"It's Brad Pitt in 'Fight Club.' That's the body blokes ask for."

"Yesterday: Roided out bodybuilders. Today: V-lined ab-focused fat free men ready for their HD selfie."

"First, straights came for the smooth, pretty gay look recustomized as 'the metrosexual,' and now you have come for our hairier brethren. "

"What else would you like? What else can we give you? You’ve taken it all. All our cutting asides and repartee, design expertise, gym dedication, fitted shirts, food knowledge, high and low culture snarking, gift-buying nous, and our smarts ('She’s such a drama queen')—straight culture has gobbled gay culture as ravenously as Cookie Monster atomizes baked dough. It’s fine, we’ll take the compliment, even if we are baffled that you’re now wanting a slice of performing and playing with masculinity, given the amount of homophobia and legislative discrimination you have put in our way. All that gay fear you’ve labored under and battered us with, all that crap about what men should be, and now, with the lumbersexual, the metrosexual, the use of camp, and so much more, you’ve not only come over to our side, you want in on the joke. And lumberjacks, well, you should have really trademarked your look. The lumbersexual is beards and flannel shirts, the opposite of the waxed chest, sculpted muscles, empathetic male cyborg of a few years ago: the straight man who was 'gay' apart from where he chose to place his penis. "

From a Daily Beast article by Tim Teeman subtitled "Have you met the lumbersexual: all beards, flannel shirts, and work boots? It’s the latest gay ‘look’ co-opted by straights. Have it. We have nothing left to give you."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade quotes Teeman's "We have nothing left to give you" and writes:

And after a long time the conflicted homophobic boy came back again.

"I am sorry, Conflicted Homophobic Boy," said the lumbersexual tree, "but I have nothing left to give you — My fashionable apples are gone."

"My teeth are too weak for apples," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"My fitted branches are gone," said the lumbersexual tree. "You cannot swing on them —"

"I am too old to swing on branches," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"My gym-toned trunk is gone," said the lumbersexual tree. "You cannot climb —"

"I am too tired to climb," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"I am sorry," sighed the lumbersexual tree.

"I wish that I could give you something... but I have nothing left. I am just an old lumbersexual stump. I am sorry..."

"I don't need very much now," said the conflicted homophobic boy, "just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired."

"Well," said the lumbersexual tree, straightening [himself] up as much as [he] could, "Well, an old lumbersexual stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Conflicted Homophobic Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest."

And the conflicted homophobic boy did.

And the lumbersexual tree was happy.

― Hugh Goldenburger, The Lumbersexual Tree 

Love is all around.

Yesterday, I said "Love was all around, and I was able to choke back tears until I got back in the car." In the comments, Unknown said:

How can the increase of the rate of love in the world be a bad thing? I don't comment often, anywhere, but this moved me. Thank you.

And Pat said:

Long time conservative republican here, glad to see people who love each other and are willing to commit to each other, able to be married. We r's need to let this issue go and fight other fights.

But eric said:

I submit that the word love is being used in a fallacious way. Love does not mean something you feel. It means the way you behave. What we are seeing is a perversion of love. One that says, if you feel good, its love. Which is apropos of this situation. As we see both love and sex being perverter and enablers helping these people destroy their lives.

Love is not something you feel? "I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes," sang The Troggs in a song, titled with the words I used, "Love Is All Around." And here's Joan Jett and The Blackhearts singing the theme from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" ("Love is all around/No need to waste it..."):



And — to embrace tradition — here's the original show opening with Mary emoting and a gentle-voiced man singing about turning the world on with a smile. Perhaps eric will stop in to submit that the human smile cannot in fact turn on the world and, indeed, the world is not a unified, embodied entity with genitals capable of arousal, and even given the vast appeal of Mary Tyler Moore, it is fallacious to contend that the entire world possesses a sexual orientation toward a woman smiling.

The gentle-voiced man — if you're inclined to riff on what your body's ears hear as effeminacy or metrosexuality or whatever — is Sonny Curtis, who played with Buddy Holly before there were Crickets and who wrote — in addition to Mary's "Love Is All Around" — the lawyer's favorite "I Fought the Law" and the Everly Brother's "Walk Right Back." Or does Anne Murray turn you on with her smile?

