no light could escape from your credit card? Do you wish that, instead of just impressively wealthy, you were that singular commodity, a celebrity? That your wealth bought you the riches of creation and other’s admiration without having to be, actually, tiresomely spent? That airlines, hotels and spas simply recognised your implicit worth and the priority of your desires and promptly upgraded you, while bunging you glittering free designer gifts?

That you never ever heard the word ‘no’?

Yes, I thought so. Well, all your impossible princess wishes can come true with the American Express Centurion Card, the famously ‘black’ credit card of celebs that is also a celeb among credit cards. Forget Platinum and Gold Cards, debased by the cheap credit years: the Black Card is the card of moneyed money - and its sturdy titanium design means it will survive the pressures of the Credit Crunch. Even if you don’t.

For an annual fee of £650 ($2,500 US + one time joining fee of $5,000) you will receive numerous ‘privileges’ which you and I know should be yours by rights. Including: a ‘dedicated concierge’ and travel agent, personal shoppers at stores like Gucci and Escada (you’ll need them to carry all those bags), first class flight upgrades, and free luxury travel insurance which, oh joy, includes a 28 wastrel days of winter sports - always annoyingly excluded from proley credit card travel insurance.

And that’s in addition to a welcome aboard gift of a Canon PowerShot SD850 digital camera, or a $2000 Juidth Ripka gift card, complete with a grovelling note from the CEO of Amex telling you how lucky he is to serve you and would you like your shoes tongue-cleaned or just buffed with my silk tie, Sir?

Best of all, you’ll be the possessor of a card that most people have only seen fetishised on TV in shows such as ‘Entourage’ or ‘Newlyweds, Nick and Jessica’ or heard praised in RnB songs, such as Nelly Furtado’s ‘Promiscuous Girl’: ‘I smoke purple, my car white/credit card black, girl I’m alright‘. Black cards are the new black, and they’re anything but square. Nouveau is the new cool. Again. Likewise, Obama is clearly the black card of American Democratic politics - able to outspend Gold Hillary several times over.

There is but one small, teensy-weeny grey cloud on the horizon of your blackspiration. In the UK the Centurion Card is by invitation only. If your fame or wealth (probably at least half a million in liquid assets) hasn’t put you on Amex’s radar, you can’t have one. If it has, you probably already do.

If not, be patient, Madam, please. That list, like the ones they used to use for Platinum and Gold, is lengthening, along with the competition. Since Amex Black Card’s introduction in 1999 several other prestige credit cards with similar benefits, similar privileges, similar appearances - and similar names - have materialised, including Nat West’s ‘Black Card’ launched in 2002, and ‘Carbon’ from Halifax. Even Barclaycard’s ‘Infinite’ seems to suggest ‘black’ space/singularity. Generally, they tend to have less world-shattering financial requirements than Amex’s Deathstar Card.

The most serious rival to Amex is probably MasterCard’s Signia, which includes an engraving of the owner’s signature on the front - like the signature of Manager of the Bank of England on our banknotes, though more impressive. Perhaps this is why in the UK Coutts & Co., the bankers for that Elizabeth woman whose image appears on our notes, are the Signia agents with their ‘World Card’ (note the Global dominion).

Which brings us to the blue heart of the black matter: being treated as international royalty - in an age in which money has done away with rank. All the black cards make much of their 24hr ‘concierge’, ‘secretary’ and ‘personal assistant’ services. Amex claims it has arranged for ‘a brass band to play outside a London flat on Valentine’s Day’, for European Cup football tickets to be picked up outside the stadium in Spain by their forgetful English owner, and, ‘arranged access to the Oscar’s after-party’. In other words, get one of these cards and you will be indulged by a retinue of flunkeys.

The black card and its dark alchemy gives your wants and whims the power to create and destroy worlds. As one cultural commentator recently put it:

‘If I long for a particular dish or want to take a taxi because I am not strong enough to go by foot, Black Card fetches me the dish and the taxi: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence - from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, the Black Card is the truly creative power.’

Actually, that was Karl Marx writing 144 years ago about money. Black cards embody all the creative/managerial power of money, squared. And with none of the physical vulgarity of cash. Even better, you’re saved the perspiring vulgarity of desire itself. Possessing a black card means that your whims will be attended to before you’ve even had time to whim. Your spending power and trend-forming coolness means that corporate culture will work out what it is you want and deliver it to you before you even knew you wanted it.

The black card is the Party Card of Celeb Consumerism. It proves your membership of the Global Elite who now rule the world.

Or at least act like they do.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

I’ve just happened across a new football blog ‘The Spoiler’ that has a self-described ‘Sporno’ section: ‘Where sport meets porn’.

They have some rather good pics (such as this one of Becks mounting an opponent who seems much more pleased than he is surprised). Pages and pages of them. And you can earn yourself £10 if you have any particularly hot examples. Go on, make those straight footie fans smile. You know they can’t get enough of it.

Sport tries its best to be clean, porno is always dirty. Sport is noble and healthy. Porno is always bad and wrong. Yet for all their efforts to keep a distance, they just can’t help running into each from time to time and making sporno, without meaning to at all.

