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In that autobiography you may possibly have noticed former British PM Tony Blair is currently touting, the one called ‘A Journey’ (a title that masterfully captures the sublimely faux modesty of its subject), Blair compares himself to Princess Di.

‘“We were both, in our own way, manipulators” — good at grasping the feelings of others and instinctively playing on them.’

The papers of course have seized on the People’s Premier’s candidness, making headlines out of it.  That and his observation (conveyed in a kind of morse prose) that Gordon Brown had: “Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.”  And also his claim that he knew Gord’s premiership would likely be ‘a disaster.’

I agree with Tony.  Or rather, Tony agrees with moi.  Back in 2006, when Brown’s bizarre (and now conveniently forgotten) popularity with the media was rampant, just before his coronation as Labour Leader, I predicted, with Cassandrine accuracy, that Brown would be a disastrous leader of the Labour Party and that he had in fact already lost the next General Election.  I also compared Brown and Blair to Charles and Di, calling Brown an ‘operator’ and Blair a ‘great manipulator’.

Of course, it didn’t really take much insight to see all that coming, even if most of the media couldn’t at the time.  But in the piece I talked about how Blair’s ‘lying’ was what made him a much more successful, much more popular politician than Brown – who was very, very bad at it.  Which is not to say that Brown was a much more honest man – just that he wouldn’t and couldn’t perform for us.

‘Admitting he lied is not a mistake Blair is likely to ever make. Blair’s special talent, the thing that puts him ahead of most other politicians, certainly in British political history, is that he can convince himself his lies are literally the god’s honest truth, at least for as long as he’s telling us them. And – truth be told – in his mind, he never actually ‘lies’ to us at all. He’s an actor – an actor of the Stanlislavsky school: the emotion he shows us is ‘true’, it’s just usually attached to something that is not. This is why he’s such a great performer and politician – we appreciate and are flattered by the energy and the psychosis he puts into his performances. He is a great manipulator…’.

‘Brown on the other hand is a great operator. And operators, unlike manipulators, are painful to watch. They resent having to manipulate us and we resent having to watch them resenting having to manipulate us. Tony is Princess Di to Brown’s Prince Charles. Brown, who tells us he is ‘quite private’ and who prefers ‘substance over celebrity’ as if these were reasons why we should be interested in him, clearly wants power but he doesn’t really want to become the thing that power is in this mediated day and age: an actor. He won’t be forgiven for that by the electorate/audience.’

Brown’s desperate agreement to appear in those Election X Factor shows – in which David Cameron and Nick Clegg, both thespian heirs to Blair, shone with their ‘look, guys’ sincere insincerity – only threw his boring manse inflexibility into even more painful relief.  The electorate treated him with Cowellian disdain (the most damning thing of all was that those listening on the radio thought Brown had won the debates).

And even in the political afterlife the emotional gulf between Brown and Blair persists.  Blair of course is passionately hated, where Brown is merely despised. Or worse, pitied.

‘Doesn’t he look OLD?’ we spit, when Blair pops up in the papers or on telly, usually to tell us with those raised eyebrows how he doesn’t regret anything and didn’t fib about anything either, honestly guys.  ‘Hasn’t he aged BADLY?’ we gloat, pretending to be beyond his charms now.  But actually sounding just like a bitter ex trying to convince themselves that their former amore fell apart after the affair ended after he turned out to be sleeping with the au pair.

Truth is, Blair still has that Diana star quality – partly because he is still a great manipulator, but mostly because it’s so difficult to work out which side of the reason/unreason line he’s on these days.  You can’t but watch with rapt attention, trying to divine the content of his (Catholic) soul.

An old essay of mine about how Jean Genet invented t’internet back in the 1950s with his short erotic film ‘Chant d’Amour’ is included in ‘Objectified’ the first issue of an online series of ‘adult’ collections called Games Perverts Play edited by Quiet Riot Girl.  According to the rubric GPP…

‘…uses pornography and essays to explore the less examined sides of our libidos, and to dissect our sexualities. Gender, power, pain and violence are all present in the background when we play. This project brings them to the fore, and enables us to look afresh at what it is we are doing when we write about sex, when we play sex games, and when sex gets serious.’

The first issue includes pieces by Dan holloway, Marc Nash, Penny Goring, M de Winter, Arjun Basu and a beautifully sad piece by Quiet Riot Girl called ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ that reads like another kind of ‘Chant d’Amour’.

