MARK SIMPSON .com

Glad to see Mens Health’s We’re Hetero, You’re Hetero OK? campaign is working so well.

I don’t know about you, but the latest US issue featuring stunning spornographic shots of NFL stud Brady Quinn exploding naked out of the sea, or taking sensual, suggestive showers, the water droplets splashing and gushing ecstatically over his muscular shoulders and proud pecs while he apparently cruises the locker room makes me feel really straight.

So straight that I think you’re going to have to excuse me for a few minutes while I attend to my big straight erection….

This example of revenge sporno from last year seems to have slipped through my fingers….

‘Top’ Dutch footballer and former Aston Villa goalie Stefan Postma was a tad embarrassed last year to find a home-made video of himself enthusiastically bottoming, that’s to say, taking it up the Arsenal, plastered all over the ‘net’.

The chap doing the ’scoring’? Well, it was actually an (embittered) ex lady friend wearing a strapadicktome.

Another reason why man-shagging should be a man’s job. At least if they’re cute and blond and have thick necks. (I can keep a secret lads, honest!)

In this spornographic age it’s going to get out there anyway. And at least if they put it out there themselves they’ll make money out of it rather than fritter it away fruitlessly trying to keep the dirty thing under wraps. Most importantly, they’ll be able to make sure its edited in a flattering fashion. And it does make you rather more famous: I for one had never heard of Stefan Postma before; now I’m one of his greatest fans.

Though probably if sportsmen want to maximise sales they should pretend it was released without their consent.

Much was made of the ‘bizarre’ nature of the ‘kinky sex’ depicted. But why is it so strange that a straight man should want to get shagged up the arse? After all, if God hadn’t wanted men to get bummed he wouldn’t have given them prostate glands. A very convincing and attractive tranny pal who went through a great deal of pain trouble and expense to have the ‘op’ tells me that the first thing that straight men ask her once she’s told them she used to be a geezer is: ‘Will you shag me up the arse with a dildo??’ The next question is, ‘What’s the biggest one you’ve got??’

Probably the most shocking thing to most football fans is how clearly and audibly Stefan is enjoying being ploughed (and watching himself being ploughed in the mirror and, no doubt, in the video afterwards, repeatedly). Some of them will be thinking: ‘He seems to be enjoying taking that a lot more than I do giving it.’ Traditional heterosexuality’s rigid, or sometimes semi-erect, sexual division of labour depends on men not thinking too much about whether they’re getting a bum deal.

Or women. Interesting that no one seems to have considered that the lady friend in the video might be enjoying it too. She certainly sounds like it. For all we know, it might have been her idea. There are a lot of naughty ladies out there who don’t just lie back and think of Sunderland, and not all of them are trannies.

Now, after all those words, here’s what you really wanted: a clip of the strap-on video.

This is really just a (naked) excuse to parade these delectable Oz spornostars again, after exhibiting them on here in b/w last year.

Apparently you can order vibrant colour posters of them, as well as the scrumptious b/w calendar. I’ll buy that. Actually, I’ll have a dozen calendars too. Who cares if it’s already halfway out of date?

I’ve just had an idea for a rugby calendar for 2008. It’s new, it’s different, it’s kinda radical, kinda shocking: Fully-clothed rugby-players!

Or maybe not.

The new England rugby strip, launched for this year’s World Cup, somehow manages to be even tighter than the last, launched just four years ago to massed gasps. Are our lads going to be able to breath in? Are we going to be able to breathe out?

What’s more, it has an added sash/arrow plunging from armpit down to large, firm thigh, as demonstrated by the very lovely young David Strettle, pictured left (snapped dancing on a spotlit podium at Heaven nightclub). Is it just me, or does it seem to shout: ‘If You Wanna Score - Flip Me Over!’?

Apparently the new strip’s ‘asymmetric’ design will confuse opposing players. I could make the obvious joke that they won’t know whether to tackle them or kiss them. But then, why can’t you do both? (I certainly find this a very effective tactic with rugby players myself.) The way things are going it can only be a matter of time before this approach becomes compulsory.

So instead I’ll point out that if there’s any truth to the science of eye-tracking, which suggests that most men like to look at other men’s packets rather lingeringly, our opponents’ main confusion with that ‘dressing to the left’ pendulous arrow will be working out where to actually locate our boys’ tackle.

[See how the meaning of 'rugby shirt' has changed over the years from ‘baggy beer towel’ to ‘gay disco cocktail top’.

A recent study using the new-fangled science of ‘eyetracking’ to improve the readability of online pages seems to have produced, erm, prominent proof of the eye-catching power of Sporno - for men.

