MARK SIMPSON.com

That shameless hussy show Big Brother will soon be spread-eagled across our screens again.  The puddle-deep fame factory and test-tube celembryo hatchery starts it’s Summer-long domination of the TV schedules next week.

I have no intention of watching it - like most, I had my BB fling years ago and wish it would stop trying to woo me back.  But I do have a slight curiousity about who the contestants are this year.  Why?  Because they might have been my housemates this Summer. They might have been people I was arguing with over crumbs in the margarine, bitching with about other housemates, or pretending to have sex with under a duvet.

If only I wasn’t so precious.  Or was a bit more of a masochist.

Late last year I received an email via this blog from Endemol, the makers of BB, trying to persuade me to ‘audition’ for BB 9.

I inititally dismissed it out of hand, of course.  But then I actually thought about it for a while - if only because I was trying to make sense of it.  Why me?  Am I so obviously mad and desperate and unknown?

I quickly stopped asking myself those questions… and began to think practical instead.  Yes, the whole notion of appearing on BB filled me with horror and terror, but perhaps I was just being snobbish, and cutting off my own snooty nose to spite my face. 

Was there any way, for instance, that I could make something nice and vulgar like money out of it? 

But then I realised that the only way you make money out of BB, aside from winning - which, along with surviving more than a couple of weeks would be completely out of the question for Nasty Mark - is through tabloid interviews and provincial club appearances.

Somehow, I don’t think tabloid readers or clubgoers anywhere are going to get very excited over me.

I very briefly thought about the ‘inside the belly of the beast’ pop-cultural angle, but realised that the so-called serious press wouldn’t really be interested in that either.  They’d just want wordy, hypocritical pieces about the girl with the big knockers who kept fellating bottles.

Besides, imagine agreeing to a BB audition and being rejected?

So I replied to Endemol:

‘Whilst it’s always nice to be asked, I think I’ll have to turn down your offer because:

a) I don’t do telly for free (terribly old-fashioned, I know, but that’s me)

b) Although I do have prison fantasies, they don’t usually involve Davina McCall’

Madonna interviewed with this month’s Elle magazine, excerpted this week in the Daily Mail under the headline ‘My amazing sex-life‘. Apparently hubby Guy has encouraged her to be more feminine.

Madge said: “I think I’ve been honing and finessing my feminine side. I’ve always been very comfortable with my masculine side - the confidence, the ballsiness. I’ve learnt to be more pliant, more vulnerable - and to be comfortable with that.”‘

I know it’s rude to quote yourself, especially in public, but it does remind me of something I wrote for this month’s Out magazine about transexy celebs who are obliterating sexual difference with botox:

‘Even when a celebrity couple, like Maddy and Guy, act out a reassertion of traditional roles, it only serves as parody. When Madonna brags about her mockney gangster groupie husband bossing her about, it only serves to make it clear that Guy is the English nanny whose duties include having to pretend to dominate Madonna seven or eight times a week.’

But what, I wonder, was Guy saying when the pic (left) was snapped?

Given this story from last year about Madonna’s sex toy gift for him, perhaps it was: “The strap-on was that big I couldn’t get my hand around it!”

By Mark Simpson, (Nerve.com, February 22, 2001)

Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers, may have won only a few consolation prizes at the Grammys yesterday [2001, but clearly the white rapper behind “The Marshall Mathers LP” has created the Album of the Year in every other sense. Em is the hottest property not just in the music business, but in pop culture itself, and, like Big Gay Al, aka Elton John, who sang a duet with him on stage, no one - the fans, the press, the critics, the police, the Vice President’s wife - can leave him alone.

Especially, of course, the gay rights activists, two hundred of whom picketed the Staples Center in protest at his “violently homophobic lyrics” (and what they saw as gay Elton’s “betrayal”).

Afterwards, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation solemnly expressed “gratitude” that Em was not awarded Album of the Year, but complained that the three minor Grammys awarded Eminem showed that “Academy members were willing to place their stamp of approval on lyrics that promote hate, prejudice and violence.”

Amen. But the rather important point that the protestors appear to have overlooked is, Sure, Em’s music is violently homophobic. It also happens to be violently homosexual. The two facts are not necessarily in contradiction of each other. Actually, in the world beyond the Care Bear sexuality of GLAAD, they’re inseparable. It might even be the case that the Grammy didn’t go to Em precisely because his lyrics are too queer.

