MARK SIMPSON.com

This weekend Communist Cuba held a large government-backed rally against homophobia, the first of its kind in that country, presided over by Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela.

“This is a very important moment for us, the men and women of Cuba, because for the first time we can gather in this way and speak profoundly and with scientific basis about these topics,” said Mariela Castro, director of Cuba’s Center for Sexual Education.

Cuba’s metrosexual revolution, the modernisation - perestroika even - of attitudes towards sexuality and gender after decades of stagnation and embargo, seems to be picking up speed after hirsute, retrosexualist revolutionary Fidel Castro’s official departure from the scene (in a tracksuit).

I’m sure Mariela is sincere in her motivation and goals, however it should be pointed out that this new, enlightened approach is also a rather good, relatively inexpensive way of ‘rebranding’ Cuba after years of bad press. Being nice to gays is after all one of the ways in which all sorts of out-of-touch and oppressive institutions such as the British Army, the BBC, The New York Times, and even the Guardian have attempted to update their fusty, daggy image in the past decade.

As part of the new drive to change attitudes, Brokeback Mountain was also aired on prime-time Cuban TV over the weekend.

Which just goes to remind us that all revolutions have downsides.

An ad for Braun in Germany.

I have nothing to say.

Mmmmm. Retrosexual masculinity. Served in a rocks glass. Effortless. Unselfconscious. Dated.

It tastes just like your… dad.

Unlike you, of course. You moisturize. Go to the gym. Watch what you eat. Fret about whether you’re worthy of love. Worry about what masculinity actually means. And taste of tea-tree oil and lavender.

If only we could bring those days back: days when you could operate heavy machinery and speedboats pissed out of your mind. When no one thought you might be homo. When the only magazines you bought were Angling Times and Penthouse. When women couldn’t keep their hands off you even though you had no dress sense, smelt bad and your hair was full of lard.

And when toned, topless, tweaking 1970s hustlers checked themselves out in rest room mirrors while waiting for their next married punter. (Yes, that picture caught my eye too.)

Canadan Club: for the the man who, like most men today, is on the outside looking in. Aching to be sold back by advertising the very thing that advertising has deprived him of. How many of the men reading this ad today even speak to their dad, or know what he drinks?

As I have pointed out before, it’s a measure of how self-conscious and mediated masculinity is now that ‘real guys’ whatever they were/are now just another annoying fad. Faux retro.

On the rocks.

Tip: Fresca Davis

Contenders, ready! Gladiators, ready! Cross-Your-Heart male bra, ready!

It’s back. This weekend that naff 90s Saturday Night family entertainment staple Gladiators returns to British TV - though this time on sattelite and cable only.

A few, possibly superfluous, observations:

It looks a lot kinkier. It looks, in fact, like a suburban fetish party. Rather ‘dark’, with a lot of leather and rubber and a lot of porno pouting - and that’s just the guys.

The most popular male Gladiator, ‘Spartan’, wears a skirt.

Some of the men also seem to be wearing bras. It’s difficult not to wonder they’re a bit lacking in the tit department but have good abs, so they gave them something to cover up their saggy breasts or over-large nipples.

Or maybe, along with the skirt, it is just more evidence that the male body is now as packaged and fetishised, not to mention scrutinized, as the female variety - at least on Prime Time TV.

Actually, on the basis of the new Gladiators, you could argue that women are now held up to less exacting standards. The men are showing more flesh than the ladies - and their flesh is much more spectacular. Spartan’s abs aren’t really terribly useful, but they do look fantastic, so let’s have him hanging by his arms while the camera zooms in on them.

Either way, the Gladiators, male and female, with the exception of pigtailed Battleaxe who looks like she might actually be able to handle herself in a pub fight, seem less like super-heroes than a bunch of tarts.

But then, tarting’s what we want these days. Especially on family shows like Gladiators.

It’s a measure of how mainstream metrosexuality is now, how ‘normal’ it’s become, that even naff old Gladiators has been metrosexed up - ‘for all the family’. The original series was of course also a form of lycra-clad voyeurism, but with a It’s a Knockout/PE-teacher heartiness as fig-leaf. New Gladiators, on the other hand, like the brave/terrifying new metrosexual world we’re living in, isn’t the least bit shy and doesn’t need fig-leafs. Instead, we’re given skimpier outfits and flickering, lustful, wicked flames licking around their perfect bodies.