Most of the people involved in ‘The Spoiler’ appear to be former lad mags staff (FHM, Nuts, Zoo). I’m sure their sporno snaps aren’t designed to turn on their male visitors, just make them giggle - or go ‘Ewwwwwwww!’ - and they probably haven’t read any of my articles on sporno.

All the same, they seem to have an even filthier imagination than I do. And they certainly have a bigger pervey pic collection.

by Mark Simpson, The Times, 28 July, 2008

Next week the V&A opens an exhibition called Fashion v Sport, profiling the relationship between the sports and fashion industries - a relationship that seems to be flourishing despite the habit of many of today’s sportsmen and women of wearing less and less.

Recently the New York Daily News ran a spread of photos showing rugby players from the New Zealand and South African national sides playing a match, starkers, on a windswept New Zealand beach. Disappointingly, it turned out that the players showing us their tackle were not in fact Boks and All Blacks, but local amateurs taking part in a beery annual “Naked Rugby” event.

But who can blame the media for getting over-excited? After all, last year the Rugby World Cup was advertised with posters on the Tube of snogging, scrumming rugby players. And then there are footballers such as Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham spreadeagled across the side of buses.

Almost everywhere you look, sports, advertising and fashion seem to have jumped into bed to produce a spornographic money shot. Sports stars have become sporno stars. How did this happen? What does it mean? And where can I get hold of a pair of those pants?

Ironically, the only unconvincing aspect of the snogging scrum campaign was the relative unattractiveness of the faux rugby players compared to the pumped, shaved perfection of the real thing. The Parisian team produce an arty soft-porn calendar, called Dieux du Stade, featuring lovingly photographed nude players soaping each other up in the showers - or playing naked rugby on the beach. A great success. It sells like, well, hot rugby players.

In the run-up to the last football World Cup the fashion label Dolce & Gabbana commissioned the photographer Mariano Vivanco to snap members of the Italian team all oiled up and ready for us in the changing rooms, wearing very skimpy - and stretchy - D&G briefs. The results were splashed across prime advertising sites. In hindsight, the world was grovelling at the Italians’ feet from that moment on. The Spanish winners of Euro 2008 have yet to pose glistening in thongs, but with studs such as Fernando Torres and Iker Casillas in their stable it can only be a matter of time.

To get our attention in an age of broadband jadedeness, men’s fashion advertising has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped group session in the showers.

And if this sporno looks a bit gay, that’s probably because it’s meant to. Partly because it made you look, partly because gay men are a loyal niche market and also taste-formers - especially when it comes to consuming the male body (Mr Dolce and Mr Gabbana are themselves famously gay).

It’s also partly because it seems to turn on the ladies in the same way that girl-on-girl action does their boyfriends. For an athlete nowadays, having a big gay following no longer necessarily means looking over his shoulder worriedly, but instead turning round and winking playfully.

Both Beckham and Ljungberg have posed in gay magazines, the beefy former England rugby ace and married father of two Ben Cohen has brought out a nude calendar marketed at gay men and talks about “embracing my gay fans”. Some, such as Becks and Welsh rugby glamour-boy Gavin Henson, have even argued over them. “I think I have lost a lot of my gay fans to Gavin,” Beckham once said. “It is a shame, as I really love them.”

Being equal-opportunity flirts, today’s sporno stars want to turn everyone on. Sportsmen, like porn stars, are by definition show-offs. Besides, it also means more money, more power, more endorsements, more kudos.

Fashion is more than happy to indulge them. Athletes represent everything that is desirable today: youth, vigour, success, health, fitness, looks, fame - and also the sweaty shorthand for all these things: sex. What’s more, as highly paid “pros”, their bodies are already what all men’s bodies are supposed to be these days: hot commodities. If athletes with hundreds of thousands of fans - gay and straight - are willing to tart themselves up this way, why bother with silly, skinny male models?

Naturally, all the sporno stars flirting with gayness are officially heterosexual. Team sports are still not the best place to openly bat for the other side, not least because it might cost you one of those lucrative gay-looking sporno endorsement deals. Virility is still considered to be officially hetero. (This holds true even in gay porn - where many stars are, like sporno stars, only “gay for pay”.)

But there’s no denying how dramatically attitudes towards the sporting male body have changed as a result of sport’s collision with the world of fashion and celebrity. Sporting male heroes now adopt sex-object poses on the side of buses that were once seen as girly, slutty or homosexual. Or, what was once much the same taboo in the male mind: passive.

As one outraged, middle-aged - and rather plain looking - BBC sports presenter thundered recently in The Sun about Beckham’s Armani-clad giant package: “You’ve got money, status, respect and fame - and then someone says: ‘Armani want you to do a picture wearing tight white pants with your legs as wide open as England’s defence.’ Why would you say yes?” Actually, in a spornographic age, the question should really be: why on earth would you say no?