To understand this you just have to pay attention to the music instead of the press releases. Sodomy never sounded so seductive, or seditious. When fellow Detroit rapping duo Insane Clown Posse ‘wittily’ renamed Slim Shady “Slim Anus” on their last album, the squeaky blond bombshell responded quickly and explicitly. “Slim Anus? You damn right Slim Anus / I don’t get fucked in mine like you two little flamin’ faggots,” he retorts on a track on “Marshall Mathers,” the CD that lost the Grammy. But then in the track “Ken Kaniff,” he all-too-enthusiastically impersonates the voices of the ICP frontmen engaging in lip-smacking fellatio complete with very convincing grunts and groans and backed by cheesy porno Muzak: “Fuck yeah! Suck it! That’s good!” (ICP have since placed a downloadable track on their website featuring an Eminem-on-poppers-soundalike getting reamed by his hip-hop producer, Dr. Dre.)

Am I the only one who got aroused by all this “homophobia”? I suspect not. After all, sodomy - and graphic sodomy at that - is really the only sex you’ll find on Em’s record-selling CD, whether in the form of invitations to the listener to “suck my fucking dick, you fucking faggot” or dismissing his critics as bitter queens: “He’s just aggravated because I won’t ejaculate in his ass.” If Em really is the “New Elvis,” it seems that “Jailhouse Rock” is his starting point (which would at least explain his prison punk look). Even when he leaves the violent sodomy alone for a moment and turns to romance, it’s of a rather queer kind, as in the hit single “Stan,” in which a fan sends a series of unrequited love letters to his rap-star hero - the song Eminem chose to duet with Elton John with at the Grammys.

Em himself “comes out” and acknowledges his obsession/passion in another skit on “Marshall Mathers” in which a furious record exec complains that he can’t sell his records because instead of rapping about his wide-screen TV, Eminem is “rapping about homosexuals!” (Of course, the joke here is that Eminem’s records “about homosexuals” could hardly sell better.)

Now, if all this “fuckin’ homo” stuff seems adolescent, that’s probably because it is. It’s meant to be. Adolescence is a time of hormonal anxiety about identity for boys, but nowadays it’s not just a phase, it’s a career. And what is it that boys are supposed to grow into these days? Masculine certainties have vanished, in many cases, along with dad, family and blue-collar jobs. The only certainty left to bastard boys like this is that they are “not a fag.” It’s a negative identity that can’t sustain a sense of self, let alone sustain one in a world which has made boys useless - i.e. faggots - by making mature masculinity redundant.

Rapismo like Eminem’s articulates that frustration, then soothes the anxiety the articulation produces. Eminem’s own story (now the stuff of legend) is instructive. A poor, pretty, blue-eyed white boy growing up in a depressed black area of Detroit without a dad, he left the house the definition of “different.” He claims that he was neglected by his mother, which she vigorously disputes. Perhaps the truth is that, like many sons of single mothers, he was spoilt and fussed over and then ended up hating his mother for turning him into a sissy: “I used to be mommy’s little angel at twelve” he sings in “I’m Back.”

To avoid complete emasculation, he rebelled against his mother and chose to be fathered by pop culture, in the form of hip-hop and the humongous phallus of black street culture. To Eminem (and other “shady” white boys of uncertain paternity from better homes) the world seems like a post-feminist nightmare where Mom is the law - and political correctness is merely “wash your mouth out with soap” writ large. He’s South Park’s Kyle, ten years down the line plus plenty of drugs and disappointment. In this world, homosexuality isn’t only emasculation and weakness, it’s also the ultimate machismo, and the ultimate rebellion against “bitches” - as well as a contradictory solution to the problem of being fatherless, easing as it does the ache for male intimacy. But easing that ache means acknowledging it. And that means weakness. So homosexuality has to be constantly “stabbed in the head,” to use one of Em’s more infamous lines, even as it is constantly being evoked.

Every stab just leads to another target. After all, homos are everywhere nowadays in pop culture. And the blatancy of male passivity in a world where males are sex objects only makes this “stabbing” more imperative - even when you’re not, like Eminem, a pretty bottle-blond boy with “cock-sucking lips” (to quote ICP) and more than a passing interest in having your picture taken. “All I see is sissies in magazines smilin’” groans Eminem. “Staring at my jeans, watching my genitals bulging / (Ooh!) That’s my motherfucking balls, you’d better let go of ‘em / They belong in my scrotum, you’ll never get hold of ‘em.” Look at the pictures of him in his book Angry Blonde (interesting spelling, that), skim past the one of him in blond pigtails to the ones where he is surrounded by a crowd of Shady clones looking at him with shining, hungry eyes. Has pop culture ever looked more disturbingly queer?

