marksimpson.com

By Mark Simp­son (Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, 21 Jan 2008)

Every child wants to be a zookeeper when they grow up. To run a place where every­thing is in its place, and has noth­ing to do but eat, shit and breed — to your timetable. Maybe it’s a yen for revenge on the par­ents who brought them into the world with­out ask­ing their per­mis­sion first, or maybe it’s just because chil­dren are all lit­tle dic­ta­tors with a peaked-cap fetish.

Most though aban­don these zoo fuehrer dreams when they actu­ally grow up. Not so Desmond Mor­ris. Impres­sively, this for­mer cura­tor of mam­mals at Lon­don Zoo, doesn’t make do with ani­mals: with best-selling books such as The Naked Ape and Man­watch­ing, this world-famous zool­o­gist has man­aged to become head keeper at his very own human zoo.

And to be hon­est, the world evoked in his lat­est book The Naked Man, ‘a study of the male body from head to foot’, sounds like a place I’d quite like to visit — but only because I’m some­thing of a nostalgic.

Mor­ris­land isn’t just a zoo, you see. It’s also a his­tor­i­cal theme park. In Mor­ris­land, mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion, red in tooth and claw, have brought us right up to… the sub­ur­ban 1950s (the decade Mor­ris grad­u­ated). In Mor­ris­land ‘long-term pair bond­ing’ is the uni­ver­sal norm and there’s no need for a Child Sup­port Agency or Asbos or turkey-basters since: ‘Pow­er­ful pater­nal feel­ings are unleashed the moment a human father holds his new baby in his arms and in the years ahead he will devote a great deal of time and atten­tion to the rear­ing of his offspring.’

In Mor­ris­land, where every­thing hap­pens accord­ing to the zoo-keeper’s plan, women are 7 per­cent shorter than men so that their nose will reach inside a man’s hairy armpit, because sniff­ing his manly, rugged ‘pheromones’ makes her happy and want babies. And, of course, no West­ern man would shave his armpit. Only ‘mem­bers of the homo­sex­ual com­mu­nity or the bondage/sadomasochistic com­mu­ni­ties’ would do that.

By far the biggest attrac­tion in Mor­ris­land is sex­ual cer­tainty. Within this fenced-off space the dis­tinc­tion between ‘mas­cu­line’ and ‘fem­i­nine’, ‘homo­sex­ual’ and ‘het­ero­sex­ual’, is unclouded by all those unnat­ural mod­ern trends. ‘As nature intended’ is a favourite phrase, one which appears above the entrance gates. In Mor­ris­land, men are men — and there’s a strict golf club dress code. ‘Accep­tance of male ear­rings still tends to be lim­ited to those worn by the younger, more flam­boy­ant males, largely from the world of sport, music and show­busi­ness,’ you’ll be glad to hear. Male bracelets are sim­ply effem­i­nate. And men only shave their legs — ‘sac­ri­fic­ing their mas­culin­ity’ — to swim or cycle faster.

In today’s fallen world, an older man might be called a ‘slap­head’ by unruly yobs — but safe inside Mor­ris­land you’ll find your­self prop­erly respected: ‘it is obvi­ous that bald­ness is a human dis­play sig­nal indi­cat­ing male senior­ity and dom­i­nance. It typ­i­fies the vir­ile older man…’ (There’s no author photo on the dust-jacket, but a quick Google search con­firms that Desmond is com­pletely ‘virile’.)

There is trou­ble in the Gar­den of Desmond, how­ever. Appar­ently ‘A few men — nar­cis­sist or masochists — have opted for nip­ple rings.’ But at least it’s only ‘a few’ — and they’re all deviants. Mean­while, serpent-like ‘Gay design­ers’ ‘ignor­ing male pref­er­ences’ attempt to intro­duce ‘effem­i­nate new leg fash­ions’. For­tu­nately, these fash­ions prove as ster­ile as the gay design­ers them­selves: ‘they may have looked amus­ing on the cat­walk, but they have never made it to the high street. Crum­pled trousers and grubby jeans still reign supreme in the world of the manly male.’