The Fashion v Sport exhibition runs from Aug 5 to Jan 4. The catalogue, edited by Ligaya Salazar, and featuring an essay on Sporno by Simpson, on is published by V&A Books at £19.99.

“Ere, Ron, The Sun’s just texted me. They want to know if you’ve got any smaller shorts.”

Britain’s best-selling newspaper The Sun has been working itself into a confused lather about our metrosexual footballers, again. Like me, it just can’t leave them alone.

In a long, hand-wringing - and graphically illustrated - article spread over the centre pages last Friday headlined ‘Preen Team’ they ask ‘What the hell is going on with our footballers?’

Led by the Premier League’s arch-metrosexual Cristiano Ronaldo, football has this summer gone camper than a row of tents.

This week Ronaldo continued his holiday tour by hanging out in a pair of tight silver shorts in LA - and had the world’s gay men coming over all funny.

Er no, it had The Sun coming over all funny. For much of the summer, The Sun has been stalking Portuguese Ronaldo, the best footballer in the UK and also one of the best looking, who is currently convalescing after an injury (hence the unflattering blue footwear), trying to exploit his current unpopularity - the result of his plans to leave Manchester United for Real Madrid, and his failure to keep them, like his hot oiled bod, under wraps.

Like a jealous, spurned suitor, The Sun (along with most of the Brit tabloids) has been bitching and beating him up over his dark (Portuguese) tan, his shorts, his good looks - and his lack of apology for them. And trying to imply he is girly and, what is the same thing in their book, homo.

And who can blame him for wanting to leave the UK, where the biggest paper behaves like a school-ground bully with sexual identity issues? They’ve even published pictures of him smiling at a mate (who appears to be his brother), telling us that he’s cruising him. And I thought I had bumsex on the brain.

In a familiar trick, they’ve given space to the editor of ‘Britain’s best-selling gay magazine’ to gush about what a ‘gay idol’ Ronaldo is. Otherwise known as guilt by association. At the same time as proving they’re ‘not homophobic’ because they let the king of poofs have his say.

Friday’s article goes one step further and seems to blame Ronaldo for making an entire generation of footballers gay. I know he has nice legs, but I doubt even those pins have that kind of power.

But a perfectly-waxed chest and budgie smuggling shorts are just the tip of the iceberg.

A sun investigation has found the manbag and grooming obsession is rife among our highly-paid stars.

As you may have suspected, it turns out that this ‘investigation’ is just another excuse for lots of pics of young footballers without much on. An excuse even smaller than Ron’s silver shorts. Not that I’m complaining, mind.

Though I can’t help but poke fun at The Sun’s hissy list of the metrosexual offences of our footie aces:

Chelsea ace Frank Lampard refused to go anywhere this summer without his salmon pink vest and matching shorts.

(Which we’ve Photoshopped to make look even pinker and gayer, just as we’ve done with Ronaldo’s tan to make him look even darker and even more of a girly dago.)

He has also been lugging around wife Elen Rives’ fuchsia handbag.

I think it suits Fabulous Frankie and he should nick it off her.

Italian World Cup winner Fabio Cannavaro actually SHAVED his mate’s chest and armpits on the deck of their holiday yacht this week in a show of shameless male bonding.

Actually SHAVED his mate’s chest and armpits? No! Well, I never. The shamelessness of it!

And Liverpool and Spain striker Fernando Torres spent most of last month by the pool with an Alice band in his hair while leafing through lifestyle magazines.

You can bet he wasn’t reading The Sun.

Ah, for the days of football when men were men and soap was never scented - or dropped. Right on cue The Sun wheels out 1970s footballer Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, to whinge about how in his day he got paid ten bob a week, cut his own hair with garden shears, ate gravel, and beat up poofs on sight (or so you’d be forgiven for thinking). Interesting that the Sun didn’t ask retired ‘hardman’ Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock back to play this role, after he failed to deliver the poof-baiting goods in a recent previous Sun article bemoaning the gayness of today’s football.

How The Sun loves to keep coming back to this theme of metro V retro, pretending of course to be on the side of retrosexuality against, well, homosexuality. Partly this is because it imagines that retrosexuality is synonymous with ‘working class’ - traditionally the majority of this tab’s readership - because The Sun is now edited by expensively educated types who are faking it. By posing as champions of ‘Chopper’ Harris they present themselves as connected to that stoic proletarian tradition they actually have nothing to do with, and today’s consumerist, sensual, closetted metro Sun is a million fake-tanned miles from.

I suspect readers under the age of 30 that they know they desperately need to attract if they are to have any future at all, let alone continue to sell millions every day, are mostly turned off by this confused and conflicted metrophobic bullying from The Sun, however jokey it’s presented as being. Especially those from a working class background. Why? Because they will probably see it as directed against them. When repeatedly adopting this kind of cor, strewth, look at the pooftahs footballers are today! tone, The Sun just sounds like their nightmare fat dad.

Or me.

Intentionally or not, this time the space given to the editor of Attitude to twitter about fashion and male freedom and footballers showing the way makes that gay mag sound much more in tune with younger Sun readers than The Sun itself.

Tip: Dave Harley