Slim Shady is famously a character Em invented to express his “dark thoughts.” But maybe Slim is himself just a screen. This is not to say that Mr. Mathers is “really gay” (just as he clearly isn’t “really straight”), but just “really fucked up.” Perhaps the “real” Em is as neurotic, mother-identified/mother-hating, homeless, vulnerable, narcissistic and passive (aggressive) as the lyrics and the picture of him on his album cover suggest. In other words, all the things that make a great star, from Elvis to Lennon to Cobain.

And, alas, he’s all the things that can make young men these days who will never be stars sad and sullen, and sometimes suicidal. A seventeen-year-old white Eminem fan in Devon, England recently threw himself in front of a train. Apparently he was depressed by the “dissing” he’d experienced from friends after a gay boy said he fancied him at a party. The liberal coroner thought the lad’s anxieties foolish and misplaced: “He appears to have been unusually worried over his sexual orientation which really should not affect people a great deal either way.”

Maybe. But Eminem and the sexually shady, not to say confused, world of white hip-hop show that such a preoccupation is anything but trivial for many boys today. It’s all they have left.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

From this month’s GQ Russia.

My Russian is a little rusty, but I think the piece from this 50th anniversary of GQ issue is about ‘Forty Things That Changed Men’s Lives’.

I’ve no idea what GQ has to say about me, but all I care about is that:

• there’s a scarily large picture of me oiled-up pulling my pants down and

• I’m ahead of, and much bigger than, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schwarzenegger and - this is really impressive - Biotherm Homme

I only wish I’d, err, trimmed a bit. Or worn some snug, designer, possibly padded, blindingly white underwear.

And had Freddie’s body and face. Or Beck’s airbrusher. (See below.)

MS Pic by Michele Martinoli

Madonna and Guy Ritchie recently celebrated his 39th birthday at Claridges, London.  The Daily Mail claims, and the pictures of them leaving seem to suggest, she presented him with an unconventional present.  One he didn’t fancy being seen carrying himself:

Let’s have a closer look….

Oh, it’s the Purple Penetrator strap-on! 

Here’s what AnnSummers.com has to say about it:

‘Strap it on and slip it in!! 6″ dildo with adjustable waist and back strap to fit all sizes. Comes with perfectly positioned vibrating bullett to give the wearer clitoral stimulation whilst pleasuring her mate!’

Hubby Guy Ritchie looks like he can’t wait to get home and be pleasured.  I wonder if he has been swapping ‘tips’ with Stefan Postma?

But then, Guy is a man who has a history of interest in ‘arse-intruding dildos’.

In ’Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells’ (1998), an all-male gangster movie obsessed with bumming and ’pooves’ written and directed by Guy (and remade by him a couple of years later as ‘Snatch’), one of his oh-so-cheeky chappies explains, in loving, lengthy detail, the ‘perfect’ scam:

‘Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler’s Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos…. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie’s Bits or something, for twenty-five quid. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler’s Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn’t get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!’

Obviously Madonna didn’t have any embarrassment at letting the world and its bank manager know that she tickles Guy’s arse when she’s not paying in cheques.  (Guy’s career, unlike his wife’s, has been in the doldrums lately.)

It may well be just an elaborate joke at Guy’s expense, but I for one find it remarkably easy to imagine him Purple-faced and having his Snatch… snatched. 

Tip: Anglophenia

An extract from The Queen is Dead:

London, 5 October 1997

Dearest Steven,

Greetings from the Kingdom of Diana.

I never thought I’d live to see a revolution in this country, but that’s almost what happened here after the Princess of Wales took a ride in a car driven by one of those Parisians who make you wonder why they bother painting white lines in the road. The famous stoic stiff upper lip of the English has quivered, cracked and broken into public sobbing. And who has achieved all this? A bulimic, self-mutilating, manipulative blonde bimbo from a broken home.

After our own (black) Velvet Revolution, Princess Diana is the dead drama-queen of all our hearts.

OK, so I exaggerate a tad. But by sheer pressure of public outrage over their silence after Di’s death the Royals were forced to return to London early from their traditional Scottish holiday at Balmoral. In the British context it was as if they’d returned in a cart lined with straw and rotting vegetables.

