The trouble with very smart dames who ‘get’ what’s happened to the male of the species is that they threaten to put this particular one out of work.

Over at the HuffPo Caroline Hagood has written an annoyingly good piece about Lynn Shelton’s bromance-dissecting movie Humpday, about two straight male buddies who decide to make a gay porno together as a kind of dude dare.  I’ve yet to see Humpday, but sort of feel that I don’t need to as I appeared in it — having notoriously allowed myself to be dared into joining in the action by some military dudes when when researching a piece about (mostly straight) US paratroopers making gay porn.

Unusually for a journalist, Hagood understands exactly where masculinity is today:

Hovering somewhere between the heterosexual and the homosexual is modern male sexuality — with its metrosexuality and bromances — in all its ambiguous splendor.

Just as unusually, she also understands metrosexuality.

…. the word describes the man whose sexuality is more linked to urbanism and consumerism than it is to either gender or sexual proclivity. A post-sexual, he is no longer homo or hetero, but just metro.

Most usefully of all though she articulates very well the essential anxiety of ‘bromance’, and how it is in effect set against the very thing it appears to be celebrating:

…there are two opposing forces that are powering films of late: an intense desire to pay tribute to the unique relationship that exists between men and an equally intense fear that this relationship may contain homosexual undertones. The result of these warring impulses are films like Humpday that blow open the dread and disgust surrounding homophilia that Hollywood strives to keeps under wraps in its average bromance flick. In the end, Shelton’s movie just may function as a mass therapy session for all the Judd Apatows of the world who live in terror of their bro-love.

I’d like to find something to disagree with, if only so as not to become completely irrelevant, but aside from perhaps some academic quibbling about the continuity between the dandy and the metrosexual, I can’t really think of anything.

Meanwhile, across the North Sea in Sweden…. 19 year old Eric Saade is telling us, in a leather jacket and gloves: ‘You can call me manboy’ before pleading, in the crie de coeur of metrosexuals everywhere: ‘Give me lurve!  Give me lurve!  — Don’t go!’.

The pleasingly annoying/annoyingly pleasing ditty ‘Manboy’ cranks to a creaky climax with Eric receiving an open-mouthed drenching while on his knees.

This probably shouldn’t be very surprising.  Sweden is the country, you may remember, that gave us Abba, Ikea and Freddie Ljunberg. Sweden is probably the most metrosexual country on Earth.

‘Manboy’ is in with a good chance of being chosen by Swedish TV viewers as their country’s entry in the family-friendly Eurovision Song Contest.

They should.  It would win.

Tip: DAK

…acccording to a headline in today’s Sun newspaper. Glad to see they’re finally reporting the news that people really want to hear.

Far be it for me to contradict Britain’s best-selling tabloid, but I wonder whether Danny Young isn’t more ‘vers’.

You can watch his topless Rocky on the tragically awful and apparently endless ITV reality show Dancing on Ice here.  Danny is favourite to win because he and his perky nipples (I’m sure it’s the ice) are the only reason anyone watches it.

I’d like to see him skating with Johnny Weir.  Then we’ll really find out who’s top.

A profile on the truck driving Republican Presidential hopeful from Boston Scott Brown in Vanity Fair caused a few chuckles last week with his wife’s cheeky revelation about the pink leather shorts he wore to his first date with her in the 1980s.  Here’s the money shot:

“The pinkish color drained from [Brown’s face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t like that at all. ‘I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes,’ he said. ‘And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.’”

It’s certainly a relief to know Mr Brown didn’t buy them – that would be kinda faggy – that instead he was given the pink leather shorts for sashaying up and down the catwalk at a couture show.

How funny to think that the US was the only country that had anything approaching a serious backlash against metrosexuality, back in the mid-Noughties.  Oh, come on now, surely you remember?  That so-called ‘menaissance’?  Those prissy lists of ‘manly’ ‘do’s and don’ts’?  And those completely non-ironic ‘Reclaim your manhood – go shopping in a Hummer’ ads?  It got lots of coverage  in the press at the time.  Supposedly metro was out and retro ‘regular guys’ were back in.  Oh, and George W. Bush was re-elected in part on an anti-gay marriage anti-metro ticket (his Democrat opponent was portrayed by the Republican machine as a girly-man metrosexual passifist).

And yet,  just a few years on, faux Texan ‘bring it on!’ George Bush has been replaced by a svelte mixed-race President who starts every day with a workout, who ran a campaign based on slogans printed in the GQ font, and who is, for all Michelle’s prettiness, something of his own First Lady.

And now the great white hope of the Republicans, who whipped Obama’s skinny ass in a Democrat stronghold, is a former Cosmo centreforld and male couture model who liked to wear pink leather shorts because they showed off his tanned legs.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Scott Brown’s very successful 1980s male modelling career, looking at the pictures, is this: he wouldn’t get the work today.  He’d have to do hardcore gay porn.  And certainly not Falcon or any respectable studio – no, Scott would have to do fetish/extreme stuff.  Fisting in black (not pink) leather, that kind of thing.  Or cash-in on his surname.  And he still wouldn’t get paid very much.  Though they probably would let him keep one of the XXL toys.

I’m not being bitchy.  No, really.  I’m just being realistic.  And anyway, it’s not about him; it’s about us.

He was nice enough looking in a wooden sort of way, but since the 1980s an entire generation of young men have been raised to be male models – and they work at it a lot harder than Scott evidently did.  They also look at themselves a lot harder.  Scott had it relatively easy because there was much less awareness of what was ‘desirable’ in the male body back then – amongst women and men.  Young men as a sex hadn’t learned to desire to be desired.  That was still officially women’s role.  And because there was probably also rather more in the way of stigma attached to his profession there was even less competition.

Yes, it looks like Scott had a pert bum and what they used to call back then a ‘hunky’ physique – but today it would be a case of ‘Don’t call us dear, we’ll call you.’  Such is the choice available of absurdly desirable, obscenely fit young men, I doubt anyone would even bother to tell him what he so obviously needed to do: get down the gym and take steroids and crystal meth.  (And if you work really hard and you’re really lucky you’ll end up on Jersey Shore.)

His body looks far too natural to be credible today as a idealised male image: the lack of porno pecs, a six-pack and ‘cum-gutters’ is heinous.  The untrimmed, un-waxed body hair is grievous.  The unbleached teeth unforgiveable.  He wouldn’t make the audition for today’s male Cosmo – Men’s Health – let alone the cover.

In fact, the most buffed and pumped thing about the young Scott Brown to our critical 21st Century eyes is his hairdo.

From The London Times

David Cameron has propelled marriage to the centre of the election campaign after surprising the Tory party faithful with a promise to spell out his flagship policy before polling day.

Rallying the troops after a narrowing of the poll lead, the Conservative leader said that he would announce details of tax breaks for married couples in the manifesto.

Whatever happened to the days when the Tories were the party that refused to use taxpayer’s money to prop up failing, outdated industries making things that people didn’t want?  That told us sternly that ‘the market must decide’.  Well, it turns out the Tories aren’t happy with what the market has decided in this instance, and instead want to effectiviely nationalise marriage – to take it into public ownership.  British Layland.

Obviously this isn’t going to do marriage much good.  Aside from celeb photo opps and immigration fiddles it was already hideously out of fashion.  But the Tories want to turn it into an Austin Allegro.

It’s nice that Dave has figured out a way to buy off the Ian Duncan Smith/Terry & June tendency of his party – with your tax money – but I wonder if he’s thought it through.  Will he be handing out tax breaks to civil partnerships as well?  If he does the IDS tendency won’t be very happy about subsidised sodomy.  If he doesn’t then, well, his enthusiastic support for Section 28 will come back to haunt him.

Of course, he could save everyone a lot of time and trouble if he just gave the tax bonus money directly to the divorce lawyers.

Until last year I thought pop was a completely spent force.  Oh, there were some nice bands around with nice tunes and some nice haircuts, but pop as a total art form was pooped.  Along with pop culture.  It was just another Facebook app.

And then along came the New York songwriter-turned-singer that the press loves to dub ‘bizarre’.  2009 was indubitably The Year of Gaga, and not just because she had a string of blockbuster international hits, but because they were the instantly unmistakable product of a ‘kooky’ young woman who is actually completely in control of her work and vision.  And her own aesthetic.  Hence perhaps the wishful-thinking sightings of a penis.  This chick doesn’t need a dick – she has a real one.

Last night at the Brits (where she performed acoustic versions of ‘Telephone’ and ‘Dance in the Dark’, styled by Miss Haversham saluting Marie Antoinette ) she won a rare three gongs.  She deserved much more.  And a much longer set.  (It was rumoured to have been cut down by anxious Brits producers because she kept changing her plans.)

Gaga has, almost single-handedly, resurrected mainstream, High Street pop music – or at least made it seem like it’s alive again.  She’s even made postmodernism seem almost… modern again.  That she does it with a look and startling pop promos that play so entertainingly with the deathly, garish iconography of fashion and contemporary celebrity culture is all the more remarkable.  Yes it’s a kind of galvanic motion – those promos often look like Helmut Newton zombie  flicks – but boy, this is shocking fun.  Besides, that’s the nature of the twitching/tweeting human subject in a mediated, hyper-consumerist age.

Sorry to go on, but Gaga manages to be truly pop, and yet is a true artist.  She churns out crowd-pleasing dance-floor tracks that stomp on the competition, but there’s also a winsome melancholy and vulnerability behind the… Poker Face.

Some hasten to mention the ‘M’ word to put Gaga in her place.  But aside from moments of hilarious brilliance such as ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Vogue’ I was never much of a Madonna fan, even before she found the Kabala and I’m-not-Gay Ritchie.  Maybe it’s early-onset dementia, but I feel differently about Gaga.  Rather than see her as a Madonna knock-off, I see her as a more fully-realised Madonna.  She’s the Madonna Madonna wanted us to take her for (and legions of gays did).

And it’s not as if Gaga doesn’t pay homage.  ‘Dance in the Dark’, which Gaga performed at the Brits, is probably my favourite track from The Fame.  It’s very 1980s HiNRG – with a talky bridge that is a touching tribute to Madge’s Vogue.  It’s actually gayer than Vogue, which is quite something.  You can almost smell the poppers.  And I don’t even like poppers.

Gaga, a dedicated follower of fashion, dedicated her Brits performance to her friend Alexander McQueen, who died last week.  I don’t like eulogies, but I did rate his work.  He was a genuinely free spirit, a gay bohemian of the kind that almost died out in the 1980s (and which Gaga is clearly inspired by).  That he seems to have taken his own life suggests that it wasn’t easy fighting history, or fashion houses.

I never met Lee, but we did have a flirty fax correspondence in the late 1990s when I was still in my thirties.  His opening gambit was ‘we met once in DTPM a couple of years ago’.  DTPM was a London gay techno club where all the muscle boys went and took off their shirts and downed masses of drugs, dancing the night away, so of course I should have met him at DTPM – and forgotten about it.  But I never did because I never went there.  Or anywhere, really.

In the course of our thermal-paper correspondence (which I think I still have somewhere, now fading away into blankness)  he asked me, in a handwritten scrawl on Givenchy headed notepaper, to marry him. I don’t know how serious he was, but I declined, pointing out I wasn’t really the marrying kind.  This was true, but it was even truer that he wasn’t really my type.  Which is a sad reflection on me, and perhaps on male homosexuality.  I suspect Lee was often told by gay men he wasn’t ‘their type’.

Either way, I could have done much, much worse.  And of course, I did.

My personal favourite is the one headlined: ‘Probably the 2 Best Looking Men You’ll Find On Here’, which insists: ‘No trannies, no dudes, none of that creepy stuff – we’re straight!’  The pictures attached of the two buffed, preening male tarts are indeed a testament to where straight men are at these days.  The state of straight.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with some buddies wanting to re-enacct the gang-bang, several-outsized-penises-pester-one-pussy porn that is so popular with straight men these days.  And if they’re buffed – even better.  It doesn’t mean they’re gay.  It doesn’t even mean that they’re particularly bisexual.  It just means that, like most men, they’re rather keen on cocks.

But the hysterical lengths men still feel they have to go to to refute any of ‘that creepy stuff’ – even as they spit-roast or DP an obliging lady together, admiring each other’s sweating, flexing muscles and perhaps enjoying the sensation of their buddy’s erect penis hammering away on the other side of the pelvic area – or perhaps in the same orifice – is a bit sad.  If understandable.  Because of course, if you’re male and ‘touch one another’, even just once, then you are GAY!!!!!  Forever.  Whereas if you’re female and touch one another you’re… HOT!!!!!

The slightly, how shall I put it, impenetrable French Freudian feminist Luce Irigary (impenetrable even by the standards of French feminism) wrote back in the 1980s about the ‘masculine homosexual economy’ (of heterosexuals) in which women are merely objects and tokens to be exchanged between men – men in patriarchical systems being supposedly far more interested in other men than in women.

In the 21st Century we have moved on from that, of course.  Now men appear to be using women as double-ended Fleshlites.

The London Times

I’m not one of them.  Now, I enjoy a good scourging as much as the next man, especially in the wake of a war that has cost so many lives, but it seems to me that the expectations of the media and public played into Blair’s (stigmata) hands.  Tone the Catholic convert barrister excels at crucifixions and turned in a performance Mel Gibson would envy yesterday, hanging from the cross of his ‘belief’ that ‘removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do’.  For all the spears in his side, nothing was made to stick.  He won’t need to rise on the third day because unlike Our Lord Jesus Christ he didn’t die — instead he thrived.

Besides, the thing that many if not most people in the UK long to pin on him – personal and complete responsibility for our involvement in a disastrous US war – isn’t something that can be really pinned on any one British politician, however annoying his grin.  It has to be pinned on history.  The history of the UK’s ’special relationship’ with the United States.

Blair is more than happy to play the self-aggrandising role he’s been allotted by public opinion and the public is only further infuriated by the evidence of this.  Blair of course interprets his role not as The Man Who Invaded Iraq Illegally And Has Blood on His Hands, but as The International Statesman Burdened by Heavy Responsibilities, Special Knowledge and Big Decisions Reluctantly Made to Guarantee Our and An Ungrateful World’s Safety.  But it’s essentially the same role: A bigger one than he deserves.  Blair is a much more pitiful figure than most of his enemies are willing to admit.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be offering Blair a vinegar-soaked sponge, but scapegoating him as all sides of the political spectrum want to do – He lied to us!  He was sycophantic to Bush!  A poodle!  A narcissist! – obscures the larger, much more painful issue: that the UK invaded Iraq not because of weapons of mass destruction.  Nor Al Qaeda.  Nor Saddam’s tyranny.  Nor Zionism.  Nor even for oil.  And certainly not because Tony Blair is a weak man or a strong man.  No, in the final analysis there was only one reason why we invaded Iraq. Because the US wanted us to.

Jump is what military satellites of imperial powers do when their master tells them to, and it’s very difficult to imagine that any other British Prime Minister since 1940, with the possible exception of Harold Wilson (and look what happened to him – you can be sure that Blair did) could have said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to Uncle Sam’s kind invitation, especially after it had been attacked on 9-11 (the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack is irrelevant — or at least it was for America’s need for vengeance).  The Tories certainly wouldn’t have done, and their attempts now to wriggle out of their enthusiastic support for the war –without which Blair would not have won his Commons war vote – by bleating about being ‘misled’ by Blair is just shameless opportunism.

The former premier that Blair most calls to mind is Anthony Eden, who was forced out of office after the disaster of Suez in 1956.  Eden bigged up Nasser as a ‘monster’ threatening his own people and The World – and also famously lied to Parliament to justify  invasion, but this isn’t why he was shamed and shunned, even more so than Blair.  By fatally misjudging America’s wishes Eden had rubbed the UK’s nose in its post-war subject status.  Suez was actually a much more ‘justifiable’ war from the point of view of British interests than Iraq –  the canal was British and French owned and the route to (what was left of) the Empire.

But the Americans were not amused: they were competing with the USSR at the time for anti-colonial cred and told us to bog off home. And we did, pronto.  Eden was so reviled at home not for lying as many claimed, or even for losing, but because he succeeded in making it embarrassingly clear to everyone, most especially the French, that the UK no longer had a sovereign foreign policy.  He shamed us in the world’s eyes.  In our own eyes.

Likewise with Blair.  Those loud complaints about Blair’s ‘sycophancy’ to George Bush over Iraq – well, really it’s mostly about how we don’t like to be reminded of our national sycophancy towards US interests, unavoidable as it may very well be.  Sometimes its that very unavoidability that makes it so painful.

Blair, ever the actor, decided to make a virtue of what was essentially a political necessity.  Being something of a devotee of the Method School, he probably even succeeded in convincing himself of that necessity: and yes, doing so meant that, like Thatcher before him the US gave him a global stage to preen upon.  But this is what the US has done to the UK since the Second World War.  As a military satellite of the US – or giant American aircraft carrier, as the great American anti-imperialist Gore Vidal puts it – we’ve been bigged up by US power as a way of further projecting that power around the world.  Like, say, Austria-Hungary was by Germany in the early Twentieth Century, but with slightly less interesting headgear.  As a result we have remained far too big for our post-Imperial, post-industrial, post-everything breeches.  Though we of course prefer to term it: ‘punching above our weight’.  As if punching above your weight was something clever.  Even when you’re not teetering as we now are on the verge of bankruptcy.

In hindsight, to save our sensibilities Blair should have made it look like the UK wasn’t so easy.  He should have made Bush wine and dine us more – and put up more of a virtuous struggle before giving Bush everything he wanted and was going to get anyway.  Instead Tone seems to have gone the whole way on the first date.  We feel cheap instead of ’special’.

True, the way Blair and his minions set about terrorising us and his own party with fairy stories of WMDs was very naughty indeed, but as he now cheerfully admits, if it hadn’t been WMDs it would have been something else.  After all, we elect politicians to lie to us.  And did anyone, apart from David Aaronovitch, really believe any of it?  Something else that shouldn’t be forgotten: Blair would probably still be in power and only hated by a small ‘bitter’ minority of the British public if the US occupation of Iraq hadn’t gone so spectacularly awry – he was remember, like his master Bush, feted by the press and much of the public in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. They only fell out of favour when they seemed like losers rather than winners.

Nailing Blair to the cross of Iraq now won’t change what happened, or even stop something like it happening again.  In fact, by obscuring the real nature of our ‘special relationship’ with the US and instead blaming one man’s weakness and mendacity, it may make it easier for it to happen again.

And it is already happening again. In a war that threatens to make Iraq look like a picnic.  Despite all the discussion and debate in the UK media about why we’re still in Afghanistan after eight years, what we hope to achieve, and what tactics should be employed, everyone in the media knows – but doesn’t say – there is only one reason why we’re in Afghanistan.  Because the Americans are. Everything else is hot air.  Or, in the case of Brown’s claims that the war in Afghanistan has to be fought to stop terrorist attacks in London: another 45 Minute WMD lie that no one believes.  After the UK distinguished itself in the 7/7 London bus and tube bombings as being the only country in the world that has succeeded in raising, housing and educating its own suicide bombers, everyone knows that the real problem the UK faces with radical Islamism is homegrown.

Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the Iraq Invasion and now Prime Minister in large part because of Blair’s unpopularity over Iraq, is very fortunate to have US imperial interests represented these days by someone much more appealing and persuasive than George W Bush.  Someone who gets handed plaudits and Nobel Peace Prizes just for being elected.  But however nice his smile is, the Emperor is the Emperor and our troops must still die for him.  Why are we sending even more troops to Afghanistan?  To liberate women, build power plants, and stop people being blown up on London buses?  No.  They’re going because Barack ‘I-didn’t-vote-for-that-war!’ Obama says so.

Blair should be held to account for his actions of course, but we shouldn’t fall for his self-aggrandising view of himself and history.  Even if it takes our mind off the rather vulgar details of the ’special relationship’ and how embarrassingly, vanishingly small our influence is over our transatlantic boss.

© Mark Simpson 2010

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.