marksimpson.com

…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 George Bush has been replaced by a svelte mixed-race President who starts every day with a workout, who ran a campaign based on slogans printed in the GQ font, and who is, for all Michelle’s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.

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.

Amidst the swathe of drearily predictable ‘decade  in review’ pieces that appeared at the end of December this one by Amanda Hess at The Sexist stood out as one which actually managed to offer some observational cultural insight, rather than just recycled cuttings and cliches:

Think boys are simply born into their masculine gender role? Consider, for a moment, how quickly the cultural norms of acceptable maleness can change. The past decade of masculine fads saw cultural expressions of manliness range from finely-groomed boy bands to shlumpy stoners to blowed-out “guidos.” The versions of masculinity that gained popularity in the aughts saw an infusion of traditionally feminine traits—along with a heavy dose of hyper-masculine compensation.

Sharply observed and well-informed (after all, she quotes me) Hess is one of the few decade-end commentators to notice that the Noughties signalled a major, if not epochal shift in masculinity — but perhaps this isn’t so surprising since as I know very well myself the media in general is highly resistant to any serious analysis of the subject, despite or perhaps because of the space it gives to women’s issues.

Hess’ section on ‘bros’ is worth quoting at length:

Like the metrosexuals who rose alongside them, bros incorporated some traditionally feminine aspects into their own version of masculinity—think pink polos, pastel ribbon belts, and store-bought scents. But bros differentiated themselves from the metro set with a healthy dose of crippling homophobia that encouraged both aggressive heterosexual behavior and subversive homoerotic displays among the bros. And so—we got aggressive heterosexual sexual conquests (banging some chick in the frat house), alongside decidedly homoerotic sexual conquests (banging some chick in the frat house with three of your best bros). We got extreme masculine contests (CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!) alongside absurd homosocial displays (fraternity initiation paddling). At least women got a reliable warning sign of likely brodom—the double-popped collar.

I would submit however that most of Hess’ listed masculine trends, particularly ‘boy bands’, ‘bros’ and ‘Guidos’ are more like fads or subspecies within the wider trend of metrosexuality itself and the breakdown of traditional male gender and sexual norms that it represents.  Bros and Guidos for instance seem to be examples of how metrosexuality is being assimilated (and resisted — often in the same gesture) in different areas of American life, according to class, ethnicity, age etc.

The homophobia of bros for example, looks very familiar and very ‘gay’ to me: it’s the homophobia of ’straight acting’ gay men towards ‘queens’.  While Jersey Shore looks to me very much like metrosexuality for boys who love their Momma’s cooking too much to go to college (they also look a lot like metrosexual young men from matriarchal working class backgrounds in the UK, such as Geordies — who tend to be just as orange and plucked and just as prone to fights and making fun of men who cook).

Hess lists the ‘peak year’ of metrosexuality as being ‘2003′ — in reality, this was the peak year not of metrosexuality but of metrosexmania, the global media’s insatiable craving for literally skin-deep stories about male spas and sack-and-crack waxes — and trying to wear out the ‘m’ word with empty repetition.

Metrosexuality, men’s passionate, epoch-making desire to be desired, is a long, long way from peaking.  And the Twenty First Century is going to have to get used to it.

I’ve often thought that Bear Grylls’ ’survival’ programs with his frequent nakedness and subby eagerness to put all sorts of eeeurgh! things in his mouth in extreme close-up while generally putting his body on display and in harm’s way are really a form of fetish porn.  Bear Grylls: Nature Gimp.

Yes, it’s true that I see porn everywhere – especially if it involves fit young chaps – but in this instance I think it’s quite deliberate.

The clincher is Gryll’s terrible acting.  It’s passionately unconvincing.  Acting so bad that almost by itself it renders what you’re watching pornography, even on the rare occasions he keeps his clothes on.  And as in porn, his bad acting is a major part of the sadistic pleasure of voyeurism.

I would describe Bear as taking the role of the bottom in gay porn but this probably isn’t accurate enough.  Bottoms in gay porn generally don’t make nearly as much noise as Bear: it would be a bit of a turn off.  No, Bear makes as much noise as women in straight porn.  Bear’s job, like female porn stars, is to act out (very, very badly) the pain, pleasure and degradation – and glamour – of being on the receiving end.  Of being ‘the bitch’.  For the male viewer.

Every time Bear the rufty-tufty ex-SAS explorer jumps naked into an ice hole or eats dung the ridiculous noise he makes lets us know that we’re watching something much kinkier than a survival programme.

But this clip in which he gives himself an enema ‘Only as a last resort’ takes everything to a whole new level.  The noise he makes as he ‘lies back and thinks of England’ should get him an Adult Video Award.  I’m sure that giving yourself an enema with seagul poo-flavoured water in a chunky plastic hose is a trifle uncomfortable, but Bear manages to make it sound like he’s being fisted by a Rhino.

Bear Grylls: Use only as a last resort – if you can’t find any proper porn.