I visited Kensington Palace, Di’s former royal residence, the Day After, escorted by my glamorous tranny friend (and former male stripper ‘Stud-U-Like’) Michelle and her male-to-male trannsexual model friend Enzo (Pierre et Gilles have painted him, but this was an exercise in redundancy since the flesh-and-blood Enzo is so perfect, so airbrushed and colorized already - he’s post-production). Both Michelle and Enzo adored Di. They recognized a kindred spirit. But that didn’t stop Michelle joking, as we approached her former home, ‘It’s a good job she sold those frocks, otherwise William might have turned into a Norman Bates!’

Hundreds of candles guttered in the wind at the foot of the railings in front of the palace; thousands of bouquets of flowers and messages fluttered on the railings; an ocean of flowers in front of the gates gave off a shockingly strong smell of sweetness that filled the eerily silent air. A long, respectful procession of people clutching their own tributes inspecting those that had already been left there shuffled past - giving murderous looks to Mich and Enzo who were kneeling in front of the candles singing, a la Madonna, ‘Life is a mys-ter-ry…‘.

The next night I took The Divine David [a performance artist from Manchester who sings Smiths songs in the style of Shirley Bassey while looking like an exhumed Bette Davies to Ken Palace as well. At the sight of all this sombre devotion he burst into tears and croaked in a small, hardly ever heard un-ironic voice, ‘This is what love looks like, Mark.’ The implication being that this was the closest he or I would ever get to it. He cheered up, however, when I drew his attention to one of the madder messages pinned to the railings:

‘YOU who are responsible for the death of DIANA will find no hiding place, you will DIE in agony and be sent straight to HELL - the CURSE of TUTTENKAMON is upon YOU!’

A week later, the night before the funeral, I accompanied David to the gates of Buckingham Palace, where a different kind of demonstration was happening. Initially I hadn’t understood why people were placing flowers there, but it rapidly became apparent that for some it was a calculated snub to the Royal Family who were considered to be covered in Diana’s blood. David harangued the CNN cameras, shouting ‘LIARS!’ as they interviewed hand-picked people to announce how satisfied they were with the Queen’s humble-pie TV address earlier that day.

He also confused unsuspecting bystanders by asking them what they thought about the (non-existent) second broadcast she made: ‘Personally, I think she did the right thing,’ he’d say, looking suitably serious/sympathetic. ‘It’s the best for the country. I mean, abdication was the only thing she could do…’ Or: ‘Apparently they’ve announced open house and the Duke of Edinburgh’s having a barbecue in the back garden. Liz has also agreed to allow people to sit on ‘er throne and try on ‘er crown so they can get some idea of what it’s like being Queen.’

Then he produced, from where I have no idea, a pair of big inflatable red lips with a flashing torch attached to the back that made them pulse with light. Clambering clumsily over the floral tributes, he hung them on the palace gates making the large round ornaments above the hinges look like eyes and the whole gate like one huge crazy cartoon. As David put it, for a moment (before the police removed them) the Battenburg-Saxe-Coburg-Gothas had a human face.

Sadly, the evenings jinks came to an end when the police, who had been eyeing us warily since we arrived, suddenly accosted us, asking David threateningly. ‘Planning to ‘ang around, Sir?’

‘No, I think not officer, said David tactfully. ‘I’ll be on my way.’

Outside Westminster Abbey the next day I saw the coffin arrive on the gun carriage (David: ‘How offensive that they should have put a woman who campaigned against land-mines on a gun-carriage and wrap her in the Royal standard when they deprived her of her royal title coz they though it’d be a laugh that she would have to bow to her own kids!’). Sweltering in the sun, we listened to the service, and clapped loudly at Earl Spencer’s bitter speech. Some people cried quietly. I didn’t.

Which is just as well. A CNN camera was inches from my face. Not to worry though, CNN had apparently arranged for a couple of girls next to them to weep and sob openly through the service. When a woman fainted the cameraman leapt down to clear people away, shouting, ‘Give her some air!’, only so that he could start filming her. At this the crowd turned into a lynch-mob: ‘STOP FILMING HER!’ they yelled as one. And he did.

After the service ended I went home and watched on television the funeral cortege drive through North London, along Hendon Way (a mile or so from here) and up the M1 to the Spencer estate in Northampton. All along the route, which was over 50 miles, people lined the sides of the road and threw flowers in the hearse’s path. Then, in the privacy of my own home, I finally allowed myself some some tears. It would have been churlish not to at such an image.