Former Raymonde and RPLA front-man James Maker’s much-anticipated autobiography ‘Autofellatio’ is finally published – on Kindle. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: it’s extravagantly funny and well-written.  Glitteringly epigrammatic, it’s a rock-and-roll Naked Civil Servant in court shoes.

And I’m not just saying that because in the chapter about his life-long friendship with the singer Morrissey, titled ‘Gide the Ripper’, he praises Saint Morrissey as the ‘the most incisive biography’ of Moz.  This was an especially kind thing to say since ‘Gide the Ripper’ even in its brevity is a much better biography than Saint Morrissey.

Oh, and in case you think that I might have done something as vulgar as some actual research for St Moz – such as talking to people who know him – let me reassure you that James and I didn’t meet or communicate until after he’d bought and read my ‘psycho-bio’.  And then we found we couldn’t stop talking.

No one will believe it, but we hardly discuss ‘M’ at all.  Though if you read James’ memoir of his idiosyncratic life you’ll realise there’s plenty of other eccentric subjects to talk about.

As a boy growing up in the 1960s and 70s I was raised to fight the second world war all over again. Airfix models. Commando comics. Air tattoos in June. Watching The Battle of Britain and The Longest Day on telly with my dad, just so I’d know what to do if I ever found myself pinned down on a Normandy beach or with an Me109E on my tail.

All of which made me easy prey to an RAF recruiting film about a buccaneer squadron training sortie from Gibraltar, set to a Vangelis soundtrack. I promptly signed up to the air cadets and spent Tuesday afternoons and a week or two in the summer hols wearing itchy shirts and a Frank Spencer-style beret, learning how to march without falling over. I loved it, and would probably have signed up for the real thing if it hadn’t been for a sixth-form flirtation with Quakerism….

Read ‘A backwards salute to recruitment films’ by Mark Simpson in today’s Guardian.

What planet is Salon on these days, I wonder?  Wherever it is, it seems not to to have access to a decent newsagents, or cable, or a gym, or Facebook.  Or any young men.

An interview with Paul Solotaroff about his book ‘The Body Shop’, which seems to be a regretful memoir about his drug-soaked foray into bodybuilding in the 1970s, is titled by Salon ‘The Decline of the American Muscle Man’.  Perhaps they’re being ironic, you think.

But then they open up with this:

‘Where have all the muscle men gone? Just a few short decades ago, men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hulk Hogan and Sylvester Stallone, with their glistening bodybuilder physiques, were not only movie stars but the embodiment of the 1980s American zeitgeist — pumped up, ripped and always ready to take off their shirt and start flexing. Nowadays, hyper-muscular physiques are more readily associated with a hard-partying subset of gay men and the cast of “Jersey Shore” than with conventional notions of sexiness (the Village Voice went so far as to conflate the two by putting the “Jersey Shore” stars on the cover of its queer issue)….’

While Solotaroff’s book sounds as if it may have something to say, beneath the usual American ‘I was such a sinner but now I’m saved’ narrative, the central premise as presented by Salon in this opening paragraph is somewhat absurd – as well as managing to sound both snobbish and faintly homophobic.  Oh, so it’s just a scary subset of ‘hard-partying’ gays and those freaky vulgar guys off Jersey Shore who like muscle is it?

Tell that to Men’s Health, the biggest-selling men’s mag, that manages to seduce men with the same cover-lines every month about ‘how to build muscle and burn fat’. Tell that to the steroid dealers supplying more and more young men to the point where drug counselling agencies are now telling us that steroids are ‘mainstream’.  Tell that to the booming supplement industry and the gym chains.  Tell that to the manufacturer of GI Joe who now makes his arms and chest so big (and waist so narrow) that they are anatomically impossible.

We’re all supposed to be musclemen now (Salon writers excepted).  They’re less of a Hollywood ‘special effect’ than they were in the 80s precisely because so many people have them.  And the reason that the cast of Jersey Shore can be put on the cover of the Village Voice’s queer issue is not to reassure upper-middle class hipsters that muscle is faggy and vulgar but because so many gay men and straight men now share the same obsession with the male body.  Yes, fashions have changed.  The look most men – gay and straight – want to achieve today is muscular, but with sensual, touch-me! definition.

The massive, wobbly water-retention of 1970s bodybuilders is out because it looks too druggy (which isn’t a good look, especially when you’re using drugs) and isn’t terribly aesthetic.  Being huge per se is not what most men want from muscle today.  Instead of just impressive, they want muscle to make them desirable – something photogenic.

