meekia

Die! Metrosexual Die!

Again, something I saved from Nerve.com. A gem. A real dig. Especially if you care about personal grooming, knows how to cook, manage 15 pull-ups a day, and knows Karl, as in Marx, instead of the retired NBA truck Malone.
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Abercrombie & Fitch, what hath thou wrought? The pretty boys on the frat-house clothier's shopping bags taught a generation of heterosexual men to shave their chests. Then Maxim, the aggressively hetero men's magazine, extended its brand with . . . hair coloring. "Metrosexuality," the press dubbed it — a cultural movement led by urban men eager to embrace their "feminine sides" through grooming and shopping! The New York Times published an article titled “Metrosexuals Come Out.” Queer Eye for the Straight Guy became a TV hit and a seeming cultural mandate. Last month, presidential hopeful Howard Dean tried to seize the Banana Republican vote by declaring himself metrosexual; the next day, he discreetly retracted the statement, confessing
Howie, we're with ya. But before we could reach for some ipecac and collectively purge ourselves of this concept, Da Capo Press released The Metrosexual Guide to Style: A Handbook for the Modern Man by Michael Flocker. To recap: it's a book about a trend that doesn't really exist and a label that means nothing.

Fittingly, for a book that bills itself as a "Guide to Style," it's rather lazy in that department. (A typical revelation: "From tuxedoes to T-shirts, Armani provides consistent quality pieces.") Elsewhere, passages on what wine goes with which food and how to determine the best hairstyle for your face are interspersed with didactic tutorials on art and travel that read like emails from your know-nothing, know-it-all friend: "There is a commonly held misconception that Parisians are always very rude to Americans visiting their city. This notion has been perpetuated over the years, but is not always the case." Amazing.

Like hand-me-down Drakkar Noir, the odor of status anxiety wafts from these pages.

That the book would have the intellectual gravity of Marcus Schenkenburg in a wind tunnel is no surprise. Like its similarly designed shelf-mate, The Hipster Handbook, The Metrosexual Guide is a crass attempt to cash in on a trend manufactured by style writers for glossy magazines. we've never met anyone who described himself — or anyone else — as a "metrosexual" or a "hipster," yet somehow these demographically ideal lifestyle specimens crawl out of the woodwork just long enough to go on the record before morphing into the next new, new thing.
As the term "yuppie" was to the '80s or "hipster" was to the late '90s, "metrosexual" has become a lazy catch-all, something you can call any guy who manages to shave himself properly or who falls short of John Wayne in the rugged-masculinity department. But like those earlier terms that warped into epithets, "metrosexual" doesn't say anything about the person being referred to, but plenty about the person making the reference.

The odor of status anxiety wafts from these pages like hand-me-down Drakkar Noir. Here's Flocker on etiquette, for example: "To some, the rules of etiquette may seem outdated, stuffy, and unnecessary, but the fact remains that they serve as a sort of social weed-whacker eliminating unsavory growths from popping up in the world's finer gardens." Or his justification for the metrosexual man's fixation on clothing: "For centuries, pharaohs, kings, and czars bedecked themselves in furs and jewels while the underclasses toiled hopelessly clad in dull flea-bitten rags." (Now that's what I call historical significance!)

This anxiety reminds me of all those articles about the Decline of the White Male that were published at the tail end of the early '90s. Much sociological ink was spilled explaining how feminism, affirmative action and gay rights were lowering the esteem of white men. Perhaps the rise of the metrosexual can be seen as a grasping for relevance — cultural, sexual, and (with Dr. Dean joining ranks), political — by these forgotten white shadows. By stealing plays from the gay playbook (assuming, of course, that things like "shopping" and "grooming" are inherently "gay"), maybe the metrosexual male can retake the field of American culture!

That's why Flocker's book — and the whole metrosexual moment — is so devious. It pretends to be about breaking down barriers, about embracing diversity and stretching gender roles, yet in the end it supports the same old thing. A cursory glance at men's magazines from the late '50s and early '60s reveals fear and dread of the breakdown of traditional hierarchies in articles like "You Have to Horsewhip Your Wife" (Jem, January 1957) and "Women Don't Want Equality" (The New High, March 1959).

If the anxiety ain't new, neither is the vanity. Whether they were called Beau Brummels, fops, dandies, fancy lads, Teddy boys, mods or pimps, certain men have always been willing to spend inordinate amounts of money and time on self-maintenance. One need look no further than Muhammad Ali (an African-American style icon ignored — like most black culture — in this lily-white book) pronouncing himself "So pretty!" to find a non-'90s example of this. Or what about Warren Beatty in Shampoo as the flounciest heterosexual hairdresser in Beverly Hills? Or John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever complaining to his working-class dad: "Would ya just watch the hair! Ya know, I spend a long time on my hair!" Pick up any old issue of Esquire and you'll find ads for After Six tuxedoes, which "kind of make [you] feel part of the upper crust" and Kanon skin products for "the care and preservation of the male body for living, loving and enjoying life to its fullest."

What's missing is any awareness of how real people live and what real people do.

There's really no need for a "guide" to this "new male ideal" (as the back cover calls it), since it's not new and it's far from ideal. Any trend that's solely predicated on buying shit should be regarded with the utmost skepticism by anyone over the age of thirteen. But self-identified metrosexuals like Flocker not only buy the shit, they actually buy the trend as well. And here's where The Metrosexual Guide's biggest failure is evident: what's missing is any awareness of how real people live and what real people do. For example, I live in a city. I shave with a bowl and brush. I smear on Kiehl's aftershave. But I also wear the same shoes I've had since college and rake leaves in paint-splattered pants. I'm not a paper doll waiting to be outfitted with a lifestyle.

The metrosexual, despite his numerous hairstyle and accessories options, is a one-dimensional being. Maybe that's why this book — and the term that inspired it — feels so flat. (Last month, Mark Simpson, the writer who coined "metrosexual" in 1994, pronounced it dead. And apologized. So can we let it go? Please?) With all of its definitions and graphics, the Metrosexual Guide reads like Flocker's attempt to shape metrosexual mythology the way Dick Hebdige did for mods, rockers, punks, and skinheads in his seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. Problem is, the metrosexual myth-spinners don't know dick, and it shows. n°

Matt Haber has written for Spin, Entertainment Weekly, New York, Salon.com, and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn and writes for http://www.lowculture.com/

posted by audaciousjoy @ 8:12 PM