Life goes on, of course. An hour or so later I went to the supermarket. Which meant driving along Hendon Way. Already the flowers had been crushed into the road by the traffic, forming ghostly flower-shadows on the tarmac. It’s astonishing how flat flowers press, how little substance they have.

The next day in the gym, a young football-crazy lad I often chat to spoke to me about watching the funeral on telly. ‘I had a little cry,’ he told me. Strangely, I couldn’t quit bring myself to tell him I did the same. I also saw another gym-romance of mine, a twenty-something squaddie farrier (two fantasies for the price of one) with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery - the Regiment who provided the gun-carriage and escort for Diana’s coffin. He had shod the horses that drew Diana’s coffin himself. How did he feel about it all?

‘Very sad,’ he said, fixing me with his guileless clear green eyes. ‘She was the best we had. You couldn’t help but cry.’

Love,

M

Elvis died 30 years ago today but this ‘virile degenerate’ refuses to let us rest in peace

by Mark Simpson, (Independent on Sunday, April 2000)

Elvis didn’t want to be black, he wanted to be Tony Curtis.

A natural blond, Memphis’ belle boy dyed his hair in imitation of his 50s idol’s shiny black pompadour and continued tinting it that unnatural-supernatural blue-black colour until the very end (though later it was probably merely to hide the grey). Even those virile sideburns, which by the early Seventies seemed to be bracketing the world, were deceivingly dyed too.

I know this is a shocking, indecent thing to bring up, and not just because of the way Tony Curtis’ ‘hair’ looks now. We like to think of Elvis as rock’s Unmoved Mover, The King, the original, the alpha and omega - the fount of all pop cultural sovereignty. ‘Before Elvis there was nothing,’ as John Lennon famously put it. In a world where popness has become the measure of everything, we’re all Elvis impersonators now - and we don’t want to think that we might be inadvertently ‘doing’ Tony Curtis.

As the parade of celebs who lined up for the premiere of the re-released, re-edited, re-mastered 1970 Vegas gig movie ‘Elvis: That’s the Way It is’ bears testimony, all the new pretenders want to be seen in His presence, even if it’s only a celluloid one. Maybe it’s just the PopStars in Your Eyes, but Elvis seems to keep on getting bigger while those that came after him keep getting smaller. Elvis was the first truly giant pop star created by post-war consumerism and it’s attendant media. Since then, shopping and looking have become everything, and Elvis has become the personification of the looking-glass world we inhabit now, a latter-day Narcissus who drowned in his own reflection (on his bathroom floor) - but granted immortality in a universe of surfaces and permanent (shallow) memory. ‘Elvis’ is Fame’s first name in an age when ‘fame’ is something we’re increasingly over-familiar with.

Perhaps this is why in Elvis’ face we can see an angelic/demonic premonition of the needy faces of so many of those stars that have come after: Tom Cruise, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Jim Carrey, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Diana, Jeffrey Dahmer. Elvis’ masculine androgyny and animal smartness seem even more modern today than when he launched his career. In footage of The King in action, all the male faces in the crowd - and many of the women - seem strangely frozen and meatish next to his, even when he is clearly half-paralysed by downers, the eyes all hooded and sleepy. As the lesbian Elvis Impersonator k.d. Laing observed: ‘He had total love in his eyes when he performed…’. It only makes his ‘total love’ all the more potent that when he sang, he didn’t mean it, or didn’t know what he meant, we are left to sort it out, like the swooning victims of a passionate but exquisitely, totally careless lover (which is the condition of human subjectivity in a mediated world).

Elvis the Lover is also however the archetype of the post-war male ‘Pervert’. Radiantly narcissistic and dramatically unable to negotiate his Oedipus Complex, he is the prime idolatrous icon of a decadent, post-patriarchal age. Again, he may not have invented virile degeneracy (Clift, Brando and Dean, whom he also imitated, have a prior claim) but he patented it. True, it may have been campy Liberace who was accused of being the ‘quivering distillation of mother-love’, but it was good ol’ boy Elvis-the-pelvis (and Liberace fan) who got away with it and in fact made it cool. Elvis, the beautiful boy who loved his mammy and almost forgot he had a daddy (as we did too: we always call him by his first name), the boy who desired to be desired so much he persuaded the whole world to eat him up, is the patron saint of the New Matriarchy.

