MARK SIMPSON.com

111 men descend on Abercrombie and Fitch’s giant 5th Avenue store in New York, and, taking their cue from the grinning topless model greeter, not to mention the plethora of pictures of topless men and a giant topless bronze statue in the store, peel their shirts off.

Apparently management were not amused and responded to this mass act of getting into the A&F schwing of things, by asking them to put their shirts back on or leave.

Which is a tad unkind. After all, they were flashing their tits for free. A&F have to pay their model to stand around with his nipples out.

So remember boys, Abercrombie and Fitch stores may look and sound and feel like a 1980s gay disco - but it’s only make believe. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can treat it like one.

Unless you’re a hustler.

Tip: Damien

What a carry on in the dark.

The very widely-reported story of the Avon firemen disciplined for bringing the Fire Brigade into disrepute and unauthorised use of their fire engine (and torches) is both fnarrr funny and funny peculiar. But the most peculiar aspect of it, and certainly the most serious, is the light it casts on the minds of newspaper editors.

The ‘bare’ facts that can be ascertained from the various reports are these: on their return to their fire station, four on-duty firemen from Avonmouth Fire Station’s ‘Blue Watch’ (no kidding) drove out of their way at night in in a fire engine to a remote cruising/dogging area and shone their very powerful Fire Brigade torches into some bushes, supposedly revealing a group of four men involved in ‘a gay sex act’. According to the newspaper reports, one of the participants in this night-time tryst in the bushes illuminated by the firemen’s torches complained to the THT who then contacted Avon Fire Brigade. Avon Fire Brigade suspended the men on full pay for three months before finding them guilty of bringing the service into disrepute, demoting, fining and moving them to different stations and compelling them to undergo ‘gay awareness’ training.

The Sun, for whom the story was almost tailor-made, devoted most of a page to it: ‘Firemen expose gay doggers’, with the strapline ‘Four firemen have been carpeted after disturbing an outdoor gay sex romp.’ The Sun suggests of course that the case was an example of ‘political correctness gone mad’ (and some of the details, such as the ‘re-education’ of the firemen appear to lend themselves to this), and also makes a meal of the ‘criminal’ nature of the acts these public-spirited firemen witnessed.

However, perhaps surprisingly, the Sun, unlike most other newspapers, made some effort to avoid whipping up indignation at the very idea of men having sex with other men outdoors - e.g. the use of ‘gay romp’ (’romps’ used to be strictly hetero in the Sun; gay sex was ’sordid’ or ’sleazy’ or ‘perverted’) and the interesting phrase ‘gay dogging’ (when dogging, a very recent phenomenon, might actually be described as straight cruising).

Funnily enough, The Sun’s sister-with-a-degree-paper The Times, the UK’s paper of record, ran a report that was much more misleading, right down to the headline: ‘Firemen are disciplined for disturbing orgy in bushes’, which in its very ambiguity is rather ‘revealing’. The piece failed to make it clear that the firemen had quite literally gone out of their way in council taxpayer’s time in a fire engine bought and fuelled with taxpayers money to shine their taxpayer-purchased powerful torches on this ‘criminal activity’ - when they should have been back at the fire station awaiting a call from a member of the public whose chip-fan was on fire.

More importantly, like most reports, it also conveyed the impression that the (disturbing) act the firemen witnessed was illegal and seemed founded on the absurdity that they should be punished rather than the uppity criminal ‘gay’. (If you think I misread the piece, see the indignant comments about ‘criminal gays’ posted at the end - e.g. ‘I am astounded. Fine upstanding citizens, hardworking firemen who risk there lives to help people, disturb people in an ILLEGAL act and it is they who get into trouble, not the individuals who are behaving in an ILLEGAL and immoral way. This country is going to the tubes’.)

The Daily Telegraph, which doesn’t pretend to be as metropolitan as The Times does these days, managed a better fist of it, despite their equally confusing/revealing headline: ‘Firemen reprimanded for disturbing gay sex act’. The article seemed like the others to presume the ‘illegality’ of the disturbing gay sex act, and the outrageousness of the uppity gay who complained, but, crucially, included (in the print version) a small box at the end by their legal correspondent which contained the rather important point - neglected from all the other reports I saw - that reforms to the law in recent years, doing away with discriminatory laws that criminalized only sex between men, and introducing the concept of ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’, mean that consensual sex between men - or anyone of any gender - in a remote place (in the middle of the night, in the bushes) such as was happening here, isn’t illegal.