Did you know Mary Tyler Moore is now 77 years old and nearly blind?

Have you heard there are none so blind as those that will not see? 

And:

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

"Liberals hate male strength. Liberals do not like male strength at all."

Proclaimed Rush Limbaugh the other day.

They don't like the use of force unless it's for their own ends.  They love the military when they run it, but at no other time.  They're a bunch of metrosexuals.  Metrosexual culture is pacifist.  That's why metrosexuals are liberals that rely on government force to perpetrate their agenda.  They don't do it themselves.  Government force takes the place of powerful men.

This came at the end of a rant about how liberals want to ban football. I thought it was a tad strange, actually, even though I do tend to think that liberals would like to set up the government so that women would see it as serving an array of purposes traditionally assigned to husbands.

What happened to all the manly men?

The NYT asks a bunch of people, including Natasha Scripture, who says:

Come to think of it, I haven’t met a manly man in quite some time. Maybe because most of them live in Montana. Or Texas. Or Sicily! They’re certainly rare sightings in New York City because here the abundant local species seems to be the metrosexual.

Oh! Metrosexual. I haven't seen that word for a long time. I'm thinking it fell out of fashion because... Barack Obama? But it's reviving because somebody at the NYT thinks Obama is manlier than Mitt Romney. (He just points at a name on a list and a guy half a globe away explodes — to smithereens.) But, no, maybe it's not that. Maybe it's "50 Shades of Grey" being a big bestseller and somebody at the NYT inferring that their female readers are tired of less manly men, so it's time to bring back the old epithet. Or, hell, maybe ladies are reading "50 Shades of Grey" because of Barack Obama. Whatever. Anyway, back to Natasha Scripture (love the name):

And as much as I can appreciate a man who knows his sashimi, the more carnal, female side of me wants to see him tuck into a heaping plate of meat and potatoes; and to toss aside the cologne and let pheromones take charge. Yes, gentlemen, you’re allowed to sweat in my divine presence.

Also, when it comes to so-called manly traits, I would be kind of a masochist if I didn’t want a man with some level of emotional availability. But please, is it too much to ask that he not cry on a first date?...

I hope we don’t become so much like each other that we end up essentially morphing into one androgynous being. That would just be plain weird.

Lots of things are weird. Like longing for masculinity, then calling yourself "divine" and dispensing precise instructions for just enough but not much manliness. But it's not so weird to sigh about how everyone you think you might want is somewhere other than on the small island where you live. But what can you do? Go to Montana?

There are 7 other essays in this NYT set....

Mark Simpson, author of "Metrosexy: A 21st Century Self-Love Story," says:

Continuing to fret about [manliness] means men being sold prissy lists of “manly” dos and don'ts. Or reactionary ideology, such as the mendacious “menaissance.” Or a dodgy daydream of a “manly” past, such as an impossibly pretty, fastidious advertising creative, who is also a basket-case army deserter. And entirely fictional.

What? Those are words, and I know what they all mean. But I don't know what they mean together. Presumably: Stop thinking about it.

Joel Stein,  author of "Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity," says:

I got messed up by my feminist mom in the 1970s, who taught me that gender was a social construct. I can’t believe that social experiment went on as long as it did, since it’s clear by month six of having a child that William does not want a doll....

His boy is masculine. Problem solved for Joel Stein.

Still 5 more essays, but that's it for me.

Why men shave their heads.

Christina Reihill writes:

While the idea of the modern man as a hairless metrosexual more interested in manicures than motors challenges my notions of a heterosexual man, I'm more interested in the state of play between the sexes in our hyper-sexualised, pornified culture.

As young girls are told that it's empowering to pursue men aggressively and young men are learning to lie back and take it, I wonder how these acts of aggressive connection affects the psyche....

On Freud's map, this redefining of male sexuality could be seen as men searching for the mother in them and/or acting out their sexual envy towards woman.

Just as women express penis envy, is this men saying we're not lying back and taking it?

What are we watching and possibly not seeing in the bald head, bullet-proof imagery in today's "anything goes" culture? What is the symbolism in men shaving their heads?

Staying with Freud and his symbolic grammar -- the head represents the penis, while head hair is recognised as semen.

