by Mark Simpson This month the metrosexual is fifteen. Back in November 1994 I wrote a piece for The Independent called ‘Here come the mirror men’ prompted by a visit to an exhibition in London organised by men’s glossy GQ. In it I claimed to have seen the future of masculinity… Read More »Buy-Curious: Have Men’s Mags Come Out To Themselves Yet?
It’s official. Men’s tits are now more popular than women’s. With men. Men’s Health, the metromag with the pec-fest, ab-tastic covers is now the best-selling men’s magazine in the UK, selling more than 250,000, compared to 235,000 for previous best-seller so-called ‘lad mag’ FHM with its famous cover babes sporting udders almost as… Read More »Final Triumph of Metrosexuality: Men’s Tits More Popular Than Women’s
The teenage Tom of Finland’s gay fantasies from the 1940s of sensually muscular men have come to define a mainstream view of masculinity, says Mark Simpson (Originally appeared in The London Times, Nov 2008 ) The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a well-thumbed, seventh-hand… Read More »From Finland With Lust – How Tom Re-Designed the Male Body For Pleasure
By Mark Simpson (Guardian, 20 October, 2008) ‘What other culture could have produced someone like Ernest Hemingway,’ waspish bisexual American exile Gore Vidal once asked of America’s favourite so-butch-he’s-camp writer, ‘and not seen the joke?’. The answer, was, of course, that only a culture that couldn’t see the joke could… Read More »Little Britain Touches Up Uncle Sam
According to yesterday’s The Sunday Times, the so-called ‘laddish’ culture promoted by men’s magazines has spawned a new medical condition: ‘athletica nervosa’, or an obsession with exercise: New research shows that the magazines, whose titillating displays of female flesh were meant to liberate their readers from political correctness, may be… Read More »Shock News: Mens Glossies Promote Metrosexuality