So the angle presented in the Sun, The Times, the Telegraph (main story) and the Mail, and in countless Richard Littlejohn style ranting blogs - criminal gays get off (arf) while upstanding straight firemen are punished; strewth, what’s this country coming to? - wasn’t an angle at all.

Even the Guardian, in a lengthy report, failed to mention this rather salient fact and conveyed the same erroneous impression, despite quoting prominently, as most if not all of the reports did, an ‘unnamed firefighter’ (who wasn’t present on the Downs that evening) complaining: “This is a complete farce. All four officers have been let down by their senior officers when they needed their support the most. They have been treated as the criminals in this case and it has been completely forgotten that they witnessed criminal activity occurring in a public place.” Umm, nice try, but they didn’t. And they didn’t report what they now appear to claim they saw, either.

The Telegraph’s useful little box also mentioned that unwanted voyeurism was potentially illegal. In other words, if you want to get all hoity toity and talk about ‘criminal acts’ the firemen should perhaps consider themselves lucky that they weren’t disciplined and prosecuted.

It’s difficult not to conclude that the firemen, homophobic or not, were in that place at that time of the night shining their torches around in the bushes because they wanted a cheap thrill. They were dogging themselves - but on our time. (Though of course we now get to dog as well by reading the newspaper reports.) If they had observed the usual etiquette of such places and not shone their bloody torches in everyone’s eyes to get a better look no one would have complained and they wouldn’t have got into trouble. As someone who has been cruising in such places myself in the past and know how long it takes to get your night vision back after being blinded by some idiots undipped headlights, I think they deserve everything they got.

But the newspapers deserve much, much worse for their dereliction of duty.

As part of the same misrepresentation of the story, most of the reports refer to the (anonymous) four men supposedly involved in the public sex scene unequivocally as ‘gay’ or (in The Times) ‘homosexual’.

How do the newspapers know this as a fact? Were they there in the bushes themselves? Would this have even helped? This was, after all, a pick-up area, we’ve been told, popular with ‘gays’ and ’straight doggers’. Even exclusively ‘gay’ cruising areas, if there are any left now that straight dogging has become so popular, are not that gay, which is, after all, the point of them: they appeal to married and bisexual men and men who regard themselves as straight but like a bit of cock every now and again.

And from what I’ve seen of dogging, quite a few ’straight doggers’ will get involved to some degree with the all-male action if it’s a slow night - or at least have a good look if someone’s putting on a show. Dogging by its very nature tends to wander outside the the usual boundaries of ’straight’ and ‘gay’.

Besides, the claim that the firemen witnessed any sex at all, let alone a ‘gay orgy’, is just that, a claim, not a fact as presented by the newspaper reports. A claim which seems to have been made only after the firemen were disciplined, and by a disgruntled firemen chum who wasn’t even present that evening. In other words, it’s about as dubious a claim as you could imagine.

So the ‘fact’ that it was one of the ‘gays’ taking part in the ‘illegal’ ’public’ ’gay orgy’ who contacted the THT - and the basis of all the torrents of indignation - is actually pure fantasy. Nothing is known about this man other than what the THT has put in the public domain as they were the ones who presented his concerns to the Avon Fire Brigade. They have made no statement about his sexuality (and the THT doesn’t ask anway), or what he was doing on the Downs and he didn’t report any sexual activity to them.

So, a) his sexuality is as unknown as his identity and, b) the only source for the ‘fact’ that he was part of a ‘gay orgy’ is the disgruntled chum of the disciplined firemen who wasn’t there that evening.  And even if he had been, how would he know who had contacted the THT? Or perhaps the ’source’ for this ‘fact’ was the reporters’ own fevered imaginations?

It seems to me that on this one, everyone’s in the dark, thrashing around the bushes with their pants down.

—–

Update: An excellent piece by Rachel Johnson dissecting the farrago, setting the legal record ’straight’ and and going some way to restoring The Times’ honour appeared the day after I posted this blog. 

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

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

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

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

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

To paraphrase the world’s most famously dissatisfied customer Mr Praline (played by an eloquently irate Python, John Cleese), I know a dead parrot when I see one and I’m looking at one now.  The retrosexual is dead. He has ceased to be. If marketers hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies.  He’s an ex-parrot.

When I first used the metrosexual antonym in 2003, I used it merely to refer to men who were not metrosexual - what most people still liked to call ‘real men’.

Remember those? 