The eye-popping graph on the left appeared on the Annenberg Online Journalism Review’s dignified website with the the soberly explanatory rubric:

‘This image of George Brett was part of a larger page with his biographical information. All users tested looked the image, but there was a distinct difference in focus between men and women.’

No kidding. dude.

The results are in folks and it seems chaps are more interested baseballer’s ’stats’ than chapesses.

This eyetracking/eyeballing graph seems to have surprised some, even shocked others. Not me. Perhaps I’ve spent too long hanging around the showers and the gents, but I’ve always maintained - with the benefit of that old-fangled eyetracking technology known as ‘cruising’ - that while some women are size-queens, all men are.

‘Fixation length’ is a very masculine trait.

What’s more, all men know this, though many don’t admit it, even to themselves. Why else would straight blokes in men-only locker rooms stripping off after the game give their pee-pees a crafty plumping pull or three before hopping in the shower with their teammates? (Sorry lads, I coudn’t help but notice….) In case the women’s synchronised swimming team, overcome by chlorine fumes, get disorientated on their way back to their lockeroom and somehow find themselves in the men’s showers?

Guys are more interested than gals in what makes a guy a guy. This is why gay and straight men have much more in common than either of them usually care to admit. Knowing that other men are going to check him out - and find him wanting - is probably one of the reasons why most American males today are Speedophobic.

But you don’t have to take my depraved word for it. Just take a peek at web porn for straight men. Is a penis that doesn’t look like something that should be housed in one of Count Von Zeppelin’s draughtier hangars even allowed anywhere near a videoed vagina these days?

And all that spam cluttering up your Inbox promising a larger penis isn’t appealing to male weakness in regard to sexytime with the ladies so much as the male’s weakness for maleness. The unconscious pitch is: A REALY BIG PORNO PENIS can be yours to HAVE and to HOLD! With TWO HANDS! Think of all the ADMIRING and BITTERLY ENVIOUS looks your HUGE IMPRESSIVE SCHLONG will get from the guys in the locker room!

Most penis enlargement techniques only make the flaccid penis larger, not the erect variety - in other words, most penis enlargement is for the benefit of your gym buddies and teammates, not your girlfriend. Penis enlargement makes show-ers not growers.

While I know women who are proudly sizist, it doesn’t appear as if they were part of the eyetracking study, which seemed to indicate nada interest by the fairer sex in men’s baskets. Perhaps, despite Sex in the City, women really do like twinkly eyes more than a full basket. Whatever, it’s fairly clear that women are expected to act out straight men’s size queenery on their behalf - especially in porn movies. The insatiable porno slut’s job is to reflect back the straight man’s inexhaustible love of big dick. This is why it is impossible to ever imagine this dialogue in a straight porn movie:

PORNOSTUD: Yeah, bitch, you love that big piece dontcha?

PORNOSLUT: Well now, funny you should ask because, thing is, I actually find your penis somewhat impractical, very uncomfortable and frankly a bit freakish. Would you mind wearing this plastic donut at the base to reduce the length?

It would be far too much like the real world of men and women instead of the nympho world of male sexual fantasy. Of course, in the twilight world of male homosexuality size queenery isn’t restrained or veiled by a pretended sexual division of cockwatching. Hence the old gay joke: ‘There are only two kinds of gay men - size queens and liars.’

It goes without saying that this kind of terrible generalisation is grossly unfair. I’m sure there are some gay men out there who really don’t like large penises. It’s not their fault they’re so strange and perverted.

The Romans knew a thing or two about the fascination of packets and weren’t afraid of talking about it - or inventing words for it. The word ‘fascination’ itself comes from the Latin ‘fascinus’ which means ‘penis’ or ‘charm’. Phallic charms or amulets were worn around the neck for luck.

I’m sure that if nothing else they improved your batting average.

Thanks to Uroskin for rubbing this story in my face

Yesterday’s Daily Mirror, Britain’s second most popular newspaper, and supposedly the ‘progressive’ tab compared to The Sun, carried a special treat for its readers. On the front page of this family paper was a picture of hunky England cricketers Jon Lewis and Jimmy Anderson moving in for a tasty tongue sandwich.

The huge headline shrieked ‘CAUGHT‘ and the tantalising bold strapline below the image announced with historic signficance: ‘England World Cup Cricketers’ night of shame.’

This just gets hotter and hotter! God Bless the British tabs - they really know how to work up a man-love story.

So, pulse quickening, upper lip moistening, I flicked hurriedly to pages 4 and 5 for the ‘AMAZING EXCLUSIVE PICTURES AND FULL STORY’.

STREWTH! Imagine a nation’s disappointment! All the sods offered was a b/w snap of Anderson planting a wet one on Lewis’ cheek and some other snaps of bog-standard drunken lads behaviour, some involving random bimbos. WOT A FLOP!! England’s recent poor peformance on the pitch is as nothing compared to this.