This story about men sealing their texts with a kiss got a lot of coverage around the world: Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald:

New research from mobile phone firm T-Mobile reveals nearly a quarter of men (22 per cent) regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates, T-Mobile said in an emailed statement.

“Metrotextuality” is most widespread among 18-24 year old males with three quarters (75 per cent) regularly sealing texts with a kiss and 48 per cent admitting that the practice has become commonplace amongst their group of friends.

Nearly a quarter of this age group (23 per cent) even appreciate an “x’ in a text exchange from people that aren’t close friends.

Ever the keen/obsessive observer of masculine trends, I mentioned the phenomenon of young straight men signing off their text messages with kisses very briefly towards the end of this piece two years ago on The Sun’s attempt to queerbash footballers for holding hands (and I also mention how this old poof can’t quite bring himself to respond in kind.)

Thanks to technology and consumerism, male behaviour is changing extremely rapidly, despite what some of us might like to think of as ‘hard-wired’ and ‘immutable’ characteristics.  This recent story from Radiolab about what happened in a community of baboons in which most of the alpha males were killed off by TB, is also illuminating in this area: the surviving males, instead of fighting and spitting at one another, started grooming one another – which in baboon terms ‘would be less shocking than if they had grown wings and started to fly.’  Even more remarkable is the way in which males joining the group from outside also adopted the new non-aggressive male-grooming routine – despite growing up outside this culture in the baboon-bite-baboon world.  It suggests that even for apes a great deal of behaviour is socially mediated. And perhaps affection between male baboons can be as strong as competition.

Back in the world of the naked ape, because of the private, intimate yet long-distance nature of text messages men needn’t fear being humiliated and kept in line by the pack for daring to groom one another with xxx’s and within this discrete-indiscrete techno-ecosystem this practise has apparently become widespread. Now that it has been outed, note the baboonish response of many of the male commenters, who can’t quite choose between deriding the men who do this and denying it happens at all.  Either way, their violent response is completely impotent and far, far too late.

These ones posted below a similar article in Canada’s National Post seem to have been made by very red faced baboons indeed:

Wattowattowatto: BS! Homosexual men may do such a thing, and they may text in disproportionate numbers amongst other homosexual men. Normal men would never do such a thing. Once again, a non-story using misleading data to shock readers.

Jocko2: How gay! I don’t know why they need to invent a word like “Metrotextual,” when plain old “homosexual” will do. T-Mobile’s research that nearly 22% of men (and 75% of 18-25-year-old men!!) do this is clearly abject bull. This looks like something put out by The Onion. I smell a hoax here, bigtime!

And I smell someone panicking because they’re beginning to realise that their painfully uptight lifelong investment in homophobic ideas about masculinity might have been a complete waste of ulcers.

It isn’t just the way that men are using kisses at the end of their text messages to other men that is such a departure from expectations of ‘innately’ masculine behaviour – it’s the fact they’re sending these messages at all.  Back in the 90s baboonish stand up comedians made a good living out of awful jokes about how phones revealed the strangely reassuring differences between men and women: men were monosyllabic and practical and women wouldn’t’ shut up.  Men used phones as an instrument; women used them as an end in themselves.  Now a generation of young men have grown up who wear their pretty phones as accessories they’re never seen without and are always chattering pointlessly on them.

Usually at the gym, looking in the mirror, while sitting on a piece of equipment this old poof wants to use.

Tip: Marcelo and Sisu

by Mark Simpson

This month the metrosexual is fifteen.

Back in November 1994 I wrote a piece for The Independent called ‘Here come the mirror men’ prompted by a visit to an exhibition in London organised by men’s glossy GQ.  In it I claimed to have seen the future of masculinity and that it was moisturised (according to several dictionaries this article was the first sighting of the word ‘metrosexual’ in print).  I also explained the key role that glossy men’s magazines had in spreading metrosexuality:

The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men’s style press, magazines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eighties and is still growing (GQ gains 10,000 new readers every month). They filled their magazines with images of narcissistic young men sporting fashionable clothes and accessories. And they persuaded other young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.

Some people said unkind things. American GQ, for exampled, was popularly dubbed ‘Gay Quarterly’. Little wonder that all these magazines – with the possible exception of The Face – address their readership as if none of them was homosexual or even bisexual.

The magazine Loaded had been launched earlier that year and its hysterical heterosexuality was to provide a template for persuading unprecedented numbers of men to buy a men’s glossy that wasn’t Penthouse, without being thought a ‘poof’.

The New Lad bible ‘Loaded’, for all its features on sport, babes and sport, is (closeted) metrosexual. Just as its anti-style is a style (last month it carried a supplement for ‘no nonsense’ clothes, such as jeans and boots), it’s heterosexuality is so self-conscious, so studied, that it’s actually rather camp. New Lads, for all their burping blokeishness, are just as much in love with their own image as any metrosexual, they just haven’t come to terms yet.