Four years on, it seems the word ‘retrosexual’ is on everyone’s lips in the US - especially marketers keen to sell even more vanity products to men.  But ironically the US media’s love-affair with the retrosexual as a supposed antidote to the queerness and self-consciousness of the metrosexual just reveals what a sorry state ‘real’ masculinity is in.  It has shuffled off it’s mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. If I was an American, I’d ask for my bleedin’ money back.

Did real masculinity even exist in the first place, I wonder?  Or was it just some 1940s Hollywood daydream?  Or a 1980s Jeff Stryker video?

But whether ’real men’ are called ‘John Wayne’ or ‘Marion Robert Morrison’ (Wayne’s given name) or ’hung the size and shape of a baby dolphin’ is somewhat moot now as in the 21st Century the male has been thoroughly mediated, accessorised and monetised - and turned into another way of making men even more self-conscious and consumerist.  As this item from last week’s Newsweek makes clear, retrosexuals are now metrosexuals with implanted chest hair:

Measuring 6 feet 3, with chiseled pecs and a bushy beard, George seemed like a model of manliness. Yet two years ago the 47-year-old Virginia businessman (who declined to give his full name to protect his privacy) decided he didn’t look quite macho enough. So he went to see Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Miami hair-restoration surgeon, to have 3,000 hair follicles ripped from his scalp and transplanted into his face, chest and belly. He wasn’t satisfied. So a year later he returned to get an additional 2,400 grafts done. “I could still have another surgery and not be completely covered,” says George today. “I’m very pleased, but 2,400 grafts is not a very hairy chest.”

I’ll take your word for it.  But I wonder how many grafts a very hairy chest is.

George’s quest for maximum hirsuteness isn’t as unusual as it may sound. He’s part of a growing group of “retrosexuals”- men who shun metrosexuality, with its often feminine esthetic, in favor of old-school masculinity. 

Old-school masculinity that perceives itself as chronically lacking in masculinity, is obsessed with its appearance, and resorts to painful and costly cosmetic surgery of a questionable effect to make itself more attractive, more worthy of love, more ‘manly’ - and up-to-date with current furry fashion trends.  As Mr Praline would say: you’re ‘avin’ a larf, mate!

Cosmetic and hair-transplant surgeons on both coasts report increases in patients seeking a more rugged look: hairier chests and beards, squarer chins, more angular jaw lines. Dr. Paul Nassif, a well-known Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, has noticed the change in the photos patients bring in to show him their ideal image. A few years ago “they were bringing in a pretty-boy look,” he says. Now, though, the requests are different: ” ‘Give me a big, strong, manlier chin’,” he says.

No doubt they were bringing in clippings of ‘manly’ models and celebrities from the very same glossy magazines from which they previously clipped images of ‘pretty-boys’.  Some of them were probably the same models and celebs, now sporting those de rigeur manicured beards.  Like David Beckham, Brad Pitt, Jake Gyllenhaal, Justin Timberlake et al.

These cosmetic surgery fashion victims clearly aren’t retrosexuals.  They aren’t even metrosexuals with faux chest hair.  These are male-to-male transsexuals. 

And like many male-to-female trannys, they’ll probably never be really satisfied with the results.  After all, neither 2,400 nor 24,000 grafts are a ‘really’ hairy chest.  It’s in the nature of consumerism - no, desire itself - that we always want what we don’t have.  I happen to have a ‘really hairy’ chest - but I’m still shaving mine, despite the appalled intervention of my gay host in LA when I visited a couple of years ago, who snatched the razor out of my hands and told me in no uncertain terms that ‘No one gay shaves their chests any more!’.  Like metrosexuality itself, faux retrosexuality was pioneered by the gays.

Perhaps Newsweek’s retrosexuals should go about shopping for the manly traits they desire in truly retro fashion - by going cruising.  Even if it’s bad for business.  As the punchline of the Python’s Parrot Sketch has it, after the owner admits the parrot he sold is in fact deceased and that has no more in stock:

Owner: (quietly) D’you…. d’you want to come back to my place?

Mr. Praline: (looks around) Yeah, all right, sure.

By Mark Simpson, (The Guardian, 8 Aug 2007)

The Phalliban, America ’s killjoy campaign against the male body’s, er, maleness, strikes yet again.

The 2008 Fire Department of New York Calendar of Heroes, the eleventh in series of snaps of buffed young firemen stripped to the waist which produces mass hysteria on the streets of NY on its release every year - along with large amounts of cash for the FDNY - will be the last.