Instead of aspiring to be bouncers or green hulks in torn shorts they aspire to be… on the cover of Men’s Health.

Meanwhile, the Arnolds of the 21^st Century, today’s pro bodybuilders, are now so outlandishly, frighteningly vast that no one is going to put them in a movie unless they reinvent Cinemascope.

I’ve re-posted a piece from 2002 here which gives a potted history of Hollywood’s relationship to its biggest special effect: muscle.

Tip: DAK

Cristiano Ronaldo’s latest fashion foible, painted toe-nails has provoked the usual bitchy, mocking response that is attached to anything Ronaldo in the Anglo media. Despite – or perhaps because of – the way they seem to regard him as a sure-fire way of selling newspapers.

The announcement of the birth of his son by a surrogate mother last week also presented another opportunity to give him a good kicking.  Some, like Celia Walden in The Telegraph, really going overboard in the expression of their tainted, twisted love.  It almost makes me regret outing the male narcissism of metrosexuality.  As one of the commenters on the Telegraph website points out, her husband Piers Morgan is everything she complains about in Ronaldo – but untaltented and unattractive.  More generally it goes without saying that Ronaldo’s vanity would be considered normal and healthy and worthy of approbation in say, a much less pretty female journalist.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Ronaldo painted his toenails as a riposte to the ‘Twinkletoes’ school playground nickname (Twinkletoes was a fairy, geddit?) given to him by football fans and the tabloids during his stint at Manchester United.  But much more probable he painted his toenails just because he thought it would be fun and might look nice.  Which is an outrage.

Really, it’s no wonder that a year after leaving these shores the UK press continue to love-hate him so.  This boy from a humble Portuguese family is very rich.  He’s famous.  He’s fabulously talented.  He’s young.  He’s absurdly good looking.  And he doesn’t owe anyone anything.  Worst of all, he knows it and doesn’t bother to hide this knowledge.  And he thinks nothing of painting his toenails because he feels like it, rather than because Esquire magazine told him to.  Yes, he’s a spoilt child, but then – so are the gods.

Here are a couple of other recently snapped photos which may help explain the jealousy mere mortals feel towards him.   (And let me assure you most people working in journalism are very mortal indeed – inwardly and outwardly.)

Tip: Mark W

So I finally went to see Sex And The City 2 the other day.  Which is a very rash thing to do.  Particularly if you’re not a lady.  Or a gay man with lots of lady friends to giggle with at lady stuff.

Almost everyone in the cinema auditorium was female.  I was flanked on the left by a gran who tutted loudly at anything sexy – and on the right by a couple of bubbly 30-something women drinking chilled white wine out of plastic cups who laughed a bit too loudly at anything sexy.  I didn’t know where to look and was having hot flushes.  I don’t think I’ve been exposed to that much oestrogen since my amniotic fluid.

I blame my new American cyber-friend Caroline who suggested I should see it.  I think she’s generously trying to educate me about women.  To the fact that they exist.  And the English film critic Mark Kermode absolutely insisted that I go along.  OK, he pretended he was telling everyone not to see it – but his passionate rant against it of course had the opposite effect.  And his loud complaint that ‘These aren’t women!! they’re men in drag!!’ sort of clinched it for me.

Actually, as a film it wasn’t quite as boring, pointless and silly as, say, Robin Hood – a film which tries so hard to be taken seriously you just want to roll your eyes.  Yes, SATC2 was a riot of bad taste – I mean, Liza and Abu Dhabi in one movie?  And yes, the treatment of culture and class was equally tasteless: beneath every burqa is a New York princess just bursting to get out, and how does anyone cope without a nanny??  But like Liza and Abu Dhabi, so off the scale as to make it impossible to take seriously.

And unlike Robin Hood, I did actually care about the people in this film and was quite taken with their naked superficiality.  Not a lot, but just enough to take my mind off how much my knees were hurting after two hours of tipsy heart-to-hearts.

However, Kermode’s first advertisement for the film – ‘these aren’t women! they’re men in drag!’ – is very wide of the mark indeed. As well as the worst critical cliche about SATC.  What kind of drag queens, I wonder, has Mr Kermode been hanging out with?  He really needs to find an edgier bunch.  Ones not nearly so obsessed with marriage and husbands and kids and nannies.