Nobody likes a smart-ass, let alone a Cassandra, so I was largely ignored.  Men’s magazines and men’s vanity products did become a boom business of course but the media in the 90s remained resolutely entranced by the oxymoronic mirage of ‘New Lad’, determinedly refusing to notice that all this  ‘blokeishness’, particularly in the form of the most successful exponent of it — FHM — was narcissistic and homoerotic: the real money shot was the scads of ads for clobber and vanity products featuring expensively attractive male models.

It wasn’t until I returned to the subject in 2002 for the then popular American online magazine Salon.com (‘Meet the metrosexual’), this time naming names — e.g. that David Beckham guy — that the world finally noticed what I was going on about.

Fifteen years on from the metrosexual’s birth, the men’s magazine market has clearly peaked.  A number of them have closed this year, including Arena (The Face was axed years ago), while Maxim has gone online-only. How the mighty have fallen.  Partly this is because in an online, i-Phone world magazines and the printed word in general have peaked and the recession has brought this into sharper — and, for those of us who work in the media, painful — focus.

But perhaps the main reason is because men’s magazines, having done what they were invented to do — metrosexualize a generation of men on the sly — aren’t needed any more.  If men have space in their hectic consumer lifestyles for a magazine at all it has to be one that doesn’t beat around the bush, or the breasts, and instead addresses their narcissism directly: hence tits-out-for-the-lads Men’s Health magazine recently became the best selling men’s magazine in the UK.  Straight men are now their own High Street Honeys.

So, having achieved what they set out to do and made bitches of us all, have the men’s glossies that remain loosened up? Now that metrosexuality has been embraced by the mainstream and become essentially ‘normal’, have men’s mags finally dropped the straight-acting act and finally come out to themselves?  Do they now dare to acknowledge that some of their readers might be gay or bisexual?  Do magazines full of images of male desirability and products promoted to make the male reader more desirable themselves now accept men’s interest in male beauty and male sensuality and — shock! horror! — even bi-curiousness?

Earlier this year (before the news emerged about sales of Men’s Health overtaking FHM) I went down to my local newsagents, cruised the men’s mags on the racks and brought a bunch of them back to mine for coffee….

 

LOADED

Coverline: ‘How many balloons does it take to float a dwarf’?

Covergirl: Gemma Merna

Concept: Imagine a magazine edited by Guy Ritchie, but without his taste in men or 80s American female pop singers. And even more irritating.

Metrosexual Money Shot: Not a lot.  But there is a back page ad featuring three famous sportsmen advertising Gillette’s batter-powered male vibrator.  The concept for which seems to be based on the appeal to straight men of stroking a buzzing Federer, Henry and Woods across your face every morning.

Buy-Curiousness: Still hysterically closeted – but if you look very closely you’ll find a gay dating ad at the back.

How to bed Mr Loaded: Tell him you shagged Liam Gallagher’s Nan.

Verdict: A parody of a parody. But somehow still not gay enough.  And its breath smells — of death.

—-

NUTS

‘Britain’s BIGGEST selling men’s weekly!’

Covergirl: Lucy Pinder

Coverline: ‘100 SEXIEST FOOTBALLER’S WIVES 2009’

Concept: Like Zoo, Nuts isn’t really a men’s style mag, more a male version of Heat magazine – with celebrity tits instead of celebrity pricks. Snickersome fare and office-friendly limp porn for those who can’t get online to download mandingo gang-bang flicks because they’re at work/too stupid/mum won’t let them.

Metrosexual Money Shot: As a sign of the times, even Nuts has a fashion and grooming double page spread – apparently because their readers insisted on it.

Buy-Curiousness: ‘Man-Love Corner’ featuring suggestive photos of footballers seemingly bumming or groping one another with captions like, ‘Feeling the pinch!’. In Nuts, anything to do with ‘man-love’ is sniggersome or terrifying. Which is fair enough. But Nuts isn’t exactly heterosexual either: its idea of red-blooded lurving is tranny-looking women pouting their bee-stung lips while reaching for each other’s silicone.

How to bed Mr Nuts: Wax off all your pubes, hang some water balloons around your neck and say you love pussy. Alternatively, buy him twelve pints.

Verdict: The letter accompanying a snap supplied by a reader of a road sign saying ‘Semenville’ sums up the slightly confused mentality of Nuts: “This has got to be the worst-named place in the entire world. I definitely wouldn’t want to live there!’  I think Adam, Plymouth, doth protest too much. I mean, if you don’t like semen, why buy a wank mag called ‘Nuts’?

—–

GQ

‘Britain’s Best-Selling Quality Men’s Magazine’

Circulation: 130,000 a month

Covergirl: Clive Owen (am I the only person that finds his face eminently slappable?)

Concept: Fashion supplement of The Spectator magazine.

Metrosexual Money shot: Ralph Lauren Polo fold-out four page ad, inside cover.

Buy-Curiousness: Although American GQ used to be known as ‘Gay Quarterly’ the UK edition of GQ is so glacially pretentious it’s often difficult to believe it’s actually alive, let alone has a sexuality.

Nonetheless, in this month’s issue lady sex columnist Rebecca Newman bravely introduces GQ readers to their prostate gland and anal beads:

‘…as you become aroused you’ll find that, rather than resisting, your backside becomes hungry and takes the first bead…. It may feel peculiar to begin with; the sensation will improve as you become accustomed to it.’