Sometimes the effect though can be very confusing. Atlas (left), with that long blond hair and sly wink he does on the website, looks less like Charles Atlas, than a cross between Popeye, Jessica Rabbit and Dick Emery. It used to be said that female bodybuilders looked like men in wigs - but looking at Atlas I can’t work out who or what is wearing the wig. Transexy time again.

Perhaps inevitably the trailer for the new series includes a pastiche of the hit 2000 film Gladiator, set in the Coliseum. Gladiators were slaves, commodities of worked-out human flesh that were bought and sold and pitted against one another in a life and death struggle by Roman showbiz at the point of a sword. Now though it’s done at the point of a TV contract. Who says civilization doesn’t advance?

Perhaps I’m reading too much in again, but to my eye this adds a layer of irony to the inclusion of several black Gladiators - in an attempt to update the format to reflect multi-racial Britain. Or perhaps simply to make it look more ‘exotic’ and saleable.

The muscliest gladiators meanwhile seem even musclier. Atlas and Destroyer look more impossibly massive than the big Gladiators of the Nineties series, such as Hunter and Wolf. The bar has, literally, been raised. Their shoulders in particular are vast - perhaps because since the 90s, partly down to the original Gladiators series, we’ve all got a personal fitness trainer - or are related to one. So they have to be EVEN BIGGER.

Or perhaps it’s because we’ve all got widescreen TVs now.

Somehow I don’t think it terribly likely the steroid ‘epidemic’ that drug agencies have warned is rampaging amongst young men today because they want a desirable body like the ones they see in the media will abate anytime soon.

Email interview with Mark Simpson by Sarah Walters of Manchester Evening News (unedited version) pegged to his appearance as the bad fairy at this year’s Queer Up North Festival

SW: Sexuality has been part and parcel of your life and writings - how has reaction changed to the topic of sexuality since you started writing? Is there a culture of openness now, or still prudishness?

MS: Things have certainly changed. I doubt that the MEN of 20 years ago, would have interviewed me. If anything, it would have organised a campaign against my visit. Frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed them.
To some extent, homosexuality was dirty and sniggersome back then because sex was. Homosex is, symbolically speaking, sex for sex’s sake - not for Mothercare’s or the Pope’s. This of course is why the pop music kids listened to in the 80s was full of queerness: Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and that band called The Smiths.

Nowadays of course, everything has gone pop - especially Manchester - and sex is everywhere. Except perhaps in sex itself. I sometimes wonder whether, in a world full of broadband porn - and that’s just the TV schedules - whether there’s any point in actually having sex any more. Unless you’re doing it in front of a webcam or in the Big Brother House.

As a result of all this, and the cultural crossover of gayness - most famously exemplified by the metrosexual - queerness ain’t so queer any more. Maybe that’s why some of today’s favourite TV queers such as Graham Norton, tend to be reassuringly penis-less creatures from the 1970s.

But then, penised homosexuality can be very scary. And I should know.

Young people seem increasingly more open-minded about discovering and challenging their sexuality. Is being bi-/metro-sexual the new black?

It certainly looks like the future is ‘bi-curious’ and ‘open-minded’. Or at least that’s what it says on its online profile.

I think we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of ‘sexuality’ - that 19th Century pseudo-science that divided the world up into ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. ‘Sexuality’ is being replaced by sensuality - or at least, more omnivorous tastes.

I mean, what is ‘straight’ nowadays? Sex outside marriage and Biblically-sanctified orifices has become almost compulsory. Now that women go out and get drunk rather than stay at home waiting for Prince Charming, men can now have ‘gay’ - no baby, no strings, no fee, no gag-reflex - sex with women. Often in club toilets. In this metrosexual world of straight gayness, dogging has replaced cottaging, swinging parties and ‘roastings’ have replaced a quiet night in the Dog and Duck, and fashionable female bisexuality has replaced synchronized swimming.

True, the lads are trailing the lasses somewhat in the sexual experimentation department - though if you promise not to tell anyone they generally catch up very quickly.

For QUN, you’re taking part in the big Debate on May 10, which is always a huge draw - last year was a sell out. What are the hot topics in queer politics you’re expecting to field?

I’m afraid I’ve no idea what the hot topics in queer politics are. Hopefully I’ll be asked to comment on the new Gladiators’ abs and David Beckham’s Armani-wrapped lunch-box.

I understand that you’ll be taking a devil’s advocate line on the point/necessity of festivals like Queer Up North and speaking out ‘against’ them on May 24. Anti-gay debate (in particular against gay stereotypes) is something you’ve written about previously - what’s your beef with QUN?

Well, I don’t really have that much of a beef with QUN, especially since they’re putting me up in a boutique hotel for the weekend. And full marks to them for addressing this subject at all.

My argument is that with the queering of the mainstream, there really isn’t such a thing as ‘queer culture’ any more - at least, not in the sense of something distinct and fragile that needs special protection or encouragement. Once upon a time, young queers would have to run away from Darlington to the queer metropoli of Manchester or London if they wanted some ‘queer culture’ - or just to be able to come out without losing their front teeth. This is clearly no longer necessarily the case. Many can come out at home, watch soaps with gay storylines - like Shameless - and log-on to look for love or sex. Or go to ‘gay night’ at the local nitespot. Queer culture was largely a product of queer communities. Queer assimilation and crossover means that those communities are increasingly obsolete.

Has Manchester as a city played a particular role in promoting (or, perhaps distorting) gay culture and liberalising opinions about sexuality?

I don’t think there’s a city anywhere that’s done more to queer the world than Manchester. Home of Coronation Street, Take That, Queer As Folk, Man U’s metrosexual ‘Spice Boys’, Shameless and The Smiths. Thanks to Manchester, it’s not just queer up north anymore.

Manchester itself seems to have been transformed from the desolate post-industrial landscape I knew in 1983 when I lived here briefly, to a city fit for hairdressers. And today’s footballers.

Mark Simpson shines a light on The Rolling Stones’ smart stupidity

‘I refer to certain objects of no use to farmers,” said Judge Block, speaking at the Horsham Ploughing and Agricultural Society’s annual dinner in 1967 (a wild affair, no doubt). “I may say they are of no use to man or beast, unless they are otherwise dealt with by being ground very small to surface roads or being cut down in size for other uses. I refer to the stones. I looked up what Shakespeare had to say about these things, and in Julius Caesar I found, ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things.’”

Judge Block had presided over Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ first but certainly not last drugs court case that summer. Perhaps because of his apposite surname, he was right in his judgement about the Stones but so wrong in his sentence and valuation of them that he will always be remembered as a silly old git.

It’s one of the conundrums of the Rolling Stones that it is impossible to work out whether their lack of anything much to say is their greatest strength or the greatest weakness. Certainly their intellectual and emotional anomie has helped them stay unfeasibly cool for most of the last four decades, especially in the last few years. It’s as if the insolent, senseless things ground and cut down not just blockish judges but the entire culture to size and turned it into merely a royal road for their bandwagoning career. Watching footage of them from the mid-Sixties today the most shocking thing about them is how modern they look; how much the world around them has changed and how little they have.

Hence one of the more charming aspects of Mark Paytress’s The Rolling Stones Off the Record (Omnibus), a chronological history of the Stones in the form of a collection of quotes by and about the band from the early Sixties to the early Noughties, is that “the unprecedented, incontestable, inexhaustible purveyors of spontaneous combustion The Rollin’ Stones” (as an early small ad in Melody Maker described them) themselves are, on paper, rather tedious. Even in their rebellious heyday of the Sixties, in which they became the definitive rock ‘n’ roll band and also, as a careless afterthought, invented glam, punk and pop promos, they appear surprisingly lacking in insight or interest either in their own phenomenon or the world they have forced to fellate them - and who thanks them for the privilege.

Like judge Block, the squarest bit-players in the narrative of the Stones have the most interesting and prescient things to say here. Michael Jagger’s headmaster at Dartford Grammar wrote a school report in 1960 which turned out to be a prophecy of what was in store for us all for the next 40 years: “Jagger is a lad of good general character though he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something… he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing and Music.” Sir Michael Jagger would persist into the 21st century in his musical camping, social climbing and sexual canoeing.

You can’t get much squarer than mothers, and Mrs Eva Jagger knew a thing or two about her son: “He was a very adventurous boy when he was younger, but then later he became interested in money. It always struck us as odd. Money doesn’t usually interest little boys, but it did Mike. He didn’t want to be a pilot or an engine driver - he wanted a lot of money!” (Michael studied accountancy at the LSE until he hit on another, much better, way of getting his hands on lots of dough.)

Refreshingly, mothers don’t have much invested in feeding the rock ‘n’ roll myth. Mrs Doris Richards: “With six aunts he [Keith was a bit spoiled… He was a bit of a mother’s boy really. When he started school, he used to get panic-stricken if I wasn’t there waiting for him when they all came out.” When Keith claims that “rock ‘n’ roll got me into being one of the boys. Before that I just got me ass kicked all over the place,” Doris hilariously corrects him: “Actually, he was too sensitive to be a Ted.”

Mrs Kathleen Perks (mother of Bill Wyman): “I can’t remember him ever losing his temper. We found out later that when something annoyed Bill, he would go up to his bedroom and read the Bible. He was closely connected with our local church, and a member of the choir for 10 years.”

Sometimes prescience can border on tragicomedy. Miss Louisa Jones, mother of Brian Jones: “When he was 12 Brian joined the school orchestra and learned clarinet… one thing he really excelled at was diving, although he wasn’t particularly interested in swimming itself.” Jones was to drown in his own swimming pool in 1969 shortly after leaving the group, disillusioned.

Brian Jones was the nearest thing the Stones had to an intellectual, which of course was why he had to go. Like Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, he was the band’s founder, ideologue and bad conscience. In 1964 he offered the Evening Standard an extremely sharp analysis of why the Stones provoked “gibbering rage” among so many adult males: “They seem to have a sort of personal anxiety because we are getting away with something they never dared to do. It’s a sexual, personal, vain thing. They’d always been taught that being masculine meant looking clean, cropped and ugly.”

The Stones’ UK TV debut provoked a bulging mailbag: “The whole lot of you should be given a good bath,” wrote one apoplectic viewer, “then all that hair should be cut off. I’m not against pop music when it’s sung by a nice clean boy like Cliff Richard, but you are a disgrace. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country.” This assessment proved to be entirely correct.

Jones had a clear understanding of the cultural importance of the Stones and the revolution - inversion, in fact - of social values they represented. “Our real followers have moved on with us - some of those we like most are the hippies in NY, but nearly all of them think like us and are questioning some of the basic immoralities which are tolerated in present-day society: the war in Vietnam, persecution of homosexuals, illegality of abortion and drug taking. All these things are immoral. We are making our own statement - they are making more intellectual ones.” Guess who lasted longer?

Marianne Faithfull offers the most interesting emotional insight: “The day I was introduced to them I thought to myself, ‘What a shame.’ I didn’t feel a thing except sorrow for the Stones.” Of course, this proved near-fatal for Marianne who was sucked into their senseless, sensual world. (According to Tom Driberg, W H Auden sidled up to Marianne Faithfull and blurted: “When you’re smuggling drugs, d’you pack them up your arse?”)

Mick Jagger offstage has not really been able to articulate the spellbinding, Satanic personality that could be seen onstage; he is no Morrisseyan wit. He certainly had his moments though. In 1964, when the Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s TV show, Hollywood Palace, Martin sent them up with some cheap scripted gags: “Their hair is not that long. It’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows…”. Jagger retorted: “It’s nice to have you on our show, Mr Martin.”

He has denied however that he feels any disappointment that he isn’t regarded as an intellectual. “It’s very nice to be just a body,” he said in 1978. “I feel like a stripper when I go on stage. I have a great sympathy for girls that are sex objects. There’s nothing more sleazy than an old stripper!”

Certainly it’s a cunning strategy. Asked how he had managed to do the same Mick Jagger act for so many years: “It’s a very English approach. We were brought up to believe that everything you do is a joke, that you’re only an amateur and you don’t ever claim to be any good at it. And that if you do get success, it’s only by luck.” A shrewd formula for surviving British resentment.

Hence his impatience with seriousness. On the Falklands War: “It’s really none of my business.” On The Smiths’ album Meat is Murder going straight to No 1: “I’m not sure I wanna hear a whole album about meat.” On his abandoned biography: “It was just boring trying to remember everything. It was just… ‘Euchhh’.” Arguably Jagger’s most famous and telling line is the one delivered to a protesting East London petrol station attendant in the early hours of the morning: “We’ll piss anywhere, man.”

But the last word should be left to Keith Richards, original punk rocker and probably the “real” Stone: “We certainly didn’t wanna be rock ‘n’ roll stars. That was just too tacky.”

(Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 21 September 2003)

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Out magazine, March 2008

How do you turn a penis into a vagina?

It’s not as difficult from a medical point of view as you might think. Yes, it involves some rather delicate major surgery and the risk of all kinds of ghastly complications, and nobody undertakes such a project lightly. But — and I know this will come as a disappointment to many — male and female genitalia are, anatomically speaking, sufficiently alike to make the procedure relatively straightforward. Essentially, the penis is turned inside out, inverted, and placed inside a cavity tunnelled out of the lower abdomen.

Or as my good friend Michelle, a post-op MTF transsexual, joked with typical tact: “I’m now shagging myself 24/7 — and don’t even need to buy myself dinner!”

Michelle is a very special lady. Not because she turned her penis into a vagina, but because back in the early 1990s she was a sexy male stripper on steroids called “Stud-U-Like,” whose tattooed muscles and XL penis were the toast of hen nights and gay bars up and down the U.K.

One day Mitch, who had always had gender identity issues, decided that despite the whoops and wolf whistles, the whole boy thing wasn’t working for him. Mitch became Michelle, stopped taking steroids, and started taking female hormones instead — becoming with the aid of hair extensions and dangerous crash-dieting even sexier than Mitch. After living as a woman for a while, she finally said goodbye to the last of Mitch, i.e., her nine-inch chopper, and had the Op. - breaking the heart of many a gay man.

“Operation Pussycat,” as she dubbed it, was fortunately a total success. “I now have a 7.5-inch punani!” Michelle declared proudly while recovering in the hospital the Day After. “And in about six months, Mark, with use it will stretch to the full nine inches I had when I was a man!”

“More like a month in your case, dear,” I quipped.

Michelle pursed her lips (the old pair).

Michelle’s trans-tastic voyage, from Stud-U-Like to Chick-U-Love, turned out to be eerily prophetic. She herself has adjusted well to her life as a woman with large breasts, but I’m not so sure about the rest of us.

Looking around at our sexually transparent, stimulated-simulated, implanted-imploding cam-fun-anyone? world, it’s difficult not to conclude that most of us are going tranny but without the, er, balls to actually change sex or even properly cross-dress. We’re all becoming male-to-male and female-to-female transsexuals: transexy.

“Male and female created He them” — but now He’s watching His handiwork rush down to the cosmetic surgeon for a nip and tuck, liposuction, rhinoplasty, pec and buttock and calf implants, breast reduction, breast enlargement, penis extensions and girth widening, vaginal tightening, revirgination, six-pack etching, and labial and scrotum reduction. He must be feeling a little bit miffed.

It’s not enough, you see, to be male or female anymore. You have to both embody and go beyond sex. You have to turn yourself inside out. We’re all becoming…Pamela Anderson. Which is nice, but we don’t all have the legs for it.

Transexy is not quite the same thing as androgyny — which, in addition to David Bowie being enigmatically fey in a spangly 1970s leotard to a glam-rock soundtrack, means a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics. Androgyny is actually quite affirming of sexual difference. Transexy, because it’s obsessed with transparency, transcends masculine and feminine and obliterates sexual difference — even and especially when it’s trying oh, so-hard not to look androgynous.

Let me give you a very hairy example. Newsweek recently reported the case of “George,” a 6-foot-3 man “with chiseled pecs and a bushy beard” who “seemed like a model of manliness.” Yet two years ago the 47-year-old decided he didn’t look quite macho enough. “So he had 3,000 hair follicles ripped from his scalp and transplanted into his face, chest, and belly.” He still 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.’”

A little bird tells me George is never going to be satisfied. After all, what is a very hairy chest? Once you start obsessing about such things, there’s no end to this.

And, boy, have we have started. Says Newsweek: “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…in favor of old-school masculinity.” The article also cites an increase in the number of men asking surgeons for “manlier” chins and noses as further evidence of the so-called “rise of retrosexuality.”

Since when did “old-school masculinity” persistently perceive itself as chronically lacking in masculinity and obsess over its physical appearance, and since when did “old-school” men resort to repeated painful and costly cosmetic surgery of questionable effect to make themselves more attractive, more worthy of love — more “manly”?

It’s a measure of how totally transexy we’ve become that surgically fixated MTM Pammy-trannys are seen as “retrosexual” by Newsweek. Like last year’s mendacious “menaissance,” with all those prissy-missy lists of manly dos and don’ts, this is just Fight Club the Musical, which by the way is coming to tap-dance and gush and bray on Broadway soon - no, really.

But why not? This after all is a generation of men on hormones: hundreds of thousands are taking steroids, according to recent reports. Most of them not circuit party queens. Not only do baseball players apparently now need to take them to be baseball players, and high school football players to be high school football players, but also ordinary nonathletic, non-body-building men need to take them to be nonathletic non-body-building men. (Only 6% of steroid abusers in the United States play sports or consider themselves body builders.)

The vast majority of males taking “the juice” are not doing so to be stronger or faster or scarier, all traditionally masculine ambitions, but simply to look more attractive in the gym, on the dance floor, at the beach, or in their online profiles — to look, in other words, like male strippers: Stud-U-Like. Or what is much the same thing, Vin Diesel.

But steroids, like transexiness itself, can have a paradoxical effect. In addition to testicle shrinkage and erectile problems, in large doses they can turn into estrogen in the body, which causes “bitch tits” and female fat distribution: Stud-U-Like into Chick-U-Love. Perhaps this is why Sylvester Stallone looks more and more like his mother, Jackie. Given his recent steroid scandals, the tagline for his new Rambo movie, “Heroes never die…they just reload,” probably refers to syringes rather than ammunition.

The world of celebrities is of course transexy with knobs and knockers on. This is really the whole point of celebs — and the reason we’re so interested in them. They’re what we would be if we had the time and money and could be bothered. Celebrities are the personal fitness instructors of postsexual identity: inspirational and motivational and very shouty. Women such as Paris and Nicole are ads for transexiness — not because they look like skinny boys with smacked lips holding water balloons, which of course they do, but because they look like women who have had all sorts of costly, painful, and occasionally risky procedures — to look, in fact, like Woman. They are all, like sex in the digital age, copies of an original that doesn’t exist. The question we continually ask of celebs is, How can we be like you? How can we copy your copy of sex?

Attacks on fashion designers for their unreal and unhealthy ideals of feminine beauty somewhat miss the point that fashion is fashion. The fashion world, for all its dictatorial gestures, only reflects culture — or what is the same thing these days, what culture wants to be.

Celebrity males are, of course, at least as transexy as the women. Tom Cruise, still the biggest Hollywood box-office draw despite jumping the chat-show sofa, is a pint-size all-American action hero who is the absolute epitome of artifice. After 22 years he’s still playing his Top Gun character, Maverick (and the Scientologists appear to have his portrait in their attic). The tagline on the posters for the Missy Impossible movies should read, “Can you spot the weave?” Weaved or not, Cruise’s zooming narcissism always outguns his leading ladies.

As Tom’s multimillion-dollar smile shows, male and female nowadays mean exactly the same thing: a ravenous, ruthless desire to be desired. And they both have the number of the same plastic surgeon. Sexual difference has been replaced by sexualized competition. As with Blu-ray and DVD HD, there’s not much to choose between the formats: One has more storage space, the other has a better interface. That’s pretty much it.

Put, say, a picture of Nicole Kidman next to ex-hubby Tom, and you’ll see what I mean. Can you really say that these two people are opposite sexes? Or even different sexes? Or put a picture of her next to Keith Urban and watch them blur into one. it’s no wonder these two ended up together. After all, their stylists seem to be.

No wonder Sharon Stone recently announced that she is sick of men who “act like women” and claimed she’d rather be romanced by a “masculine lady. It is difficult to have a relationship because I like men in that old-fashioned way,” she sighed. “I like masculinity, and in truth only women do that now.” So true, Sharon, so true. My TS mate Michelle, who is also an old-fashioned girl at heart, agrees with you completely. She’s really fed up with the first thing straight blokes ask after she tells them her little secret being: “Will you fuck me?” Having been through all that trouble to have your large penis turned into a vagina, it’s a tad annoying to have to buy a selection of strap ons.

I suspect Sharon’s been watching that show Entourage, in which a group of young men from blue-collar backgrounds behave like Sex and the City women, only more superficial. The Entourage generation of men lives to shop and to be looked at and aspires to be nothing more than trophy-man wives. “Hug it out, bitch,” is the transexy motto of transexy men everywhere.

Speaking of trophy-man wives, take a look at today’s celebrity couples. Actually, don’t even look; just say their names: Demi and Ashton, Jen and Marc, Angelina and Brad, Maddy and Guy. None of these couples even sounds remotely man-and-wifey. They resemble — you can look now — anatomically incorrect kids’ toys. Where is sexual difference here? In the drag-king stubbly beards that the sack-and-crack-waxed toy-boys wear to emphasize their Timberlakian adorability? No wonder these celeb couples end up being called two-headed single names like Brangelina or TomKat: flesh of my undifferentiated flesh.

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

But none can compare, of course, with the ultimate transexy couple: Victoria Adams and David Beckham. Somehow, Posh and Becks’s extraordinary appearance becomes, daily, more heroically artificial - perhaps because they seem to embrace their transexiness completely, performing it shamelessly to the hilt in fashion shoots in which they simulate transexy sex (which is, by definition, simulated anyway).

If a recording of Posh and Becks having sex at home were to make its way onto the internet, as it has done with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, or Paris Hilton and Rick Salomon, it probably wouldn’t test the server’s bandwidth much. Not because their naked angularity might be uncomfortable to watch, but because there’s nothing more to see.

Porn has become the celeb sensibility because porn literally makes sex transparent. By ceaselessly ‘showing’ sexual difference and turning it inside out, straight porn overexposes it, along with heterosexuality — and turns it transexy. Most female porn players look like Pamela Anderson — did they copy her, or did she copy them? Or was it both? Meanwhile lesbianism and sodomy, i.e. non penile-vaginal sex, are pretty much de rigueur in ‘straight’ porn. On the rare occasions penile-vaginal sex actually occurs, it’s usually either in the form of a man lying flat on his back while a woman bounces up and down on his penis (either fucking him or giving him a vaginal blow job, take your pick) or is joined by several other science-fiction-size penises at the same time.

Which reminds me, the male models in straight porn are no longer the penises attached to fat hairy fucks of yore but increasingly resemble those in gay porn; they are getting younger and more attractive, and their bodies are shaved and more worked out, and the camera won’t shy from showing this off. Or so I’ve heard….

Meanwhile, something interesting — at last! — seems to be happening in the world of gay porn. Perhaps inspired by Michelle’s journey, an impressively hung young model called Stonie — who bizarrely also played Borat’s son in the Sacha Baron Cohen movie — is now taking female hormones. He’s already had breast implants and has changed his name to Brittany Coxxx (though for now he’s hanging onto his cockkk). And apart from the hexagonal breast implants, he looks rather hot.

The curious thing, though, is that he also looks even more like a gay-porn star now than he did before.

As Borat, perhaps the last true retrosexual left, might say: “Transexy time!”

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Special thanks to Michelle and Donald K.

According to yesterday’s The Sunday Times, the so-called ‘laddish’ culture promoted by men’s magazines has spawned a new medical condition: ‘athletica nervosa’, or an obsession with exercise:

New research shows that the magazines, whose titillating displays of female flesh were meant to liberate their readers from political correctness, may be trapping them into an unhealthy obsession with their own bodies.

Rather than, presumably, a healthy obsession with women’s bodies.

Some readers become so anxious about their own physique that they embark on excessive exercise, spending hours running, swimming or in the gym. Athletica nervosa is already known to affect young women, but this is thought to be the first British study to link the phenomenon to men.

The piece, headlined ‘Lads’ mags inflict preening curse’, quotes David Giles, a psychologist at Winchester University, who co-wrote the research, saying: “We found that the more such magazines a man reads the more likely he is to be anxious about his physique.” The study carried out interviews and surveys of 161 men aged 18-36 to find out how many lads’ mags they read and for how long. They also scored them for dietary habits, exercise regimes and attitudes towards appearance.

“Men who read the most lads’ mags seemed to internalise the appearance ideals portrayed by them,” said Giles. “Models in these magazines are impossibly good-looking and seeing them can make readers anxious about their own bodies.”

Really? You don’t say.

Pardon me for pointing out that this is the whole glossy point of them. And the only research you have to do to discover this is flick through them. Describing these metromags as ‘lads mags’ or ‘laddish mags’ is to fall for their mendacious marketing and the beard-like breasty covers.

The reason they exist at all is to deliver the hyper-fit, near naked male-modelled fashion and vanity product advertising within to men who until the 90s were immune to it because they were too busy being actual lads with other lads to buy a magazine selling them a simulated, lonely version of ‘laddishness’ while encouraging them to to look with a mixture of envy and desire at idealised images of other men produced lovingly with all the latest techniques and technology of consumerism.

The desire that ‘lads mags’ are selling isn’t heterosexuality. It’s metrosexuality.

And don’t think staying in and becoming an online gaming geek will save you. The article quotes a separate study at the University of Illinois two years ago which showed that the muscular male bodies in computer gaming magazines drove boys as young as eight to try to build their muscles. Which is not very easy if you spend your time playing computer games. Another reason why steroids, the metrosexual hormone, are the dystopian future.

For all this, men’s magazines, however, have had their day.

Loaded - the magazine that invented the phoney ‘lad mag’ beer-and-tits-and-designer-underpants formula but which was quickly emulated, improved on and overtaken by kit-and-clobber-happy FHM - lost nearly 30% of its circulation in the second half of 2007 as circulation dropped by 47,000 year on year.

Even FHM shed 56,114 sales while Maxim lost 53,034 sales. However, sales of Men’s Health are said to be ’stable’. Probably because, despite its laughable recent attempts to het it up, it’s the most obviously metro of the metromags - and puts men‘s tits on the cover. And also the one with the most hardcore hypochondria. Men’s Health is ’stable’ because it’s the most neurotic title, doing its best for equality of the sexes when it comes to eating disorders and supplement addiction.

Men’s magazines have peaked not so much because they have so many gadgets now to play with when they’re bored and alone - Ipods, Podcasts, portable DVD players, the Interweb, Fleshlights - but because men’s mags have largely done their job.

They slyly converted an entire generation of young men to metrosexuality so successfully - partly because they were aching to be converted anyway - that now, with the possible exception of Men’s Hypochondria, they’re more or less redundant.

So, Cilla, which of our lovely lads is the public going to plump for?

Will it be ‘Dave’ the retrosexual PE teacher from Liverpool with a pint, who only uses aftershave his mum bought him for Christmas ‘on special occasions’ (but seems to be rather fond of hair product)? Or will it be ‘Joe’ the metrosexual Accounts Manager from Essex with a glass of Chardonnay and perched on an Ikea stool (I know because I have one) who spends £350 a month on clothes and goes to the gym every evening because he’s going on a ‘lad’s holiday’ with fifteen mates and they’ve got a bet on for who ‘looks best on the beach’?

Yesterday’s Sun ran a ‘Hetero or Metro?’ competition, supposedly prompted by the popularity of the unreconstructed (and impressively ugly) sexist police character in BBC 80s ironic nostalgia drama series ‘Ashes to Ashes’. According to the Sun he makes women ‘quiver’.

Probably because a) he’s safely in the 80s and b) they can’t smell him.

For just 10p you can cast your vote for the ‘hetero’ or the ‘metro’. It costs nothing to show them your indifference.

One of the many ironies of this exercise is that ‘Joe’ their sportswear clad ‘hetero’ ‘real man’ looks a lot like a lot of gay men these days, especially the ones you find in Central Station or in Triga videos. But then, after all, he’s a PE teacher. Are any of them straight?

Because the Sun is, like the rest of the media, part of the metrosexual consumer conspiracy, the competition is of course men-daciously loaded in favour of the retrosexual (bigger picture, first billing, biased intro).

In case you needed reminding that there’s no contest and that, whatever it pretends, the Sun is really rooting for metrosexuality, today’s paper has a male workout spread giving advice on how men can look good on the beach, or in underwear ads. A spread aimed very much at ‘Joes’ - who, of course, have more money and neuroses to spend than PE teachers from Liverpool. Even the Soaraway Sun’s family holiday guide in the same edition are illustrated with a scrummy ‘daddy’ with perfect pecs, skin, hair and teeth.

Whatever the outcome of the poll, Joe has already lost.

But the triumph of metrosexuality is not without rather queer contradictions and ironies. In the very same edition of the Sun, a news story tells of a gay BMW salesman taking his former employers to court for harassment and humiliation over his sexuality. Amongst his claims is that when he wore a pink shirt to work male colleagues jibed ‘Hello sweetie!’.  Rather than reprimand them, his boss sent him home to change his shirt - whereas the same colour shirts worn by his straight colleagues went unremarked.

Perhaps they taunted and excluded the gay because he reminded them what their pink shirts were all about. What they were all about.

Meanwhile, the Guardian ran an unusually interesting feature on metrosexuality by Hannah Betts a few weeks back which I managed to miss. But it seems that Betts didn’t miss my blog.

Beck’s ‘tidy’ Armani underwear ads have generated a craze for male waxing, according to the Guardian:

All over the country more and more men (gay and straight alike) are marching into beauty salons and demanding a “Boyzilian”, or as one Yorkshire-based salon bills it, “the Full Monty”. In other words, the complete or near-complete removal of hair in intimate areas using wax. If you have £120 to spare, you can even get it done in Harrods, in the Refinery spa.

Clearly these men haven’t been reading Desmond Morris’ recently-published hairy retrosexual reverie The Naked Man. He must be, er, pulling his hair out.