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Revision as of 21:27, 24 June 2004
Metrosexual, a portmanteau word combining "metropolitan" and "heterosexual", was first used in 1994 by British journalist Mark Simpson, who coined metrosexual (and its noun, metrosexuality) to refer an urban heterosexual male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle. He is the fashion-conscious target audience of men's magazines:
The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men's style press, magazines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eighties and is still growing (GQ gains 10,000 new readers every month). They filled their magazines with images of narcissistic young men sporting fashionable clothes and accessories. And they persuaded other young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.
Some people said unkind things. American GQ, for example, was popularly dubbed "Gay Quarterly". Little wonder that all these magazines - with the possible exception of 'The Face' - address their metrosexual readership as if none of them were homosexual or even bisexual.
After a period of decreased usage, the term metrosexual regained usage in popular culture in the early 2000s because of a convergence of gay issues in society. These issues include Canada legalizing gay marriage, the US Supreme Court striking down anti-sodomy statutes as unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, and the introduction of gay characters and themes in popular culture on TV shows including Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace.
Newspapers also were prominent in the revival of this term when it was reintroduced by Mark Simpson in a 2002 Salon article that "outed" metrosexual soccer megastar David Beckham and a new study by marketing firm Euro RCSG Worldwide. Metrosexuality also was boosted by a New York Times Sunday front page feature in the Arts and Leisure section which caused the term to trickle into local news outlets across North America.
Simpson's take is detached, wittily ironic, with more than a dash of anticorporate disdain –
The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis – because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere.
For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn't shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image – that's to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that's the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser's walking wet dream.
– and includes a Sex and the City definition for females, and touches on the Queer angle only in passing –
Gay men did, after all, provide the early prototype for metrosexuality. Decidedly single, definitely urban, dreadfully uncertain of their identity (hence the emphasis on pride and the susceptibility to the latest label) and socially emasculated, gay men had pioneered the business of accessorizing masculinity in the '70s with the clone look enthusiastically taken up by the mainstream in the form of the Village People. Difficult to believe, I know, but only one of them was gay and 99 percent of their fans were straight.
– but outside Britain, in its soundbite diffusion through the popular media, metrosexual has congealed into something more digestible: a heterosexual male who color coordinates and listens to Kylie Minogue and goes to independent movies, cares deeply about exfoliation, and perhaps even resorts to manscaping. A straight guy who acts gay.