That’s what I usually tell them too! Perhaps that’s why Rebecca is very careful to state repeatedly that it’s ‘your girlfriend’ feeding your arse.

Incredibly important and well-connected GQ editor Dylan Jones meanwhile, could do with some anal beads in another orifice:

‘…as I was standing in the bar at Brown’s Hotel with Piers Morgan, having just had a gossip with David Cameron, he witters breathlessly, ‘I turned to Piers and said, “You know what? I don’t buy all this stuff about Gordon being bisexual.” We chatted away for a while, both of us recounting the old stories we’d heard, and then after about five minutes, Piers turned to me, gave me a quizzical look and said, “We’re not talking about the same Gordon are we?”

How to bed Mr GQ: Do you really want to?

Verdict: GQ probably thinks itself the most ‘grown-up’ of the men’s mags, and to be fair, it has occasionally covered gay issues (without sniggering), but since it’s generally so dull, who cares?

—-

ESQUIRE

‘THE MAGAZINE FOR MEN WHO MEAN BUSINESS’

Circulation: A not very businesslike 60,000

Covergirl: Clint Eastwood

Concept: Snobbery. Here’s editor Jeremy Langmead sniffing about how Britain’s footballers

‘…dress appallingly: they pile on the designer labels with gay abandon (Ronaldo), accessorise with far too many sparkly things (Ronaldo) and haven’t yet discovered that logos a go-go have gone out of fashion (Ronaldo).’

I rather like Ronaldo – particularly the way that his looks, talent and ability to wear whatever he wants provokes both The Sun and Esquire to call him a poof. Not bad going. (As an indication of where they’re coming from, in the same issue, Esquire’s Best Dressed Man in the World is… ‘HRH Prince of Wales’.)

Metrosexual money shot: Diesel double page spread featuring a hustler-like male model in shorts sitting in a chair with a shirtless, fat, bald, middle-aged male punter at his feet, sweating face pressed against his Diesel baseball shoes. (However much the lad was paid by Diesel, Esquire was paid much more to grovel at their feet.)

Buy-curiousness: I wasn’t looking.

How to bed Mr Esquire: Tell him you write for GQ

Verdict: Ronaldo every time.

—-

MEN’S HEALTH

‘WORLD’S BEST-SELLING MEN’S LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE’

Covergirl: Another personal fitness trainer with either great genes or really good ‘vitamins’.

Coverline: LOSE YOUR GUT! ‘The 60 Minute 6-Pack Plan’ BIGGER ARMS!! (The same ones every month)

Concept: For the man who wants to be a covergirl.

Metrosexual money shot: Too many to mention.

Buy-curiousness: Off the scale. This month’s nipple Count: Male = 73 (two on the cover). Female = 4 (mysteriously covered in ‘superfoods’ berries and honey in this issue). One article is called: ‘How to hide your computer porn files from your girlfriend’ – yes, but what about your copy of Men’s Health?

How to bed Mr Men’s Health: You probably already have.

Verdict: The most flagrantly, fragrantly metro of the metromags but American-owned Men’s Health is still in major pissy-prissy denial about this insisting that all its pec-worshipping, calorie-counting male readers are straight, married with kids and not in the least bit vain.  Which is, frankly, really gay.

—-

FHM

‘VOTED BEST MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD’

(Until recently biggest selling most successful UK men’s monthly )

Coverline: ‘”Lesbian Vampire Killers”: The undead have never been hotter.’

Covergirl: Mischa Barton

Concept: Male vanity made easy – and normal.

Metrosexual money-shot: Fashion and grooming and bodybuilding supplements ads featuring impossibly pretty young men in various stages of undress throughout, but most noticeably the inside cover ad for United Colors of Benetton starring a blue eyed lad way prettier than Mischa.

Buy-curiousness: Wads of it. For all its ‘High Street Honeys’, FHM seems the least uptight of the mens mags when it comes to enjoying/exploiting male beauty and acknowledging it, albeit with a giggle. One photo spread (‘Train like a soldier – FHM hits the gym with real life US marine turned Generation Kill actor Rudy Reyes…’) shows an impossibly buff, shirtless chap in tight pants. ‘Alone at sea, Ellen MacArthur removed her top’, reads one of the captions (FHM’s jokiness, unlike most men’s magazines, can actually be quite funny).

Beneath some pics of him with his bubble butt in the air the copy explains that he’s performing ‘Hindu Push-Ups… or what some people sardonically call “the prison push up” on account of where your bottom goes…. It’s also a big favourite down at the gym with the US Marines.’

How to bed Mr FHM: Dress well, work out, moisturise, have a sense of humour. And do the prison push-up.

Verdict: Although FHM like most if not all the men’s mags reviewed here, still officially assumes its readers are all straight, its highly buy-curious pumped-up metro content, along with its cheeky, flirty sense of humour suggests that it’s anything but narrow.