Even today, twenty four years after his death, as we stumble into a century he never actually swung his hips in, Elvis the rock star, pop star, stand-up comedian and self-medicating Vegas showgirl remains the acme of the mediated male, and also of male desirability. Male love-me-tender passivity and vulnerability was endorsed and legitimised and transmitted by Elvis, helpfully preparing men for the (prone) role that consumerism had in store for them.

Tony Curtis fixation notwithstanding, Elvis really is ‘the original’, the template from which everything else is stamped, because he has become the ego-ideal of a mediated, ‘perverted’, dyed-sideburns culture. Since his death, through a process of global mourning and melancholia and constant re-runs and revivals, the lost lurve-object has been introjected into our collective Unconscious so completely that we don’t have to be lonesome tonight or tomorrow or in fact ever again. His absence has become an overwhelming presence.

Elvis really is alive. It’s just the rest of us that I’m not so sure about.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

(The Guardian, 13 July, 2007)

America, meet David Beckham. America, meet The Metrosexual.

You’re going to be seeing even more of both.

As most of the world already knows, today Becks is proudly ‘unveiled’ by LA Galaxy on their home turf. Brand Becks, the ultimate metrosexual who transformed himself from a talented professional soccer-player with a cute smile into global me-dia, is the not-so-secret weapon in their campaign to seduce America into opening its arms, legs - and, most importantly, wallets - to that obscure version of football played without crash helmets, Frankenstein padding or artillery barrages by the rest of the world.

In case you can’t wait for the unveiling, you can find a selection of adorable photos of Ken Doll David ‘taken’ from every delicious angle in his new strip in The Times of London. Or coquettishly meeting your gaze on the cover of Sports Illustrated, on a red carpet. Or stripped to the waist on a car bonnet on the cover of ‘W’ magazine flexing his tits and tatts in trousers that appear to be pulling themselves off. Oh, and that ex-ex Spice Girl wife of his is somewhere in the picture too.

And, of course, you can always catch Brand Beckham endorsing major brands like Motorola and Nike. Or is it the other way around?

Spice Boy Becks is the total commodity who has totally commodified himself - and turned soccer into his personal billboard. ESPN, the channel televising Beck’s first game in his LA Galaxy strip on 21 July have arranged for an extra TV camera to feast solely on David for the duration of the entire game, lest we miss any precious moment of his spornographic body in motion - as well as making sure that they get their money’s worth. Who said that football was a game of two teams of eleven men? Or two halves? Becks is all that you could need and all that you could want. The Alpha and Omega of soccer.

ESPN are already airing an ad promoting the match in which Becks leaves a heartbroken Europe for an ecstatic US, with the Beatles’ ‘Hello Goodbye’ as the soundtrack - referencing a previous ‘Brit’ invasion. Some are already talking about ‘Beckmania’. The Beatles may have been bigger than Jesus, but Becks is bigger than soccer (which is why all those lengthy articles debating whether he will or won’t make soccer popular in the US somewhat miss the point).

And after all, in the Sixties the Mop Tops successfully exported pop music back to the US, the country of its birth, having taken it further and transformed it into something even more saleable. Becks in the Noughties is exporting metrosexuality back to the US, and in fact to the very town, which, in the Fifties, came up with the prototype for it in the delectable, Cinemascoped form of Marlon Brando, Monty Clift, James Dean, and Elvis Presley.

It was also the US that produced possibly the first metro sports star in the form of Seventies NFL star Joe Namath, dubbed ‘Broadway Joe’, an aesthetically inclined quarterback who advertised shaving cream and… pantyhose. But once he retired, America pretended he had never happened - leaving the field open to dandy foreign players like David Beckham.

America and Hollywood, so long at the cutting edge of commodifying masculinity, have fallen far behind. America is today conflicted, fearful and hypocritical about one of its greatest inventions: the mediated, male sex object. So in US, Speedos, the perfect ‘package’ for the male body and Beckham’s favourite beachwear, are all but banned on US shores because they are seen as ‘gay’. Which, apparently, is still the worst thing you can accuse a man of in the US - and the reason why the US, unlike the UK, experienced a backlash against metrosexuality, albeit a men-dacious one.

American masculinity desperately needs some tarty tips on how to tart it out more. Enter Becks, the tartiest tart in Tart-Town who relishes being seen as ‘gay’ - and also relishes being seen by gays (‘because they have good taste’). What’s more, he’s a jock not an actor.

