marksimpson.com

You may remem­ber that a few weeks back Metro­daddy was moved to defend the new, svelte Shane Warne from a metro­pho­bic kick­ing by the British press. Even though his look isn’t really work­ing for me.

It seems I may have to do it again.

The Guardian — ‘the world’s lead­ing lib­eral voice’ – has finally got around to putting the car­ing, lib­eral boot in too, with a piece by Hadley Free­man titled ‘What’s Up With Shane Warne?’ But the Graun being the Graun it can’t just have an hon­est bit of metro-bashing. Oh no. It has to do it with a side-order of hypocrisy and and a sprin­kling of sanctimony:

‘This is not a plaint of the quasi-misogynistic and homo­pho­bic ones that have appeared in other, infe­rior rags, which can be summed up as “Liz ‘That dress’ Hur­ley turned Shane into a big queen’.

But  of course that’s exactly what it is. And pre­cisely because it’s the lovely lib­eral Graun which offi­cially adores The Gays it can be more explicit than The Daily Mail:

‘Leav­ing aside the fact that he appears to have mor­phed from the chubby, frosted-tip rogue that he was for sev­eral decades into Dale Winton’s blond brother, all with the help of noth­ing other than the Estée Lauder mois­turis­ers his girl­friend Eliz­a­beth Hur­ley hap­pens to shill for, it’s the man him­self that con­cerns me.’

But it really isn’t the man him­self she’s inter­ested in (who tells us ‘he feels bet­ter than he has done in years’). Again and again Freeman’s whinge is that Warne isn’t a man any­more because… he’s not the chubby, blokey crick­eter with the bad per­ox­ide job whom she freely admits she wasn’t very inter­ested in. And in fact, the viril­ity of the entire Aus­tralian con­ti­nent has been insulted by Hur­ley and England’s spay­ing and gay­ing of its favourite sportsman.

‘Why has Aus­tralia not staged an inter­ven­tion? And after the humil­i­a­tions this coun­try have inflicted on… Warne, why has Aus­tralia not declared war on Britain?’

Free­man like most Brits (see any UK ad for Fos­ters) seems to fetishise Aus­tralia as some kind of repos­i­tory of authen­tic mas­culin­ity – when in fact the bath­rooms of Syd­ney are repos­i­to­ries of more male beauty prod­ucts than almost any­where on Earth. I sus­pect that part of the ladies and gen­tle­men of the British press’ bit­ter antipa­thy towards Warne’s makeover met­ro­sex­u­al­ity is the way it deprives them of their fan­tasy of being rogered sense­less by a sweaty, leathered up Mel Gib­son in Beyond Thun­der­dome.

Now, I realise that Free­man is employed to be bitchy and isn’t to be taken ter­ri­bly seri­ously. And besides, her breath­less style is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to fol­low. Or read. All the same, and for all the ironic and hyp­o­crit­i­cal smoke this piece puts out, it’s pretty clear that ‘the world’s lead­ing lib­eral voice’ has some very tra­di­tional views on mas­culin­ity, even in its ‘Life and Style’ sec­tion, which has past form in this area.

But then The Graun has always had some­thing of a puri­tan­i­cal bent, which is in full ser­mon­is­ing mode in this recent piece in the TV Sec­tion about the Welsh rug­ger bug­ger and gal­lop­ing met­ro­sex­ual Gavin Hen­son, pegged to his lat­est real­ity TV ven­ture The Bach­e­lor, (and blogged about by QRG at Graun­watch) which man­ages to char­ac­terise the show as demean­ing to women (pos­si­bly a con­trac­tual require­ment at The Graun) but spends most of its time demean­ing Hen­son for being a rugby player who is also ‘a looker’.

Though at least the author David Stubbs is more hon­est than Free­man about being an old-fashioned girl.

More on The Bach­e­lor soon.…

UPDATE 30/08/11

Thanks to Bat020 for alert­ing me to ‘Where have all the real men gone?’ by Bry­ony Gor­don in yesterday’s Daily Tele­graph which despite the omi­nous title, comes out in doughty defence of Shane Warne and met­ro­sex­u­al­ity. Leav­ing ‘the world’s lead­ing lib­eral voice’ sound­ing even more b&t:

‘The sur­vey, by Dixons, found that if allowed to travel with just one elec­tronic device, four times as many men than women would take an iron. In fact, portable speak­ers for iPods come below hairdry­ers, straight­en­ers and a male groom­ing kit in the list of travel prod­ucts men claim they can­not live without.

“We are increas­ingly see­ing men com­ing into our stores to pick up last-minute travel essen­tials, such as a hairdryer and travel iron,” said Daryl Humphries of Dixons. “They often hope their girl­friend won’t notice.”

News­flash, boys: we have noticed. We know that you some­times use our Estée Lauder Advanced Night Cream (we can smell it on you), that you occa­sion­ally reach for our tweez­ers, and we have seen you study­ing your wrin­kles in the bath­room mir­ror. And you know what? It’s really OK.’