The male desire to be desired shows no signs of tiring
In 1994 the UK PM was a dull, no-frills 1960s branch bank manager, called John Major – a name that evoked a dull, no-frills 1960s British car, the Morris Minor. A new railway tunnel had just opened, recklessly connecting Britain to France. The economy was only just beginning to ease out of a long, smothering recession caused by crushingly high interest rates introduced by the 1960s bank manager.
The age of male homosexual consent had just been reduced from 21 to 18 – but only to thwart an attempt at equalising it with the age of heterosexual consent of 16. Same sex lurving was still completely banned for members of the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy.
An untucked shirt (covering your arse and crotch) while clutching premium bottled lager was in vogue, middle class men pretended to like football in case anyone thought they were a poof, chain-smoking ciggies indoors was probably the nation’s favourite past-time, working out was a bizarre affliction, and the last, coked-up agonies of pop music, otherwise known as ‘Britpop’, ruled the charts and the tabloids.
Print was still king – only 600K people in the UK had internet access, and there wasn’t in fact a lot to access: only that year the Telegraph had become the first UK daily to publish some of its content online. Proper, physical, finger-staining newspapers, magazines, and even books were booming – blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited them. Magazines though were particularly ‘hot’ – the nineties were all about lusting after ‘lifestyles’.
Smartphones and social media were a sci-fi fantasy. There was no Netflix. There weren’t many TV stations either, in the pre-digital telly era. Hence prime-time TV and print advertising reached pretty much everyone – instead of being mostly a way to sell funeral insurance.
Proving every era contains the seeds of its destruction, 1994 was also the year that Harry Styles, Tom Daley, Adam Peaty, and Justin Bieber were born.
And the metrosexual. Who turned thirty last November. Anxiously checking in the mirror – or on his phone – that his Botox injections are still working.
My first book Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity, about the effect that an increasingly mediated, consumerist world was having on men, and the role of homoeroticism and narcissism in that, had also been delivered earlier that year. To publicise it, I visited a men’s lifestyle exhibition at the Islington Business Centre in London in November, organised by men’s style mag GQ, called ‘It’s a Man’s World’, for the Independent newspaper.
I had seen the future, and it was moisturised. I wrote my report, Here Come the Mirror Men, in the mischievous style of my ‘It’s a Queer World’ columns for gayish men’s style magazine Attitude, launched in May of that year, the same month as straightish men’s lifestyle magazine Loaded, effectively its sister publication.
I used the word ‘metrosexual’ – its first appearance in print – as shorthand for some of the ideas I advanced in Male Impersonators (which was rather freighted with Freud). Or as I put it in the piece:
‘Metrosexual man contradicts the basic premise of traditional heterosexuality – that only women are looked at only men do the looking. Metrosexual man might prefer women, he might prefer men, but when all’s said and done nothing comes between him and his reflection.’
In the future that metrosexuality bestowed us, this might seem almost banal – constantly bombarded as we are with male-looked-at-ness, female gazing, and everyone forever fidgeting with those hi-tech compact mirrors called smartphones. But back in the 20th Century, many scoffed and scorned the notion that the ‘passive’ and ‘feminine’ pleasures of being looked at were being appropriated by men. Unless those men were, of course, not real men.
Likewise, in today’s era of loud and proud corporate Rainborg flaggery, many might be surprised by the way the It’s a Man’s World organiser, GQ publisher Peter Stuart found it necessary to tell me that “all the men will bring their girlfriends”.
Some might also feel slightly sad for the apologetic gay couple I speak to at the end, one of whom, Steve, tells me it’s shame that I picked them to talk to because “straight men are just beginning to discover the joys of shopping and we wouldn’t want to scare them off.”
But Steve was merely being realistic.
As I say in the report, the adamantly heterosexual official voice of men’s lifestyle mags, pretending that none of their readers were gay or bisexual, was a convention, one designed to reassure that men’s lifestyle magazines were masculine and normal and not at all suspect. That they were mass market rather than ‘niche’. The nineties, coming in the wake of ‘The Gay Plague’ and Thatcher-Reagan, were officially No Homo. They belonged to Oasis not Suede shoes.
It was Loaded of course that achieved what had eluded all before them: becoming the first truly mass-market men’s lifestyle mag. In large part by perfecting a man-in-pub house style that successfully reassured men that buying it wasn’t poofy – or, almost as bad, poncey. Loaded was irreverent and self-consciously ‘laddish’ instead of affecting the aristocratic airs and graces of gentleman’s quarterlies.
But the material point of an expensive-to-produce-and-print glossy magazine for men that isn’t actually porn is – or was, when magazines still existed – to deliver high end, i.e. very expensive, advertising. Which generally means fashion and vanity products. Poofy.