Why? Because it might make the good people of New York think of firemen’s hoses.

Calendar coverboy 22-year-old Michael Biserta (above) has caused a scandal because he briefly got his semi-erect hose out in the video ‘Boys Gone Wild’ in 2004 - some time before he even joined the FDNY.

For the sake of research, you understand, I’ve viewed the clip (it’s because in the Net Age images never go away that this scandal has happened). And let me just say that Biserta’s fire-fighting equipment will have no trouble extinguishing the tallest flames.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is not impressed, however, and has ordered the scrapping of future calendars. Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, himself a former fire commissioner (and, judging by his penchant for double entendre, also an avid Are You Being Served fan) agrees, telling the press straight facedly: ‘You can’t allow anything that tarnishes the reputation of the people on the job.’

Not being American, I’m not sure how the fact that a fireman flashed his large fire axe to consenting adults before he became a fireman tarnishes the reputation of the people ‘on the job’, or anywhere else.

Unless you’re just jealous. Or penises frighten you. (Admittedly, Biserta’s is slightly scary.)

And, Captain Peacock, isn’t a spot of polishing, French or otherwise, the usual way to deal with tarnishing?

I could understand if the FDNY was worried that Biserta’s hot body might be starting more fires than it puts out. Instead it seems like just another example of the puritanical American Phalliban trying to turn back the commodification cock that American consumerism started ticking. In the UK its difficult to imagine that a topless fireman calendar would be banned because one of them had once got their big pump out on video. Instead, they’d probably be given their own TV show. Over in France, the Dieux du Stade calendar featuring starkers professional rugby players covered in baby oil with their balls out sells like hot croissants - and no scandal erupts.

The US clearly has a different attitude towards the male member, even if many people are convinced it’s currently led by one. Recently the city council in Kaiser , Oregon was forced to promise to remove some traffic bollards because people complained they looked ‘too much like penises’. In other words, bollards. During the filming of last year’s Superman Returns the biggest preoccupation was how to keep Superman’s Spandexed bulge from… bulging.

This year the posters for a film called ‘Pride’ about Philadelphia ’s first black swim team were nearly banned by the hawkeyed American Motion Picture Association because they were convinced that the package of one of the black swimmers in the background had been ‘digitally enhanced’. (It hadn’t, and it wasn’t even particularly ‘proud’.)

I realise that post 9-11 the FDNY has been sanctified. That they are now all ‘heroes’. But nowadays amateur porn stars can be heroes too. Especially if they’re hung as heroically as Biserta.

The real problem here is that Biserta’s showing-off before he became a fire-fighter was a little too explicit. The fact the coverboy had got his actual cock out instead of his hose outed the pornolizing of the male body going on in the culture that the FDNY calendars themselves are part of. Which freaked out the old men running the FDNY who probably never liked those faggy calendars anyway.

Many of the glossy images in the calendars, like the one on the cover, are deliberately phallic and fetishistic. Look at the way a ‘pumped’ and ‘ripped’ Biserta is holding his big shiny red fire axe with both hands, over that huge butch metal clip apparently keeping his flies together.

Even the Statue of Liberty, looking on, has erected her arm - which has, understandably, burst into flames. Unlike the old grey men who run the FDNY, she’s an American who knows how to salute a prodigiously well-equipped young fireman when she sees one.

You can see that incendiary Biserta clip on Xtube here.

Tip: Donald Krolak

Men are from Mars and women from Venus. Or so yaketty male American self-help gurus who want to be loved keep telling us.

But according to recent research both men and women actually turn out to be lunatics that can’t shut up.

These findings may or may not explain the behaviour of the general population, but they certainly would explain American self-help gurus.

In the Middle Ages, sodomy was thought to be caused not by hair whorls, but by drunkeness.

As this spornographic clip shows, they were absolutely right.

The post-match beery bonding of the lovely lads of Sandbach RUFC - which, be warned, includes very male nudity, heavy petting and male-on-male snogging - made me feel faint with jealousy.

And also faintly redundant.

These straight lads’ eagerness to perform their manly love for one another in front of UK TV cameras (for an instalment of an ITV2 series last month called ‘Generation Xcess’) does away with the need for my:

• essay on hazing, in which I argued that male bonding is deeply homoerotic, but that despite this it is not a ‘gay’ thing - it’s a ‘guy’ thing

• pointing out the size queenery of straight men.