Which reminds me, perhaps Becks will offer some friendly advice to his new Scientologist neighbour Tom Cruise. Cruise, the All-American Dream Boy gone wrong, who once wooed the world by dancing in his underwear on a sofa in his 80s film ‘Risky Business’, but now jumps up and down on chat show sofas (while President Bush jumps up and down on Iraq), needs Becks more than Becks needs Cruise, who is now globally much less popular than Becks.

However much Becks may deny movie star aspirations, his Hollywood career has already begun.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

This example of revenge sporno from last year seems to have slipped through my fingers….

‘Top’ Dutch footballer and former Aston Villa goalie Stefan Postma was a tad embarrassed last year to find a home-made video of himself enthusiastically bottoming, that’s to say, taking it up the Arsenal, plastered all over the ‘net’.

The chap doing the ’scoring’? Well, it was actually an embittered ex lady friend wearing a strapadicktome.

Another reason why man-shagging should be a man’s job. At least if they’re cute and blond and have thick necks. (I can keep a secret lads, honest!)

In this spornographic age it’s going to get out there anyway. And at least if they put it out there themselves they’ll make money out of it rather than fritter it away fruitlessly trying to keep the dirty thing under wraps. Most importantly, they’ll be able to make sure its edited in a flattering fashion. And it does make you rather more famous: I for one had never heard of Stefan Postma before; now I’m one of his greatest fans.

Though probably if sportsmen want to maximise sales they should pretend it was released without their consent.

Much was made of the ‘bizarre’ nature of the ‘kinky sex’ depicted. But why is it so strange that a straight man should want to get shagged up the arse? After all, if God hadn’t wanted men to get bummed he wouldn’t have given them prostate glands. A very convincing and attractive tranny pal who went through a great deal of pain trouble and expense to have the ‘op’ tells me that the first thing that straight men ask her once she’s told them she used to be a man is: ‘Will you shag me up the arse with a dildo?’ The next question is, ‘What’s the biggest one you’ve got?’

Probably the most shocking thing to most football fans is how clearly and audibly Stefan is enjoying being ploughed (and watching himself being ploughed in the mirror and, no doubt, in the video afterwards). Some of them will be thinking: ‘He seems to be enjoying taking that a lot more than I do giving it.’ Traditional heterosexuality’s rigid, or sometimes semi-erect, sexual division of labour depends on men not thinking too much about whether they’re getting a bum deal.

Or women. Interesting that no one seems to have considered that the lady friend in the video might be enjoying it too. She certainly sounds like it. For all we know, it might have been her idea. There are a lot of naughty ladies out there who don’t just lie back and think of Sunderland, and not all of them are trannies.

Now, after all those words, here’s what you really wanted: a clip of the strap-on video.

by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared, Salon.com April 23, 2004 as ‘Who’s the hunted now?’ in the same week that CBS aired controversial images of a dying Diana. Tonight the UK’s C4 ran a doc featuring less explicit images, despite emotional appeals by her sons Princes Harry and William, not to do so. This Sept sees the tenth anniversary of her death.)

In the seven years since she died in a high-speed car crash in a tunnel in Paris, the pictures of the bafflingly mangled black Mercedes that ferried Diana to her death have become almost as famous as its most precious passenger.

Looking at the pictures, snapped at night with flash photography (like many of the pictures of Diana), it’s difficult not to wonder at how such an expensive, glamorous, chauffeur-driven, bodyguard-accompanied limousine could end up such a shapeless mess — or how such a mess could have been a car at all, let alone such a famous one. To wonder how a limo whisking someone from the Paris Ritz could have turned so suddenly into a hearse. To wonder just how mangled the expensive, glamorous Diana was.

But of course, no matter how hard you look at the picture, you can’t see her — she has already been whisked off to the hospital where she would die soon after from “internal injuries” (something we know she had been suffering from for many years, and they were not caused by any car accidents). Until this week, Diana’s expiring body is literally obscene — “off scene” — in a way that much of her life was not.

Standing in for the totaled body of Diana, the wrecked Merc — the ultimate rubbernecking image — has somehow become a symbol not of prurience but of discretion. We all knew that pictures of a dying Diana in the back of the car were snapped by the paparazzi pursuing her moments after the impact, and that these landed on the desks of newspapers the next day. Until the CBS documentary about her death this week, no English-speaking publication or TV station has dared to show us the pictures. The media always has to navigate between catering to public curiosity and voyeurism, and on the other hand avoiding provoking the disgust of their audience — with themselves. “What kind of lady do you take me for?” is ever the response of Dame Public when they feel they haven’t been romanced enough before being given “what they want.” The public could not get enough of Diana — but after her death, they turned out to be as bulimic as the shy, awkward, exhibitionistic, sophisticated, vulnerable, feisty girl they voraciously consumed.