And in fact the movie, which begins with a (very) gay marriage, goes to great lengths to distinguish gay men and straight women’s attitudes towards relationships and marriage, in a way which almost daringly goes against the grain of current liberal platitudes that gay relationships are ‘just the same’ as straight ones.

The gay couple getting hitched are quite sanguine about the prospect of ‘infidelity’, to the evident shock of the hetero couples.  One of them is something of a reluctant groom: ‘He gets his marriage and I get to cheat!’  His more traditionalist partner doesn’t seem to mind the prospect: ‘He’s only allowed to cheat in the 45 states where gay marriage isn’t recognised.’  (Which would include, I think, New York.)

Now, I realise that some gays will object that the gay couple getting hitched are a ‘stereotype’.  Certainly their wedding is an all-singing all-dancing stereotype.  And they themselves are a stereotype of hag faggery – plain-looking nellies who haven’t been invited to the circuit party: ‘The music stopped and they were left with one another.’

But SATC deals in stereotypes.  Stereotypes and aspiration (aspiration is almost impossible without stereotypes).  Each of the female characters is clearly a stereotype.  And whilst of course many gay male couples have open relationships, not even the most doctrinaire gay marriage zealot could deny that they are much more prevalent in long-term gay male relationships than hetero ones (about 50% of male-male couples have open relationships according to this survey).

If there is one thing that is definitely not up for grabs for the women in a movie asking for much of its two long hours ‘what makes a marriage?’, as they try and adapt wedlock and family to their needs (and whims), it’s sex outside marriage.  This also applies to their husbands.  ‘Marriage is marriage’ says one of the straight people attending the gay wedding, offended by the laissez faire attitude of the gay newly-weds.  Meaning of course: marriage is monogamy.  Or, perhaps, if need be, celibacy.

This is even the case for the central relationship of Mr Big and Carrie, who take on the some of the stigma of a same sex couple since they have resolved not to have any kids – and are scorned for their selfishness by other married hetero couples.  ‘So, it’s just going to be you two, alone, forever?’  ‘Yep.’  The disapproval and disgust of the ‘breeders’ is palpable.  They even try living separately for a few days a week, which is a strategy of some same sex couples – that can afford it.  But even the possibility of an open relationship is never even broached.  And the big plot point of the whole movie (spoiler alert) revolves around Carrie just kissing another man – and regretting it, terribly.

Now, I somewhat doubt whether SATC 2 accurately depicts the sexual realities – and experimentations and frailties – of modern married male-female couples.  It’s definitely not a cutting-edge movie, or terribly realistic – shouldn’t at least half of them be divorced by now?  Or have just remained unmarried because they don’t want to get divorced?  And (singly single) Samantha’s role here does seem to be to embody sluttiness, panties literally around her ankles, so that none of the other women have to.

But I think it’s fairly safe even for someone as ignorant of women and relationships as me to say that SATC 2 more or less accurately depicts the Saturday Night aspiration – or necessary illusion – of marriage.  That you have found The One.  And Only.  Forever.

Lovely – in every sense – piece in the Guardian today by Gary Kemp, guitarist and songwriter and general brains behind 80s New Romantic norf London working class wide boys Spandau Ballet, about how he fell for David Bowie watching his epoch-making performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops in 1972.  (I’d like to think it was inspired just a little by my account in Saint Morrissey of how I fell in love with El Moz singing ‘This Charming Man’ on The Tube – Morrissey was to my generation what Bowie was to Kemp’s.)

‘The first time I fell in love it was with a man. It happened one Thursday evening in the bedroom of a flat in King’s Cross. I was a wide-eyed boy of 12 and the object of my passion had dyed orange hair and white nail varnish. Looking out from a tiny TV screen was a Mephistophelean messenger from the space age, a tinselled troubadour to give voice to my burgeoning sexuality. Pointing a manicured finger down the barrel of a BBC lens, he spoke to me: “I had to phone someone, so I picked on you.” I had been chosen.’

The bit where Bowie languorously and yet somehow matilly drapes his arm round the golden Mick Ronson on the ‘family show’ that was Top of The Pops was a very calculated and inspiring gesture of defiance back in July 1972, not just a bit of slashy titillation (though it was that as well). I mean, look at them. And if there was any room left for doubt, only a few months before Bowie had publically come out as bisexual.