Extending the logic of these associations, long hair expresses unrestrained sexuality, while hair removal makes a statement around sexual restraint, as in celibacy or castration.

What is restrained about exposing the penis? You had to do that hair=semen move to make this theory work.

Great photo at Drudge right now.

It says so much:

the election is razor close...

Huckabee faces a close shave in more ways than one...

and he needs close shaves to stave off his resemblance to Nixon...

Huckabee has a monobrow which he controls not with metrosexual waxing but manly straight-razoring...

Matt Drudge wants us to think about "Un Chien Andalou."



ADDED: Yes, and think about "Sweeney Todd" too.

AND: Uncle Jimbo, in the comments, convinces me that the razor is not being used between the eyebrows.

What if we had to choose a President based on knowledge of pop culture?

What Stephen Bainbridge would want:

• Knows which wine to match with the foie gras-stuffed quail being served at a state dinner
• Won't wink at the Queen
• Doesn't hunt, fish, or go with girls who do
• Smokes cigars
• Is sometimes accused of having a metrosexual streak
• Only drinks beer with foods that would score at least 10,000 on the Scoville scale
• Can credibly debate the relative claims of The Matrix, Star Wars, Bladerunner, and Star Trek II to be the greatest science fiction movie of all time
• Can credibly debate the relative claims of the Who and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band to be the world's greatest rock and roll band

(More items at the link.) I'm going to assume these are all things that are true of Stephen Bainbridge, who is mainly sick of all the Southern pop culture in presidential culture. But, frankly, he's got a few in there that would be disqualifiers for me. "Claims of the Who and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band to be the world's greatest rock and roll band"? And you just know he means the 70s Who. I want my President to take a firm stand preferring pre-"Tommy" Who to post-"Tommy" Who. And I don't care if he -- Bainbridge's character is clearly a guy -- winks at the Queen, but I do want to see him do a karaoke performance of "We Are The Champions."

ADDED: Speaking of metrosexuals, this is pretty funny.

That's not funny! Snickers.

Is this ad offensively homophobic?



The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign complained and got Masterfoods to withdraw it (after it played during the Super Bowl). I wonder if non-activist gay people and gay-friendly non-gay people are offended by that ad. I think it's funny. It makes fun of guys who are afraid of being gay, which isn't endorsing homophobia. It's mocking it. And what do they do when they feel compelled to "do something manly"? They rip hair off their chest. Hair on the chest is a longtime symbol of masculinity. And de-hair-ifying your chest is a metrosexual thing. And the fact is, they showed two men in a big, sweet open-mouthed kiss.

So the complaint is not only humorless, it's obtuse.

ADDED: Americablog is horrified and outraged by the ad. I disagree, but accept the point that idiots could view the ad and learn the reaction of violence. Given that there is anti-gay violence, one ought not to fool around with material like this.

MORE: As you can see at the Americablog link, there were follow-on ads that exacerbated the problem. And as the commenters point out, the original ad, even if funny and not homophobic, is still not a good way to promote a candy bar.

Beards.

They're back!

[Vice magazine's ad director John] Martin's idea of a style symbol, seriously, is Ulysses S. Grant, whose beard he came to admire after watching the 2003 Civil War-era drama "Cold Mountain." Two years ago, when he began experimenting with different beard styles, which he described as ranging from neat to burly to unkempt, his facial hair was an expression of individuality in a tide of metrosexual conformity. Now 10 of his 15 co-workers at Vice wear full, bushy beards. In that, they vie with the pro-facial-hair contingent of an editorial rival, Spin, where a rash of new beards has broken out. "It's a sign of the times," Mr. Martin said. "People are into beards right now."

NOOOO!

No survey ever conducted about women's attitudes toward beards, even those not underwritten by the Gillette Company, has indicated that more than 2 or 3 percent of women would describe a full beard as sexy. ("I hang out with those girls who are in that 2 or 3 percent," Mr. Martin, of Vice, said.)

Can we have a little sanity? Martin's found the girls who are into this? 

Catchwords.

This is actually a pretty nothing article on a subject I'm interested in: catchwords. It links to two sort of useful websites: blogpulse and wordspy. You'd think a piece on the front page of the NYT Week in Review, with that subject and those websites, would find some new, cool things to play around with. Instead, we get to hear about metrosexual again.

