MARK SIMPSON.com

Who are you calling hummersexual?

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 read. 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.

You might think that it was Italy’s greater ball-skills or stamina or team-spirit that won them the World Cup in the final against France last night.

But you’d be wrong.

Cleary, indubitably - as the pictures ’explicitly’ show - what won it for the Italians was not so much their sporting spirt as their sporno spirit. 

Earlier this year some players from the Italian team recruited Dolce & Gabbana (or was it the other way around?) to produce a spornographic fashion shoot of them all oiled up and ready for action in the locker-room.  In hindsight we can see that the world was theirs for the asking/at their feet (etc. etc.) from that moment on.

Sporno, the post-metrosexual porno aesthetic that sports and advertising are using to sell us the male body is, well, irresistible.  Even for the French - who were, let’s face it, a much uglier bunch.  First Portugal defeat England because Ronaldo is tartier than Becks and swoonier than Rooney, then Italy defeat France because the punters would much rather celebrate with them in the locker-room than the French. 

It’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us as desirable, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of metrosexuality.  This doesn’t proffer an intense enough image.  It’s not shocking or arousing enough any more.  In fact, it’s just too… normal.  Now the male body has to promise us an (immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped) gang-bang in the showers.

Though of course, because this is sporno and not actual pornography, it remains just that: a promise.  Advertising offers us not just a fetish of the spo/urting male body but also of his… underwear.  Commodity fetishism is usually the name of the sporno game, just as it was for metrosexuality.  However, the homoprovocative nature of sporno is much less easy to disavow than it was in metrosexuality. 

I mean, just look at the pictures.

One of the especially peculiar - and frustrating - effects of a spornographic world however is that more and more men at the gym tend to wear their underwear or trunks in the showers .

Which seems to me to be really dirty. 

Just in time for the World Cup the July issue of the re-launched OUT (now edited by Aaron Hicklin) features an essay by yours truly on the post-metrosexual pornolization of sport - or what I dub ’sporno’.  Here’s a (breathless) taster:

‘Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with their gay fans, a la David Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg (the man who actually looks the way Beckham thinks he looks). Both these thoroughbreds have posed for spreads in gay magazines and both have welcomed the attention of gay fans because they “have great taste.��?  More than this, they and a whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United’s Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo, to rougher prospects like Chelsea’s Joe Cole and AC Milan’s Kaka, keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a post-metrosexual, increasingly pornolized world. 

In other words: they’re not just sports stars, but sporno stars’

And if you think sporno is just a faggy Euro phenomenon, then think again:

‘Why are Euro soccer stars Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg household names in the US, a country which has generally less interest in soccer than socialism? Because these sporno stars— athletic young hustlers who are happy to be ogled barely dressed on Times Square billboards and in Vanity Fair—advertise a willingness to put out, or at least get it out, to get ahead that is about as all-American as you can get. 

‘Ljunberg’s Calvin Klein clad basket of giant Swedish meatballs is the dish everyone wants to dine on and he seems more than happy to feed us (god bless ‘im).  Or try a nice cool, creamy Beckham, recently hired as the new face off the long-running Got Milk? campaign. Want to grow up to be a sporno star? Make sure you drink your milk!’

The July issue of OUT - like the male sporting body - is on sale now.

You can read the full article here.

It seems the metrosexual is alive and well after all and keeping his pubes and butt-bush properly trimmed.

This Philips ‘flash’ website dedicated to metroshaving, including tips on how to shave your private parts for public consumption, i.e. how to make your John-Thomas look bigger is, quite deliberately, beyond parody.  It’s hilariously clever.  And proof positive that contrary to what the Brits like to say about them, Yanks can do irony.  It’s worth clicking on all the options - particularly ‘Testimonials’.  Trust me.

Why is it so clever?  Because it has people like me (and Dermod Moore) drawing your attention to it.  And it will be forwarded to a million bored veal-pen office workers to giggle over.  It’s an example of very successful, very sharp viral advertising. 

Its real cleverness though is in its parodic approach to a subject that many men will find embarrassing or distasteful - or emasculating.  And also to metrosexuality itself.  This ‘parady’ gets the gags in before anyone else can and disinhibits men from buying the ‘faggy’ product by turning shame into a roguish giggle, embarrassment into bravura, vanity into virility.  Its approach to the subject of selling men a ‘feminine’ product - a body shaver which seems to be a slightly butched up version of Philips’ female depilators - is essentially a form of masculine banter. 

More than this, it sells men a previously ’feminine’ anxiety - body hair - as something natural and universal to guys.  Which, of course, in a metrosexualised world it increasingly is.

All the same, I can’t suppress the feeling that under that suspiciously tightly-belted white towelling is either:

a) a pelt of thick black gorilla fur or

b) a black lace-up corset and fishnet stockings or

c) another white bath-robe