In Mor­ris­land there does exist how­ever some­thing called a ‘‘six-pack’ chest’ — though ‘few are pre­pared to make the effort to cre­ate it.’ Per­haps because a ‘six-pack chest’ would require not just reg­u­lar vis­its to the gym, but also sub­stan­tial surgery.

Sur­pris­ingly, that ter­ri­fy­ing 21st Cen­tury male phe­nom­e­non I’ve been blamed for sir­ing myself — met­ro­sex­u­als — are allowed in Mor­ris­land. But only those whose het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is beyond ques­tion and ‘are well-known as tough, mas­cu­line sports­men and as famous celebri­ties… so, for them to become fas­tid­i­ous and fashion-conscious cre­ates no con­fu­sion.’ Well, that’s a relief.

Non-celeb met­ro­sex­u­als don’t exist in Mor­ris­land, because ‘if an unknown het­ero­sex­ual male were to dis­play over-groomed, nar­cis­sis­tic ten­den­cies, his sex­ual pref­er­ences would be auto­mat­i­cally mis­read by any­one who met him.’ Which would, it goes with­out Mr Mor­ris say­ing, be the worst thing that could pos­si­bly hap­pen to a man and would ren­der him com­pletely emas­cu­lated and ridicu­lous. ‘This lim­its,’ explains the human zoo-keeper, ‘the met­ro­sex­ual cat­e­gory to famous celebri­ties who are already pub­licly recog­nised for their heterosexuality.’

Clearly, not many of those High Street sales of male cos­met­ics which have increased by 800% since the year 2000, have been made in Mor­ris­land. Though I do worry that the cover model for Mor­ris’ book, an anony­mous, head­less, naked, smoothly mus­cu­lar, young male pho­tographed from behind in that sensuous-shadowy adver­tis­ing sex-object way — offer­ing us his arse — has been binge­ing on met­ro­sex­ual prod­ucts. I sin­cerely hope his het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is already very pub­licly recognised.

As you may have guessed, Mr Mor­ris has a prob­lem with homo­sex­u­al­ity. Through­out his book ‘manly’ means ‘het­ero­sex­ual’, unmanly means ‘homo­sex­ual’ — and vice versa.

But it’s not a per­sonal prob­lem, it’s a sci­en­tific one, you see. In a final chap­ter called ‘The Pref­er­ences’ devoted not in fact to the pref­er­ences but rather to explaining/pathologising male homo­sex­u­al­ity, he writes, ‘Viewed purely from an evo­lu­tion­ary stand­point, there is only one valid bio­log­i­cal lifestyle for the human male and that is het­ero­sex­ual.’ In other words, evo­lu­tion, like zoo-keepers, doesn’t like waste and wants you to repro­duce early and often.

But I can’t help but won­der why, if God/Darwin/Morris didn’t want men to get shagged, why did he give them such itchy prostate glands? And if every sperm is sacred, why did he put their hands at crotch level?

Des’ expla­na­tion for exclu­sive homo­sex­u­al­ity (exclu­sive het­ero­sex­u­al­ity needs no expla­na­tion appar­ently — and bisex­u­al­ity isn’t dis­cussed) is, like much else in his book, charm­ingly mid-Twentieth Cen­tury: at puberty some boys fail to move out of the long all-boy social phase of child­hood — and also boy-boy ‘sex play’ — and switch into dat­ing girls and home-making, because they have become ‘too attached’. I per­son­ally don’t mind the arrested devel­op­ment expla­na­tion of homo­sex­u­al­ity: I think it rather roman­tic (like Mor­ris, I attended a boy’s board­ing school). I’m not entirely sure though that I’m that much more imma­ture than some­one who never gave up want­ing to be a zoo keeper.

In con­clu­sion, Mor­ris makes a final impas­sioned plea for tol­er­ance and accep­tance of dif­fer­ence and human vari­ety: ‘Iso­lat­ing homo­sex­u­als as though they are mem­bers of some exclu­sive club does them no favours’.

So true. Unfor­tu­nately, this is exactly what the The Naked Male does. Mor­ris’ human zoo sep­a­rates ‘homo­sex­u­als’ and ‘het­ero­sex­u­als’ with barbed wire — and elec­tri­fies the fence.

© Mark Simp­son 2008