Male grooming seems to be growing a pair. I recently wrote about a rather ballsy TV ad for Below the Belt antiperspirant gel – for testicles. Here’s another, viral ad for the same brand, the butch Scottish voiceover perhaps playing naughtily on Gerard Butler’s hairy grooming forays. It’s exciting to see that… Read More »The Ultimate Male Consumer
by Mark Simpson All these nicely-presented years on from the birth of the metrosexual – he turned 22 this month – and my prediction that he represented the future of masculinity, out and proud male vanity shows no sign of getting bored with itself, or running out of cash to… Read More »Balls on the Box: Male Grooming’s Groping For New Markets
Mark Simpson has a sniff around a classic men’s deodorant ad that reveals how far we’ve come – and also how some things never change Back in the 1960s the mass-market ‘grooming’ of men by advertisers wanting to sell them vanity products was only just beginning its warm-up. This rare and… Read More »‘A Fresh Clean Smell That Could ONLY Be Masculine!’
WARNING: hipsters and gay bears may want to watch this ad backwards. I’m rather taken with this refreshingly direct ad currently airing on MTV for a Philips Norelco product that promises to ‘shave, style and groom’. And also, you’d be forgiven for thinking, suck your cock. A young man approaches… Read More »I’d F*ck Me: Mirror Man-Love
It’s always tricky as a writer talking to a researcher for a TV or film documentary. On the one hand you want your ideas to be taken seriously and the historical record to be as accurate as possible. And of course we all like attention. Especially from a visual medium… Read More »Winsome, Losesome, Mansome