If you can’t in 2010, in Gay Pride week, at a time when the Conservative Prime Minister has gay celebs round for drinks at Number 10, quite understand why this caused a sensation, and why millions of dads went apopleptic about ‘that fackin’ pooftah!’, bear in mind that just five years previously any and all male-male sexual relations were still illegal in the UK. The very first Gay Pride march had only been held a few days before Bowie’s own parade through the nation’s living rooms. Truth is, this single appearance by Bowie on Top of the Pops, a show watched by most of the UK back then – and every single kid that didn’t sing in the choir – was more significant and influential than all the UK Pride marches put together.

He later famously repudiated all this in 1983, the year of the sell-out (in every sense) Let’s Dance tour, claiming that saying he was bisexual was ‘the biggest mistake I ever made’. In 1993 he announced he had always been a ‘closet heterosexual’ and that despite his interest in the culture it produced, homosexuality and bisexuality ‘wasn’t something I was comfortable with at all’.

But in 2002 an older and perhaps less ambitious Bowie was asked if he still believed that. His response sounds more convincing:

‘Interesting. {Long pause} I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners or be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that bisexuality became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.’

Not for the last time, the power of the almighty Puritan dollar had triumphed over the sexually ambiguous English pop star and his fey, spangly, decadent Limey ways. Success in the US – something Bowie didn’t really achieve until the Yuppie-suited respectability of Let’s Dance – is still regarded as the benchmark for British acts.  Partly because it is such a vast market, of course, but also because since we lost the Second World War to the United States we have nurtured such a vast inferiority complex about our colonial ‘cousins’.

But America, we often forget over here in the UK, is a very foreign country indeed. One separated from us by much more than a shared ocean and language.

The UK is a funny little small island, with far too much media per head – which since it lost its Empire takes far too much interest in superficial, ‘effeminate’ things like music and fashion and gossip. And, crucially, we’re basically a secular country and have been, more or less, since Henry VIII nationalised the monasteries. The UK is a country where the defunct popular tradition of Music Hall (which Bowie drew heavily upon) is probably of much greater cultural importance today than any of that dogmatic Pauline asceticism that calls itself ‘Christianity’.

And America? Well, America isn’t any of these things.

This is why the seriously flirtatious personal style of metrosexuality, which at the very least throws a langorous arm around the neck of bi-responsiveness – and which is much more David Bowie’s love-child than mine – really took root in the UK at the end of the Twentieth Century, largely without the muscular Christian anti-metro/anti-fag backlash that happened in the US in the mid-to-late Noughties.  In the UK, metrosexuality produced new kinds of ‘starmen’ such as David Beckham – football’s answer to David Bowie.

As well as love-ly articles like the one above by happily married men like Gary Kemp.

(Special thanks to Paul Burston for very kindly taking me to see ‘The Dame’  – as he’s known in the business, darling – at Wembley Arena, back in the dying years of the Twentieth Century. It was my first exposure to him – and although Ziggy had been buried at the Hammersmith Odeon twenty years past Bowie was still a revelation.)

Apparently Ken Doll is the preening scene-stealer of Toy Story 3 – and ‘makes metrosexuals cool‘.

I haven’t seen it yet, but the clips are fun.

By Mark Simpson

A bullet-pointed column in the NYT by Charles M. Blow examines a sea-change in attitudes towards homosexuality suggested by a recent Gallup poll which found that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as “morally acceptable” has crossed the symbolically important 50 percent mark.

Also for the first time, and even more significantly, more men than women hold that view.  While women’s attitudes have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men over 50 who consider homosexuality morally acceptable rose by a by an eyebrow-raising 26% -and for those aged 18-49 by an eyepopping 48%.

What on earth has happened in the US since 2006?  How did the American male lose his world-famous Christian sphincter-cramp and righteous loathing of sodomy? Have the gays been secretly putting poppers in the locker-room ventilation shaft?

Alas, Gallup doesn’t say.  So Mr Blow does what you do at the NYT when you’re stumped: ask some academics.  They came up with three theories:

1. As more gay people come out more straight people get to personally know gay people which makes it more difficult to discriminate.
2. Men may be becoming more ‘egalitarian’ in general, partly thanks to feminism.
3. “Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality”.

Now, the first two of these theories seem to me fairly plausible explanations for increased acceptance of homosexuality at any time, but not especially in the last few years – let alone that whopping 48% rise for 18-49 year olds.  But the third theory about public homophobes being exposed as secretly gay perhaps goes too far in the opposite direction and is too current-news specific.  As if the discovery that famous homophobe George Rekkers hired a rent boy to give him ‘special’ massages could transform attitudes towards man-love overnight – rather than just change attitudes towards George Rekkers.