• explaining how little purchase the Phalliban has in the UK - compared to the US where it has a tighter grip than Captain Tim’s team-mates have on his ‘massive cock’

• arguing that homoerotic fantasy that Sporno advertising sells us is not entirely baseless

• responding to those who adamantly refuse to believe that straight men could get naked with one another on camera and play with each other’s dangly bits when offered lots of cash. (These ones did it for a few beers.)

Instead of all my scribbling, I just needed to take a video camera to a pub in Sandbach on Saturday night and buy a few rounds. It would have been a lot more fun too.

Funny that this should have surfaced around the same time as this spornographic ad campaign for Paris - which after the salty mantics of Sandbach RUFC now looks like a slightly coy promotion for a copycat programme featuring a less attractive, less ballsy team.

But perhaps the most ‘touching’ part of all this groping is the way this (highly successful) team of rugger buggers refuse to be embarrassed by the naughty clips the programme makers make them watch in the cold-sober light of day. Instead they seem quite proud. But then, they have much to be proud of. Especially their Captain.

Alas, I suspect that some - gay and straight - spiteful members of the Great British Public who saw the doc did their best to make these young men feel ashamed for being ‘gay’ with one another - to make them feel ashamed, in fact, for being fit, virile lads full of life, laughs, spunk and puppyish enthusiasm for masculinity. (Actually, the more I think about it, and what I’m missing, I’m beginning to feel spiteful too….)

Worse than this though is the way the clip ends before the programme does.

Anyone have the final segment? Or a better quality version?

As the completely unabashed grinning donkey-hung, bubble-butted Captain Tim says, ‘We should watch that again.’

Update: I’ve just been informed that a better quality clip is available, along with rather a lot of other athletes showing off their, er, sporting prowess, at the premium adult site: www.ruggerbugger.com

The Times of London argues, in a lengthy and quite serious piece by Matthew Syed, that David Beckham deserves a knighthood not so much for being a great footballer but rather for being ‘the prime catalyst in the metrosexual revolution.’

So Becks deserves to be awarded the highest honour in the land and made a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter for preening, posing, and symbolically waving his legs in the air and showing an entire generation how to wave their legs in the air too?

Seems fair enough.

After all, unlike most knights he’ll look great in stockings.

According to MSN Money (‘The rise of the metrosexual economy’) sales of male cosmetics in Boots, the leading UK High Street drugstore have risen by 800% since 2000, making it ‘by far and away the fastest growing sector in the cosmetics and beauty industry.’ Datamonitor predicts the ‘male grooming’ market to be worth $1.5B next year and male spas and ‘grooming salons’ are rapidly expanding.

As a sign of how times have changed - and how mainstream metrosexuality now is - the journalist Matthew Plowright begins the article relating how he and his mates spent twenty minutes in a pub, probably one in London, pints in hand, discussing moisturisers, facial scrubs and even St Tropez tans.

That’s nothing. Last night I was in a pub in a rough-and-ready North Yorkshire market town discussing skin regimens with a small group of lads in their early twenties. A chain-smoking hard-drinking Geordie squaddie truck driver gave me advice on how to achieve a perfect complexion: ‘I swear by Witch Hazel wipes, me.’

Cock and crack and ball-shaving was also discussed. (They brought the subject up. Honest.)

All turned out to be enthusiastic practitioners and were keen to offer me tips. Several admitted that they shaved their whole body. More than one was keen to show me their handiwork.

However, data from my informal rural focus group suggests the size of the metrosexual market may have been underestimated. Or rather, that women are paying for much of male metrosexuality. And probably having to clear up the mess.

It turns out that most of the lads were using their girlfriend’s LadyShave.

Simon Doonan at the NY Obsever notices that metrosexuality isn’t dead after all and is busily getting straight men’s legs in the air:

Straight guys need to ditch their new aesthetic preoccupations, stop trying to turn themselves into sleazy porn studs, and go back to being drones and bread-winners. You fellows were the last bastion of self-denying un-vanity, and now look! Between your plucked privates and John Edwards’ $400 haircut, the entire social structure of America has been thrown into a reeling dis-equilibrium. Between the gays and the gals there are enough queens in the hive already. Throw away the Nair, put your Dockers and golf shirts back on, and get back to work.

It is, as Doonan obviously is aware, a forlorn hope. Straight American males have tasted the Royal Jelly and won’t accept Jell-O any more.

Or shit sticking to their man-fur.

Tip: Peter McQuaid