(Full disclosure: I’m a contributer to men’s bi-annual fashion mag Arena Hommes Plus — I don’t review it here, partly because of my self-interest, and partly because it’s a men’s fashion magazine rather than a men’s general circulation magazine.  But generally speaking, as the fact that I write for it might suggest, it has no problem about ramming homosexuality down its readers’ throats.)

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Tip: DA Krolak

Mark Simpson attends an epic UFC event and finds himself turned on to the charms of ‘gay porn for straight men’

(Originally appeared in Out magazine, June 2008)

IMAGINE THE SPACE SHUTTLE taking off with a really fat customized exhaust pipe or the Visigoths sacking Ancient Rome with kicking bass tubes fitted to their 4-by-4s. Or 20,000 supercharged male orgasms. Simultaneously. And you have some idea what it sounds and feels like in Montreal’s famous Bell Centre tonight for Ultimate Fighting Championship 83, as a spunky young carrot redhead in shorts pins an auburn lad on his back with his heels somewhere around his ears. I think the technical term for this is a “full mount.” Or maybe it’s “ground and pound.”

As the chiselled and blond bad guy with the low-slung shorts (Cam Gigandet) in the recent mixed martial arts (MMA) exploitation flick Never Back Down says leeringly to the doe-eyed brunet boxer good guy (Sean Faris) new to MMA, the good news is that in this sport you can choke, kick, punch, pin, and throttle; “the bad news is that it’s gotta end with you looking like a bitch in front of everybody.” Perhaps it was bad news for him — and for the auburn lad in the ring tonight — but certainly not for the 22,000-strong overwhelmingly young-male audience for the biggest-ever UFC event.

Over 2,500 miles away in Las Vegas, “slapper” Brit boxer Joe Calzaghe is tonight defeating light heavyweight Bernard Hopkins on points. In the long-established world of boxing, there is rumoured to be an ancient and secret tradition called the “perk,” or “perquisite” — by which the losing man may be required later to literally give up what he has lost symbolically. In other words, the fucked gets…really fucked.

I don’t know how much truth there is to the “perk,” though the breathless trash talk of modern-day boxers in the run-up to a fight — “I’m gonna make you my bitch/girlfriend/punk” — certainly doesn’t discredit it. But I’m fairly certain that the “perk” doesn’t exist in the “full-contact” brave new world of mixed martial arts (MMA), an omnivorous blend of boxing, freestyle wrestling, judo, tae kwon do, kick-boxing, karate, jujitsu, and Thai boxing that is rapidly replacing boring old traditional boxing, especially among young men, as the fighting sport. The perk isn’t needed. Because in MMA you get perked in the “ring” in front of everybody. On pay-per-view TV. The “perk” is the whole perking point, man. And UFC, by far the most successful purveyor of MMA fights for the cable TV voyeur, looks remarkably like gay porn for straight men: ultimate fuck-fighting.

In the octagonal UFC cage set up over the Bell Centre ice hockey rink — octagonal perhaps because it better affords multiple viewing angles than a square boxing ring — Mac Danzig is still on his back; his sweaty, pumped, almost translucently white torso is flushed with the auburn heat that auburn skin produces when it is aroused. His panting, fetching head has been pushed up against the cage by redhead Marc Bocek’s energetic pounding, as if the cage were in fact a headboard. Bocek isn’t making love, however, or at least not the vanilla kind. He’s hammering the living daylights out of Danzig, stoking the crowd into ever-higher waves of frenzy. Although the Octagon is right in front of me, I’m watching all of this on one of the giant screens overhead: MMA is mostly a horizontal sport — one that requires multiple zoom lenses and a big TV to enjoy properly.

Bocek pauses for a moment to grab his partner/adversary by his hips, almost tenderly, and drag him backward while still kneeling between his legs, not wanting to break contact and negotiate that tricky “re-entry.” It isn’t, though, out of consideration for his chum’s cricked neck. He’s worried that Danzig will use the cage to get up off the canvas — and then get him in the “bitch” position. MMA is all about fighting for top. (Or maybe for extremely truculent bottom.)

Unfortunately for Bocek, Danzig succeeds in breaking away anyway, jumps to his feet, and deftly, impersonally, brings up his knee and smashes it against Bocek’s left eyebrow, which provokes another roar of excitement from the crowd and opens up a very nasty laceration that spills hot blood everywhere, streaming into his eye, across his face, down his chin, and splatters across his lily-white chest — and all over his opponent. MMA is definitely not safe sex. The ref pauses the fight to examine Bocek’s eye. If the blood is preventing him from seeing, the fight will be declared in Danzig’s favor.

Turning to my beautifully produced glossy fight program, which includes full-page colour images of the topless young fighters arranged opposite one another and their vital statistics, I learn that Danzig is 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds, 28, and a Cleveland native. His feisty opponent, Bocek, from Woodbridge, Canada, is 26, and is also 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds. As someone who has a thing for redheads and short-asses, I’d say they are well matched.