Unsurprisingly, the British press has been fairly unanimous in its condemnation of CBS. The left-liberal Guardian denounced the way CBS had plumbed “new depths of prurience”; the Daily Mail thundered on about the “ultimate betrayal.” Much of the media here, though, had few qualms about showing images of, say, mutilated Americans in Fallujah. JFK’s head has, of course, exploded on U.K. prime time more often than fireworks on the Queen’s birthday.

Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi al-Fayed, Diana’s consort that evening who also died in the crash, ordered his lawyers to write to CBS before the broadcast to make a “personal plea” stating, “We cannot imagine that CBS News would want to be the first enterprise to breach the collected understanding of the media based upon good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy.” Good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy are qualities that Mr. al-Fayed, the Pharaonic proprietor of Harrods and chief retailer of Diana conspiracy theories, is well known as exemplifying.

What is really remarkable is not that CBS showed these images but that these images have not been shown before, that for seven years we have been satisfied with the “discretion” of the mangled Merc in the “tunnel of death,” as empty as her womb (according to the doctor who famously testified at the British inquest that she wasn’t pregnant). Part of the reason why there are so many conspiracy theories is because people don’t want to let go of Diana or her “secret life.”

Diana, queen of the English-gossiping world in the last two decades of the 20th century, the celebrity princess, was anything but discreet herself (CBS was responding to rival NBC’s recent airing of tapes recorded by the princess talking about her marriage and confrontation with Camilla Parker Bowles in the early ’90s). Her life was a series of revelations, ever more dramatic and orchestrated, which left the British monarchy looking rather like her last ride. But this was part of the disavowal of her death that was engaged back in 1997. It was the paparazzi, you see, rather than our own appetite for her — and her appetite for us — that turned Diana the huntress into the hunted, and that ultimately killed her. “They” wouldn’t leave her alone! “They” afforded her no privacy! “They” hounded her to her death! “They” have no decency!

I remember standing with the crowds outside Westminster Abbey in the September sunshine in 1997 as the funeral service for Diana was being conducted. In the passion and the heat a lady fainted. One of the many news teams there began filming the collapsed woman. A posh middle-aged lady shouted out “Have you no decency at all! She’s not well!” As one, we all bristled at the camera crew, who quickly fled. Satisfied, we all went back to the private business of crying in front of the myriad other TV cameras.

There was also much talk after her death about how “the boys” — William and Harry — would not be exposed to the same treatment. And out of “respect to Diana” or rather the public outcry/self-disgust following her death, the boys have been off-limits for much of their adolescence. However, the boys are growing up (William is 21; Harry, 19), and the death of Diana and the collective guilt associated with it is receding into the past. Photos of William having his feet massaged at rugby matches by girlfriends and sharing ski lifts have made their way into the press despite protests from the palace. Most recently the world was ogling pictures of Prince William, heir to the throne, in snug Speedos at a water polo match.

The pictures are eerily reminiscent of some of the most famous images of Diana before her death — snapped on al-Fayed’s yacht in her bathing costume (allegedly after tipping the tabs off herself). Those shoulders, those long limbs, those cheekbones, those flashing teeth, that foggy, English, aristocratic skin. William is being offered to us by the media in almost as sexualized a fashion as his mother, even when taking part in something as innocent and boyish as a water polo match. Much discussion followed about whether tight Speedos and their “anti-grab” material flattered William or not — and whether his wearing them would increase sales. The same Google search that listed these stories also provided a link to a posting on a gay Speedo fan Web site where, on the basis of the tiny picture, someone deduced with scientific precision that William is averagely endowed (”if not smaller — though that may be an effect of temperature”).

Tawdry, slightly pervy speculation about the “crown jewels,” yes. But is it really so different from the more innuendo-based noises the respectable press had been full of?

Interestingly, CBS insisted that its pictures of dying Diana were “tasteful” and featured only her “head and shoulders.” The program also featured the French doctor seen attending to Diana in the pictures, assuring us: “I can tell you her face was still beautiful. She didn’t have any injuries on her face.” This is both reassuring and slightly disappointing. You don’t have to be J.G. Ballard to see that horror and glamour are closely intertwined.

Celebrities tend to lead car-crash lives, and if they also happen to have car-crash deaths then who can blame us if we want to slow down and take a good look?

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007