"Metrosexual" comes right off the top of Word Spy's Top 100 list, but this word was originally listed on September 4, 2002. The author notes that "ubersexual" is a few slots lower on the list. Related words on the list: pomosexual, retrosexual, technosexual, heteroflexible.

Unrelated, though possibly seemingly related phrase that interested me, though I don't remember ever hearing it: time porn. TV shows where the characters -- metrosexuals, retrosexuals, whatever -- wallow around in excessive amounts of time.

And then there's the "adrenosexual" man.

Replacing the metrosexual.

The Leo Burnett Man Study.

The Leo Burnett ad agency recently released a study, based on interviews with over 2,000 men in 13 countries, about attitudes about masculinity.

Overall, findings from the Leo Burnett Man Study highlight the disruption of men’s sense of identity due to profound social and structural changes taking place across the globe. The study confirmed that men in most parts of the world are unsure of what’s expected of them in society, with half of those surveyed saying they felt their role in society was unclear. Additionally, a stunning 74 per cent said they believe the images of men in advertising are out of touch with reality.

"As the world is drifting toward a more feminine perspective, many of the social constructs men have taken for granted are undergoing significant shifts or being outright dismantled. It’s a confusing time, not just for men, but for marketers as well as they try to target and depict men meaningfully," said Bernardin.

The study revealed the existence of a "New Male Spectrum," characterised on one end by enlightened, evolved, modern men - or what have been popularly dubbed "metrosexuals," and on the other end, entrenched, more traditionally masculine "retrosexuals" who cling steadfastly to stereotypical male behavior. Both groups are engaged by the gender debate and see themselves in terms relative to women: either they’re more like women (Metros) or they’re aggressively asserting their difference from women, (Retros).

The agency cautioned marketers against becoming fixated on these men who are adapting - or not - to women’s new power and influence in society. According to the Man Study, fewer than 40 per cent of men define themselves this way: the majority of men surveyed (60 per cent) aren’t caught up in this gender debate and live by a more traditional set of standards for assessing their masculinity.

The John Kerry and Botox issue.

Wonkette quips:

Our politicians owe it to us to be hot. We're the ones who have look at them all the time. So, from us to you, John Kerry: Thank you. You once risked your life for your fellow Americans, and now you've risked your nerve endings. There is no greater price -- and no greater reward.

I'd say, if people are talking about your face too much, they're distracted from talking about something else about you. If there's something you can do to remove the distraction, go ahead and do it! You will be helping us turn our thoughts to substantive things.

This is especially important for the candidates because they are coming at us in our TV rooms, where we are relaxed and talking to close friends and family. Everyone in that setting feels free to just call out "Look at his face" or "He looks like [whatever]." That is basic, casual, I'm-just-watching-TV humor. Jon Stewart feels free to use that kind of humor on "The Daily Show" all the time, because he's decided to become our TV-watching pal, showing us clips and helping us laugh, pretty much the way we could do on our own, if we were just a tad more motivated and had someone isolating the most ridiculous TV-clips for us.

Obviously, there's also the fear of getting caught and then being called vain or metrosexual or effeminate. People were talking about the cragginess of Kerry's face way too much, and now maybe they'll switch not to substantive matters but to talking about the Botox issue instead. But the wiser course is to do what you can to make yourself telegenic. It's the Nixon lesson--described here by Richard Rodriguez:

Nearly forty years ago, the debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon became -- as the television lens saw it -- a debate between earnestness and sophistication, between pale skin and a tan. Kennedy wore the tan. He looked easy, cosmopolitan.

Poor Richard Nixon, in a manly burst, refused makeup before the debate; he looked sickly. Then, to make matters worse, he started to sweat. You're not supposed to sweat on television. It means that you're guilty. It means that you are a liar. It means that we can't trust you to become President.

All the political candidates wear makeup on TV now. Presumably, before long, they will all use Botox too. The problem is not using such things, it is using them badly. A political candidate that Botoxed his face into an inhuman mask would run into problems similar to those Al Gore had when he wore too much makeup in one of the debates four years ago.

No, not metrosexual, metrotextual.

An odd place for a witticism, but Herbert Muschamp always surprises, like a Constitution, and maybe even shocks, like a woman singing on television.