The ref continues the match — and why not? Blood looks good on TV. There are only a few seconds left of the third and final round (UFC fights only go to a maximum three rounds at five minutes each — about the average length of a porn scene). Bocek, despite the turned tables and his pasting and what must be deathly tiredness, is still putting up an astonishing fight. Danzig scores a take-down almost immediately and moves, as they say in MMA, “directly to the mount.” Bocek “gives up his back” to try to save his ruined face from further punishment but is then caught in a “rear-naked choke” by Danzig’s powerful, fatally inviting arms. He “taps out” (submits) at 3 minutes, 48 seconds.

I don’t know about Bocek, but these were some of the longest 3 minutes, 48 seconds of my life. I’m aroused and inspired and exhausted and confused. For my money, Bocek won that fight — morally speaking. Which of course means that he lost very badly. His face is roadkill. He is really fucked. But he displayed that quality you hear people talk about reverently in MMA: heart.

Despite the gore, MMA is generally safer than boxing — there are fewer fatalities and brain-damage is less common. Because the fight is “full-contact,” the head doesn’t take all the violence. When it does, though, it’s pretty gruesome. Yet amid all the mayhem, there is a touching tenderness to MMA. Not because it looks to my twisted, queer eye like very rough sex — but because of that “heart” business. After a bout is over, most fighters hug each other in a pseudo-post-coital embrace that re-enacts the warlike hug earlier, only this time it’s a hug of warm brotherhood.

There is another huge, manly Gallic roar. The arena’s giant screen is now tuned to the locker room; a rangy young blond skinhead fighter has peeled his shirt off, revealing a well-oiled fleshly fighting machine. The light behind him and his piercing blue eyes gazing into the camera, not to mention the low position of the locker-room cam, give him the cast of a demigod. It’s Georges “Rush” St.-Pierre, the handsome, stylish 26-year-old local Montreal boy who tonight is hoping to seize back his UFC Welterweight belt from Matt “the Terror” Serra, 33, the no-nonsense Long Island master of Brazilian jujitsu who dispossessed him of it last year with what some people said was a lucky punch.

We’ve only been watching the hors d’oeuvre. All this blood has just been so much foreplay.

***

“STOP LOOKING LADIES!” some funny guy in the audience shouts. It’s the weigh-in, a day earlier. Ed “Short Fuse” Herman, another 20-something boy-next-door red-headed fighter, from Vancouver, Wash., is naked on the stage under the spotlight, a towel held up by two lieutenants to shield his “short fuse.” Funnily enough, it’s mostly men rather than ladies doing the looking here in this packed auditorium. Though some are perhaps doing more looking than others: From where I’m seated at the side, I manage to catch a glimpse of Ed’s white butt as he bends over to slip off his briefs (a day later he will fight in shorts cheekily advertising ‘CONDOM DEPOT’ – across his butt).

Several guys have had to take their underpants off — to cheers. I can’t help but wonder whether the UFC officials, for showbiz’s sake, pretend some of these guys are closer to the weight limit than they are.

UFC knows all about showbiz. According to Forbes magazine, its pay-per-view shows have drawn well over 2 million viewers, most of them male and ages 18 to 49. Formidably shrewd, motor-mouthed former boxing promoter Dana White hosts The Ultimate Fighter, UFC’s hit PPV series on Spike (a men-only Big Brother with grappling gloves), which has taken MMA, essentially a semi-organized barroom brawl in the ’90s, cleaned it up, introduced some rules — including no stomping, no spitting, no throat strikes, no punches to the back of the head, and “no groin attacks of any kind” — and made it into a hot, multiangle, high-impact PPV commodity.

Described memorably by John McCain in 1998 as “human cockfighting,” and under threat of a total ban, MMA has become a different, more saleable, less relentlessly violent kind of “cockfighting” in the nurturing hands of the UFC — so much so that McCain himself recently relented: “The sport has grown up.” As a measure of just how grown up, UFC — for which casino owners the Fertitta brothers paid $2 million in 2001 — is today valued at roughly $1 billion. Cultural respectability has arrived too in the form of a recently published $2,500 MMA art book titled Octagon with a foreword by man-loving straight playwright David Mamet, who wrote and directed the MMA-themed movie Redbelt. MMA is also coming to major-network TV: CBS recently announced plans to air four MMA fights (non-UFC) annually — despite the disapproval of CBS chairman Sumner Redstone. “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” he said, perhaps missing the way UFC brings loving and fighting spectacularly together.

There is a lot of passionate hero worship in the world of MMA, not so much homoerotic as hero-erotic — or herotic. Straight male fans and fighters themselves will enthuse with shining eyes about “my idol”, in a way that in most other contexts would be considered much too ‘gay’ to keep a straight face.  But perhaps that’s not so surprising, since MMA owes a lot to those notorious warrior homos, the ancient Greeks. Although today’s MMA came to us via Brazilian jujitsu (alas, not conducted in Speedos, as the name may suggest), many consider it the modern version of pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling that was the basis of combat training for Greek soldiers and an original Olympic sport. With lethal purity, pankration had two primary rules: no eye-gouging or biting. Fingers were often snapped off. Sometimes death or unconsciousness was the only form of submission (rather like this year’s Democratic primaries).