After Loaded broke the dam, FHM (previously ‘For Him Magazine’) copied the man-in-pub editorial, put scantily clad women on the cover (before Loaded did), and plenty of unashamed product, clobber and ‘grooming’ advice inside – overhauling Loaded and becoming the best-selling men’s mag. And making a mint from its very expensive ads.
A curious recent BBC documentary on Loaded, featuring the founding editor James Brown and some surviving staff, reminded me that magazines are generally put together by wannabes. For wannabes. And Loaded was a painfully straight acting magazine. I doubt anyone writing for Loaded was gay but sensed, both at the time and watching the new doc, more than a hint of repressed/latent homosexuality.
Perhaps the most conventionally masculine member of staff, the rugby playing, motorcycle riding production editor who had to whip all those drunken scribbler sots into line, is now a transwoman, and recalls the ‘laddish’ environment of Loaded, and her/his own male impersonation, with horror. Interestingly, Brown seems to regard his former colleague’s transitioning as being down to “loving women so much that he became one!”. An excess of heterosexuality, in other words. Still nothing gay here, lads!
Understandably, my metrosexual intervention went largely ignored in the No Homo Nineties – or merely pushed more backs to the wall. It wasn’t until I returned to the subject in the shiny new Millenium, when it was no longer possible to ignore what was happening to men and why they were spending so long in the bathroom, that metrosexuality truly came out of the closet.
And became the sensibility of the first quarter of the 21st Century.
My 2002 essay ‘Meet the Metrosexual’ for a then-popular US website went globally viral – thanks in part to my outing of David “I love my gay fans” Beckham as the prime exemplar. It gave me, I’ll admit, no small amount of pleasure, given the fetishism of ‘authentic’ football by straight-acting 90s new laddery, that it was a famous working class footballer, a garlanded man of action, who embraced and advanced poofy-woofy metrosexuality. By openly aching to be a male model.
The official disavowal of men’s lifestyle mags continued however for several years, well into the 21st Century. Men’s Health magazine, which supplanted FHM as the best-selling magazine in 2009 – with male instead of female chests on the cover – was, ludicrously, still playing the No Homo game in the late Noughties. So ludicrously that I couldn’t resist goosing it on the squat rack.
But magazines, of course, didn’t really survive the 21st Century. They had done their job and were no longer needed. Loaded closed in 2012. FHM in 2015. Men’s Health may still be trading, and other surviving men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire, after years of snobby disdain, are now largely Men’s Health clones, but who reads magazines nowadays?
No one needs to buy a copy of Men’s Health to leer over, or learn how to be a shredded Men’s Health cover star – they can go straight to Insta, Tik Tok, YouTube and Only Fans, where today’s digital ‘cover stars’ share their HD assets directly – and their ‘pro’ tips on how to pump up yours. The frequently decidedly un-shredded magazine middlemen that used to pimp them out are largely redundant.
Also largely redundant is calling someone metrosexual today. It’s like standing in the middle of a forest and shouting “LOOK! A TREE!”
Metrosexuality, the male desire to be desired, is completely normal for the younger generation who have grown up immersed in it – and know all about the importance of really good lighting. Why wouldn’t men want to be desirable? Why wouldn’t they enjoy being looked at, liked, and shared? Why wouldn’t they want to be aesthetically-pleasing in a hyper visual world?
And why would they leave all of that potential power and pleasure to women – their competitors in the labour and (self-) loving marketplace? The fact that it looks way gay to their dad/grandad who used to read Loaded only makes it even more fun.
As the father of the metrosexual, and thus an old fart myself – more a product of the 20th Century than the 21st – I have to admit that all of this beauty can sometimes look a bit ugly. Like a hellish version of heaven – where you can’t get in or out of the locker room at the gym for hordes of hench, inked lads in their pants flexing and taking selfies in the mirror. But I think that I can probably live with it. Especially when I remember how naff and no-homo the nineties were.
The metrosexual himself was originally top down and analogue, a product of advertising and glossy magazines – and before that, pop music. Even Beckham was an analogue or pre-digital star, made globally famous by legacy media breathlessly headlining his sarong-sartorial choices and every new hairdo or tattoo debut on the pitch – and by the scores of international ad campaigns and sponsorship deals for fashion and vanity products he hoovered up, being paid millions, in effect, to sell metrosexuality to a mass market. An analogue influencer.
Second generation, ‘hardcore’ metrosexuality, in the eye-popping form of the body-centered, self-sexualising spornosexual, is however ‘bottom up’ and digital – a product of smartphones, social media, and the total aestheticization and commodification of masculinity. You are the product and the advertiser – as well as the pushy photographer egging yourself to get your tits out. Selfie-sexploitation.
Actually, I probably have that arse over tit – or glute over pec. The digital age, with its intimate, infinite, wraparound tartiness only happened at all because of the male desire to be desired.
Endlessly.
Further reading: