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After all those ads in which Becks thrusted his giant Armani wrapped package in our faces if not down our throats, an Italian satirical TV show decided to do a little consumer product testing.  You know that in Italy they like to handle the sausage and tomatoes – and haggle over the price – before they part with their Euros.

Both parties are clearly unimpressed.

For those who don’t speak the most beautiful, most musical language in the world: the rubber-gloved lady shouts at a hooded, glowering Beckham driving off in his (ridiculously large) car full of minders: ‘HOW COULD YOU TAKE US FOR A RIDE!!??’

The incident has caused some anger in the UK, and some see it as outright sexual assault.  But if you are paid very large wedges of cash to put your lunchbox on the side of buses to sell overpriced underwear to the masses then perhaps the only shocking thing is that more punters don’t cop a feel of the goods.

Yours truly will be giving talk on ‘Sporno: How sport got into bed with gay porn – with Mr Armani taking pictures ‘ in Berlin on Thursday 18th June – i.e. tomorrow – at 8pm at the Dorrie * Priess Gallery (details below), courtesy of Manner-Magazin, CSD and Queer Nations.  It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

It will be richly illustrated.

Sorry for the very tardy notice….

Dörrie * Priess Berlin
Ulrich Dörrie / Holger Priess
Yorckstr. 89 a
D-10965 Berlin
Tel. (+49) 030/ 7889 5533

Tip: Donald Krolak

I’m still in shock after watching the handover to the London Olympics in Beijing. Please tell me it was a bad dream and that on your goggle-box you saw something much less horrifying.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson looked like he’d put on his worst suit – sorry, someone else’s worst suit – and slept in it all the way to China.  Adding to his impact, he generally behaved like someone from a Home for the Terminally Bewildered on a rare day out.

As for the show the Brits put on, featuring a morphing red London bus, hordes of annoying dancers – it looked like a Cliff Richard film directed by Brent Council, but less fun.

And then the climax: David Beckham popping out of the top of the bus like Samantha Fox out of a birthday cake, to the tunes of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ warbled by crummy TV talent show winner Leona Lewis in crinolene, stuck on the end of a pole like a dodgy Christmas decoration.

How the world went wild as he showed us his latest cosmetic surgery! (My tranny friend Michelle tells me he’s had his eyes done, the upper bags – and I never doubt her judgement about these things).  Before expertly kicking a ball into the wrong part of the stadium.

It was a complete and utter disaster and embarrassment.  A comedy of errors with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Welcome to London.

No, really, you’re welcome to it.

by Mark Simpson, The Times, 28 July, 2008

Next week the V&A opens an exhibition called Fashion v Sport, profiling the relationship between the sports and fashion industries – a relationship that seems to be flourishing despite the habit of many of today’s sportsmen and women of wearing less and less.

Recently the New York Daily News ran a spread of photos showing rugby players from the New Zealand and South African national sides playing a match, starkers, on a windswept New Zealand beach. Disappointingly, it turned out that the players showing us their tackle were not in fact Boks and All Blacks, but local amateurs taking part in a beery annual “Naked Rugby” event.

But who can blame the media for getting over-excited? After all, last year the Rugby World Cup was advertised with posters on the Tube of snogging, scrumming rugby players. And then there are footballers such as Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham spreadeagled across the side of buses.

Almost everywhere you look, sports, advertising and fashion seem to have jumped into bed to produce a spornographic money shot. Sports stars have become sporno stars. How did this happen? What does it mean? And where can I get hold of a pair of those pants?

Ironically, the only unconvincing aspect of the snogging scrum campaign was the relative unattractiveness of the faux rugby players compared to the pumped, shaved perfection of the real thing. The Parisian team produce an arty soft-porn calendar, called Dieux du Stade, featuring lovingly photographed nude players soaping each other up in the showers – or playing naked rugby on the beach. A great success. It sells like, well, hot rugby players.

In the run-up to the last football World Cup the fashion label Dolce & Gabbana commissioned the photographer Mariano Vivanco to snap members of the Italian team all oiled up and ready for us in the changing rooms, wearing very skimpy – and stretchy – D&G briefs. The results were splashed across prime advertising sites. In hindsight, the world was grovelling at the Italians’ feet from that moment on. The Spanish winners of Euro 2008 have yet to pose glistening in thongs, but with studs such as Fernando Torres and Iker Casillas in their stable it can only be a matter of time.

To get our attention in an age of broadband jadedeness, men’s fashion advertising has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped group session in the showers.

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And if this sporno looks a bit gay, that’s probably because it’s meant to. Partly because it made you look, partly because gay men are a loyal niche market and also taste-formers – especially when it comes to consuming the male body (Mr Dolce and Mr Gabbana are themselves famously gay).

It’s also partly because it seems to turn on the ladies in the same way that girl-on-girl action does their boyfriends. For an athlete nowadays, having a big gay following no longer necessarily means looking over his shoulder worriedly, but instead turning round and winking playfully.

Both Beckham and Ljungberg have posed in gay magazines, the beefy former England rugby ace and married father of two Ben Cohen has brought out a nude calendar marketed at gay men and talks about “embracing my gay fans”. Some, such as Becks and Welsh rugby glamour-boy Gavin Henson, have even argued over them. “I think I have lost a lot of my gay fans to Gavin,” Beckham once said. “It is a shame, as I really love them.”

Being equal-opportunity flirts, today’s sporno stars want to turn everyone on. Sportsmen, like porn stars, are by definition show-offs. Besides, it also means more money, more power, more endorsements, more kudos.

Fashion is more than happy to indulge them. Athletes represent everything that is desirable today: youth, vigour, success, health, fitness, looks, fame – and also the sweaty shorthand for all these things: sex. What’s more, as highly paid “pros”, their bodies are already what all men’s bodies are supposed to be these days: hot commodities. If athletes with hundreds of thousands of fans – gay and straight – are willing to tart themselves up this way, why bother with silly, skinny male models?

Naturally, all the sporno stars flirting with gayness are officially heterosexual. Team sports are still not the best place to openly bat for the other side, not least because it might cost you one of those lucrative gay-looking sporno endorsement deals. Virility is still considered to be officially hetero. (This holds true even in gay porn – where many stars are, like sporno stars, only “gay for pay”.)

But there’s no denying how dramatically attitudes towards the sporting male body have changed as a result of sport’s collision with the world of fashion and celebrity. Sporting male heroes now adopt sex-object poses on the side of buses that were once seen as girly, slutty or homosexual. Or, what was once much the same taboo in the male mind: passive.

As one outraged, middle-aged – and rather plain looking – BBC sports presenter thundered recently in The Sun about Beckham’s Armani-clad giant package: “You’ve got money, status, respect and fame – and then someone says: ‘Armani want you to do a picture wearing tight white pants with your legs as wide open as England’s defence.’ Why would you say yes?” Actually, in a spornographic age, the question should really be: why on earth would you say no?

The Fashion v Sport exhibition runs from Aug 5 to Jan 4. The catalogue, edited by Ligaya Salazar, and featuring an essay on Sporno by Simpson, on is published by V&A Books at £19.99.

Beck’s ‘tidy’ Armani underwear ads have generated a craze for male waxing, according to the Guardian:

All over the country more and more men (gay and straight alike) are marching into beauty salons and demanding a “Boyzilian”, or as one Yorkshire-based salon bills it, “the Full Monty”. In other words, the complete or near-complete removal of hair in intimate areas using wax. If you have £120 to spare, you can even get it done in Harrods, in the Refinery spa.

Clearly these men haven’t been reading Desmond Morris’ recently-published hairy retrosexual reverie The Naked Man. He must be, er, pulling his hair out.

Retrosexuality Islamic stylee – which until recently was possibly the only un-ironic or non-fashion-accessorised kind of retrosexuality left – seems to be in a bad way in the Islamic heartland. Medievalism just isn’t what it used to be.

Yesterday’s London Times carries a news feature on what’s termed “Pakistan’s metrosexual revolution”. The local Mullahs’ fatwahs on beauty salons for women as ‘un-Islamic’ appear to have provoked Pakistani men into an inspiring act of solidarity with their countrywomen: they’ve been selflessly queuing up for waxings and facials themselves and splashing out on Western vanity products for their own bathroom cabinets. Male cosmetic surgery and hair transplants are sprouting up everywhere – including on the previously shiny bonces of former Prime Ministers such as Nawaz Sharif who recently tried to return to Pakistan (the bad quality of his implants and dye job led to his immediate deportation back to Saudi Arabia).

Most Pakistani women are not complaining about the locked bathroom door. A survey of 25,000 women found that over half preferred men with “a metrosexual appearance similar to David Beckham” to those with “a rugged appearance”. Though perhaps they just preferred a man who looked like they had David Beckham’s money.

But the most important angle to this news about Pakistan’s ‘metrosexual revolution’ has been missed: it confirms that the most wanted man on the planet after David Beckham – Osama Bin Laden – has indeed been taking refuge in the country as many suspected. In his recent cheery ‘anniversary’ video address, the one exhorting Americans to ‘embrace Islam’, Bin Laden appears to have ordered a 9-11 on that tired-looking grey beard of his seen in previous videos and given some major uplift to his Prophet of Doom look with a trim and a dye that has really helped massacre the years. Who wouldn’t embrace him now? Patently, Pakistan’s metrosexual makeover fever has reached Osama, even in his inaccessible mountain redoubt.

Now all the the CIA has to do is find a cave in on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border within easy donkey-ride of a drug store stocking bottles of Arabian 2000 hair restorer.

Beck’s Stateside tarting continues.

American mobile communications company Motorola have launched a poster campaign for their new Razr with an image of their ‘Global Brand Ambassador’ with his tits out.

In recognition of where most men and women are going to be looking, the product is dangling between Beck’s pecs from a chain around his neck.

The mobile is supposed to become an object of desire because of its proximity to the most famous nipples in the world. I wonder if Beck’s tits taste slightly bitter when you chew on them, like many men’s? Or whether they taste instead of pink champagne?

The chain (no pockets?) and the cropping of the pic more than hints that Becks is completely starkers.

And is it just me, or is he gazing at us greedily like punter at a gay sex club who wants us to take him home for some individual attention and capture him with his mobile camera in all sorts slutty positions?

Oh, OK, just me then.

Mind you, he’s already posed for those slutty pictures.