MMA’s younger fans are not likely to acknowledge their sport’s homoerotic heritage. For most of these young men, many of them blue-collar and swooningly in love with masculinity, gay means unmanly and passive and emasculated – and therefore major turn-off. MMA is gay porn for straight men because its violence not only justifies the intimate, protracted, eye-popping physicality of the sport but also preserves its virility — the very thing that gets many of its fans hot. These fighters can’t be fags — look how fucking tough they are, dude! It’s a bit like how in gay porn “real” tops never bottom — for the sake of the bottoms watching.

Sometimes the MMA fighter really is homo — like professional MMA fighter Shad Smith, who was recently profiled in The New York Times. From a tough blue-collar background, Smith was desperate to hide his sexuality at first. “I was petrified because I didn’t want anyone to find out,” he told the Times. “And I would try to be the toughest person around. That way no one would suspect. No one would ever say it. No one would think it.” Doubtless there are quite a few Shad Smiths who became very good, very determined, very motivated scrappers because they weren’t escaping to college or opening a hairdressing salon.

The tough-guy image is something of an illusion — if an entrancing and convincing one. Surprisingly often, fighters turn out to be sensitive, introspective loners — “fags” who aren’t actually fags — such as Mac Danzig, the beefy auburn-haired killer who is in fact a vegan and whose main pastime, when he isn’t turning another lad’s face into tenderloin, is nature photography. That’s also the story of Georges St.-Pierre, a bullied slight boy at school who turned to MMA for salvation, who with his tight, wiry body, immaculately groomed presentation and designer clothes looks rather metro. As one observer put it: “He’s the kind of flash Europunk you might think you could wipe the floor with if you came across him in a bar, but you’d be very, very wrong.”

Likewise you might expect a fight between Serra and St.-Pierre to be billed as good ol’ USA versus Frenchy “fag,” but you’d be wrong. Because GSP — to give St.-Pierre his brand name — is generally considered to be an exceptional fighter, genuinely excellent in several disciplines, or maybe because this is such a visual medium, he has begun to look like the David Beckham of UFC, albeit one who actually reads books and is, heaven forfend!, interested in philosophy (that’s the French for you). His photogenic face and body and his workouts have been splashed across countless health and fitness magazines.

His opponent, Matt Serra, may be breezily unpretentious and resemble an unpainted fire hydrant, but he is definitely no idiot: “I think they look at Georges as the Crest poster boy with the sparkle in his teeth, the looks, the physique, the body and the athleticism…the real version of what Van Damme was doing,” he’s said. “And then comes me — the Joe Pesci–style ‘Heyooo!’ But it’s cool, man. I’m down with it. I fit in those shoes real well. I’m just looking forward to having another good fight.”

When he turns up for his weigh-in, a relentless tidal wave of boos greets him. An Italian-American pocket battleship at 5 foot 6, Serra weighs in at 169.5 pounds; he appears indifferent to the roiling sea of hatred around him. The booing doesn’t stop when the host offers him the microphone, and whatever he says is completely drowned out. So he offers the crowd two fingers, meaning “two times” and V for victory – and, perhaps, “fuck you.”

Ecstatic cheers greet his challenger St.-Pierre, who’s taller by four inches but in stature by several feet. St.-Pierre fluidly strips down to his tasteful and tastily filled-out black underwear and also weighs in at 169.5 pounds. Offered the mike, he graciously tells the crowd they shouldn’t hate Serra and that “I don’t fight with angerrr – I fight with my ‘eart.” The two men pose for the cameras in a fighting stance and then they hug, GSP kissing Serra’s huge neck.

There was no trash talk in the quieter surroundings of the press conference the day before. The fighters had been polite, respectful, even friendly. “C’mon, I’ve got nothing against the French,” protested Serra when the journalists dug up some “Frenchy” quotes from the past. St.-Pierre, for his part, was touchingly open. “I am nervous and scared to fail but that’s normal,” he admitted. “I ‘ave butterflies. but I ‘ave to make the butterflies fly in formation.”

***

“AAAYYYYYYYYAYYYYEAAAAAAA-AAHHAAAARGH!!!”

The Bell Centre outdoes itself as Georges St.-Pierre, surrounded by his lieutenants, makes his way to the stage in a natty red jujitsu jacket. Climbing into the Octagon, he peels off his silky, tight black T-shirt, and then his baggy trousers come off, revealing tight black trunks with just a white fleur-de-lis on the side of his firm right buttock. It matches the arty tattoo on the back of his steely calf.

Cheers turn to boos. Matt Serra has arrived in a baggy black T-shirt with big white lettering: BUY GUNS SELL GUNS – GUNSAMERICA.COM. The stats on the big screen make difficult reading for Serra: GSP is taller and younger and has a longer reach. Worse, he is more popular and better-looking and has nicer pants. He’s the favourite in every way.

