marksimpson.com

by Mark Simp­son (The Guardian, Octo­ber 10, 2006)

There’s a war going on in the US. A war on met­ros. After years liv­ing under the cruel designer heel of those tri­umphant met­ro­sex­u­als, poor old ret­ro­sex­u­als — alias “reg­u­lar guys” — are fight­ing back. Old-time, unself-conscious, un-moisturised mas­culin­ity is in. Guys are guys again, with manly, painstak­ingly shaped and trimmed beards. They eat manly food, drive manly trucks and read manly books on manliness.

Or so you may have heard. Truth be told, this is a phoney war. The “menais­sance” is men­da­cious. This isn’t ret­ro­sex­ual at all, but hum­mer­sex­ual - a noisy, overblown, stud­ied and frankly rather camp form of fake mas­culin­ity that likes to draw atten­tion to itself and its allegedly old-fashioned “man­li­ness”, but tends — like dri­ving an out­sized mil­i­tary vehi­cle in the sub­urbs — to be a tad counterproductive.

The hum­mer­sex­ual, you see, doth protest too much. Rather than “reclaim­ing your man­hood”, as the recent US Hum­mer ad cam­paign trum­peted, hum­mer­sex­u­al­ity tends to make peo­ple won­der whether there’s some kind of com­pen­sa­tion going on. This is a fetishised, “strapped-on”, unsus­tain­able, gas-guzzling mas­culin­ity which, like the met­ro­sex­u­al­ity it is sup­pos­edly a reac­tion against, is a needy prod­uct of con­sumerism and media. After all, it is Madi­son Avenue — with those Hum­mer, Burger King “man­them” (“We are men, hear us roar”) and Dodge “Any­thing but cute” ads — that styled it.

How­ever, unlike his better-looking met­ro­sex­ual younger brother — whom he usu­ally refers to as ‘that fag’ — the hum­mer­sex­ual is in denial. He thinks he reeks of het­ero­sex­u­al­ity, but is bliss­fully unaware that he often seems to have just stepped out of the funkier kind of gay leather/bear bar.

Despite his best efforts to con­vince you, the hum­mer­sex­ual is not ret­ro­sex­ual. Since when did “reg­u­lar guys” need sev­eral tons of mil­i­tary hard­ware, or “new macho” lifestyle mag­a­zines such as Best Life, or books such as the best­selling Alpha­bet of Man­li­ness and Men Don’t Apol­o­gise, to be “reg­u­lar”? The hum­mer­sex­ual is clearly, hilar­i­ously, faux-retrosexual. He’s an off-the-peg, drag-king idea of “real” mas­culin­ity: stuffed crotch and joke beard included at no extra charge.

Speak­ing of stuffed crotches, Pres­i­dent George W. Bush has exhib­ited some pro­nounced hum­mer­sex­ual ten­den­cies. Not only does the for­mer male cheer-leader have a walk that tries a lit­tle too hard to ref­er­ence John Wayne, as Commander-in-Chief he used the USS Abra­ham Lin­coln as a giant nuclear-powered elec­tion­eer­ing strap-on (“Mis­sion accom­plished!”). “Reclaim your man­hood” was prac­ti­cally the Republican’s men­da­cious re-election slo­gan — actual war hero Kerry was por­trayed as the flip-flopping met­ro­sex­ual girly man, to Bush’s real, manly, bring-it-on, gay-baiting Air National Guard bravery.

Like Bush, the hum­mer­sex­ual is already past his sell-by. He’s an end-of-line sale. Hum­mers them­selves, sales of which are threat­ened by the mas­sive hikes in gas prices (in part because of Bush’s hum­mer­sex­ual for­eign pol­icy), were never going to sell them­selves as green. BK were never going to sell them­selves as pur­vey­ors of exquis­ite Mediter­ranean sal­ads. And the Repub­li­cans were never going to sell them­selves as a mod­ern party.

What­ever his life expectancy, the hum­mer­sex­ual is sim­ply an annoy­ing fraud. In his manly coup against male con­sumerism and self-regard, the hum­mer­sex­ual is busy hog­ging two park­ing spaces instead of one at the mall.