So I give them all just a C minus.

And, as Blow points out, none of these theories address the main finding – that men now are more accepting than women, reversing the gender split on this subject that has held since pollsters started bugging people with questions about ‘homosexual relations’.

In my own speculative opinion, none of these theories can see the rainforest for the trees.  Of course young men in the US are much more accepting of homosexuality – because so many of them are now way gay themselves.  It’s not really an issue of ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’ of ‘otherness’ at all.  It’s about self-interest – quite literally.  About men being less down on the gays because they’re less hard on themselves now – in fact, rather sweet instead.  It’s about men in general not being so quick to renounce and condemn their own ‘unmanly’ desires or narcissism – or project it into ‘faggots’.

Which from the point of view of today’s sensually greedy male would be a terrible waste of a prostate gland.  Probably most young men are now doing pretty much everything that freaky gay men were once abhorred for doing – from anal play (both ways) to no-strings fuck-buddies, to crying over Glee, and using buff-puffs in the shower while demanding as their male birthright ‘comfortable skin’ (as the recent massive ad campaign for Dove for Men puts it).

And the timing fits almost as snugly as a finger or three where the sun don’t shine.  It was after all only in 2003 that the Supreme Court finally struck down the anti sodomy laws still on the statute books of some US states as unconstitutional.  It was also in the early Noughties that metrosexuality really took off in the US.

Despite a mid-Noughties anti-metro, anti-gay marriage backlash that helped re-elect Bush, in the Tweenies the male desire to be desired, and his eagerness to use product – and body parts and practises – once deemed ‘gay’ or ‘feminine’ or just ‘wrong’ to achieve this, seems to have become pretty much accepted amongst most American males under 45.  It’s consumerism and advertising of course not the gays that has been putting the poppers in the men’s locker room.

Along the way, many young men have twigged that in a post-feminist world of commodified bodies and online tartiness there is decidedly no advantage to them any more in an essentially Victorian sexual division of labour in the bedroom and bathroom that insists only women are looked at and men do the looking, that women are always passive and men are always active – or in the homophobia that was used to enforce it.  Men now want it all.  Both ends.

And perhaps American women aren’t keeping up with men’s changing attitudes because some are  realising how ‘gay’ their boyfriends and husbands are already and wondering where this is all leading.

There’s plenty to wonder about.  After all, it’s the end of the road for that holiest American institution of all: Heterosexuality.  Not cross-sex attraction, of course, or reproduction – but that system of compulsory, full-time, always-asserted straightness for men which straying from momentarily, or even just failing to show sufficient respect towards in the past could cost you your cojones.  What, you a FAG??  If metrosexuality is based on vanity, retrosexuality, it needs to be pointed out, was based partly on self-loathing.  ‘Real men’ were supposed to be repulsed by their own bodies at least as much as they were repulsed by other men’s.  (If they were really lucky they might get away with passionate indifference.)

After a decade or so of metrosexuality a tipping point seems to have been reached.  Men’s self-loving bi-sensuality and appreciation of male beauty, awakened and increasingly normalised by our mediated world, seems to be here to stay.  Even in the God-fearing USA.  And might now, if it’s in the mood and treated right, choose to be consummated rather than just deflected into consumerism again.  When I first wrote about how the future of men was metrosexual, back in 1994, it was clear to me that metrosexuality was to some degree the flipside of the then emerging fashion for female bi-curiousness.  I didn’t talk about this much at the time because I knew no one would listen if I did.  (I needn’t have worried – they didn’t anyway.)

In this regard, one of the academics in the NYT piece was (finally) quoted as saying something interesting, right at the end:

‘Professor Savin-Williams says that his current research reveals that the fastest-growing group along the sexuality continuum are men who self-identify as “mostly straight” as opposed to labels like “straight,” “gay” or “bisexual.”  They acknowledge some level of attraction to other men even as they say that they probably wouldn’t act on it, but … the right guy, the right day, a few beers and who knows. As the professor points out, you would never have heard that in years past.’

An A ++ to Dr Savin-Williams.  Not so long ago, when Heterosexuality was a proper belief system that commanded round-the-clock obeisance, ‘mostly straight’ would have been a heretical contradiction in terms – like half pregnant.  But in this Brave New World of male neediness it’s just a statement of where we’re at.

For today’s young men the fear of faggotry is fast being replaced by the fear of missing out.

Tip: Dermod Moore