The bell rings, and they touch gloves. In a flash St.-Pierre has Serra on the canvas. All that frustration, regret, resolve, training — and heart — have exploded. All over Serra. To tire him out, St.-Pierre lets him get up, keeping him within range of his own fists but out of Serra’s. Then he takes him down again. St.-Pierre’s purposeful, ominous shoulders rise up like medieval armour, like Joan of Arc seriously narked.

End of round 1. Serra’s eye is swelling up badly. He looks beaten already.

Round 2. Plucky Serra tries a kick.  St.-Pierre catches it and takes Serra down. After Serra stands up again, St.-Pierre lets fly a barrage of punches. Serra is too groggy to parry them. St.-Pierre — part panther, part lethal ballet dancer — comes in for the kill, easily taking his opponent down again. Serra offers his back, and St.-Pierre knees him repeatedly, athletically in the ribs in a manner which somehow manages to be as passionate as it is impersonal.

The ref stops the match, and it’s all over: technical knockout. Canada has won. Montreal has beaten Long Island. The butterflies flew in formation. Terrifying formation. And judging by the noise from the crowd, the entire world and its dad have just climaxed.

A grinning St.-Pierre executes a winning somersault. The crowd chants, “FUCK YOU, SERRA! FUCK YOU, SERRA!” He has been fucked. He was fucked. He is fucked. He is without any doubt whatsoever the fuckee. But he exhibits no resentment. The warriors embrace warmly, another kiss from GSP to that huge, now sweaty neck. Serra holds St.-Pierre’s arm up for the crowd, then hoists him on his shoulder, carrying him for a few staggering steps.

If MMA is gay porn for straight men, then tonight a part of me wonders whether, for all its spilled blood and mashed faces, it isn’t the better kind.

After all, no one could seriously accuse gay porn of having “heart.”

Copyright Mark Simpson 2009

Last Sunday’s News of The World carried a ‘JORDAN’S LOVER BOMBSHELL’ expose on Jordan’s ‘hunky cage fighter boyfriend’ Alex Reid.  What was the bombshell?  He’s sexually open-minded.

‘”I’M TRY-SEXUAL: JORDAN’S MAN SAYS “I’LL TRY ANYTHING ONCE!’”’ was the shocking headline for the two page spread. The piece, cobbled together from interviews with ex-friends, and some snaps of him in drag with his mates – obviously for a lad’s night out – did its best to keep the (now old) tranny story going, further undermine his masculinity and suggest that he’s even worse than a tranny – he’s probably a poof! After all, any bloke who says he’s a ‘try-sexual’, even one who doesn’t wear women’s clothes, is obviously a bender….

So far, so NOTW. It is, after all, a famously narrow-minded newspaper catering to people who don’t get much.

But rather confusingly, the front of the NOTW glossy magazine inside the very same edition that mocked and ridiculed Reid for his cross-dressing and daring to step outside prescribed gender roles featured TV celeb Myleene Klaas shaving her face on the front page, the with the come-on coverline: ‘MYLEENE MANS UP! – Tough talking and too feisty even for Cowell. Yes, this girls got balls.’ Inside she poses for a glamorous photo shoot in a suit and a side-parting.

Klaas doesn’t describe herself as ‘try-sexual’ in the interview (though she does talk about comparing ‘boob sizes’ with female friends in toilet cubicles), but if she did it would probably have been presented in the same yay! good on ya! girl power!! fashion as her ballsiness. ‘Try-sexuality’ when undertaken by women now seems, even in the NOTW, to be both a measure of both female empowerment and also their new assertive sexuality.  It tends to enhance their femininity rather than bringing it into (fatal) question.

But when men try to join in the experimentation and step outside gendered sex roles themselves, by for instance cross-dressing or expressing an interest in same-sex fantasy, the opposite appears to be true, at least in the public sphere.  They are merely deviant, ‘gay’ or ‘sad’ – and instantly shorn of their masculinity. A joke.  Even cage fighters. Attitudes towards male bi-curiousness show that for men being ‘half gay’ is tantamount to being ‘half-pregnant’.

This new double standard for male and female sexual behaviour which in contrast to the old ’stud/slut’ one, penalises men rather than women was documented earlier this year by Canadian sociologists, who found that men were expected to be up for sex all the time – but only very straight sex. Women were allowed much more latitude in both whether they actually wanted to have sex – and what kind of sex they wanted to have.

This double standard is endemic in the UK, as is painfully evident in the recent case of the barmy woman boxer (also Canadian) found guilty of a violent and unprovoked attack on a couple of drunken squaddies at a disco for kissing and dancing with one another and ‘pretending to be gay’ screaming ‘THIS SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED IN THE BRITISH ARMY!’.

Despite being a violent foreign criminal on the run from the law for assaulting British soldiers (from behind) – and moreover a woman who stepped outside of gender stereotypes herself – she was feted by the British popular press as some kind of have-a-go a heroine.

Why? Well, partly because she was quite ‘tasty’ (in the sense of ‘not looking like a dyke’), but mostly because she was punishing men for daring to break the gender rules themselves.

21st century trysexuality is, you see, just for girls.