Things were so bad I had to resort to reading the copy:

ENGLAND’s boozed-up cricket stars shamed themselves during an eight-hour bender just 24 hours before their World Cup match against Canada.

Fans watched appalled as Jimmy Anderson, Jon Lewis, Liam Plunkett and Ian Bell downed endless spirits and bottles of Piton beer, shouted and screamed, serenaded tourists and drunkenly kissed each other.

The disgraceful antics led to the four players being fined and Freddie Flintoff - who had to be rescued at sea after capsizing a pedalo - being stripped of the vice-captaincy.

Flintoff said last night: “To my team mates and the England supporters I’m extremely sorry.” Yesterday England put up a feeble performance against Canada, one of the weakest teams in the tournament.

No doubt the ‘feeble performance’ was down to all that snogging one another.

Freddie, stripped or not, was not seen in the ’appalling’ and ‘disgraceful’ antics which most preoccupied The Mirror. Which is a shame, because he looks like a good man-snogger to me.

Whether or not Freddie & Co. deserved to be punished for getting pissed up on a school night I can’t say, but I think the editor of the Mirror should definitely be fined for being such a shameless and ‘appalling’ pricktease.

I’m sure they must have snaps of the England cricketers snogging properly and manfully with tongues and everything, but they didn’t print them. (And if they didn’t snog one another properly then England really is in trouble.) Perhaps they were considered ‘too shocking’ for Mirror readers. But then, the same paper had no problems with printing colour pictures of Madonna implanting an Alien baby in Britney’s chest cavity at the MTV Awards.

Young English straight men can’t stop snogging one another when they get bladdered. It’s one of the main reasons for getting bladdered in the first place. Trust me, I’ve made a study of these things. I have stood in a bar watching rugby teams French kissing one another in a way that puts the heavy petting in gay bars to shame and wondering when I was going to self-combust. I’ve regularly seen battle-hardened squaddies snog one another in pubs in garrison towns, eyes closed, for longer than I can hold my breath, often in front of their bored girlfriends.

Next time, I’m taking pictures of these shameful antics so you too can be appalled.

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Old Spice are running an eye-wateringly spornographic wrestling TV ad for their Red Zone Hydrowash in the US.  It features two buffed, cut, metro-wrestlers with really great hair and skin grappling on the mat.  The ‘bottom’, held in a neck lock, comments, between fighting for air, on the ‘top’s ’soft skin’ and how it’s ’supple’.  ‘So?’ replies the top, slightly baffled but carrying on choking. 

‘It’s… nice’ the lad eventually manages to sputter, before the ref blows the whistle.  ‘THERE’S NO SHAME IN SOFT SKIN,’ announces a reassuringly butch coach-like, ironic but perhaps not so ironic, voiceover. 

I’m not sure what ‘Hydrowash’ is, but after seeing this ad I don’t know how I’ve lived without it.  I suspect those 300 Spartans probably use it too.

I don’t think these guys eat Snickers.  This ad is as funny and smart and young as that Superbowl Snickers ad wasn’t.  What’s more, it has big (shaved) balls where that Snickers ad just had nelly OMIGOD!! NOWAY!! SOGROSS!! THEIR LIPS, LIKE, TOTALLY TOUCHED!!! man-panic.

A clever and effective way to re-brand a company still associated with the smooth operator breeder naffness of the 1970s.

The end-line for this knowlingly, wittily spornographic ad is ‘Keep it clean’. 

Fat chance.

[Thanks to Glenn for bringing this to my rapt attention

Although I was quoted liberally in the Haaretz article on Sporno, there’s no harm in quoting myself even more liberally….

The discussion about whether spornographic images are straight or gay, active or passive, traditional or non-traditional seems to need a more, ahem, explicit explanation, or certainly a lengthier one than was possible in the article (I wounldn’t have minded it being a monologue but others might).  Here’s the journalist Doron Halutz’s questions to me on this point and my answers in full (with some cheeky Sporno snaps added which make my point rather better than I do):

DH: You wrote: “Traditional ideas of masculinity required men to always be always desiring never desired, always looking never looked at, always active, never passive, always hetero never homo”.
In the pictures that I have sent you, and also in those you present in your articles, the sportsmen are obviously presented as objects of desire. However, they are not passive – their muscles are prominent, they look like they are ready for action; the sexual hinting, as far as I see it, regards what they can do to you, not what you can do to them…. They will of course be looked at because these are fashion pictures meant to be looked at, but they are also shot in a such a position that they are looking at you, staring directly into the camera; and of course, they are hetero, which is the one thing they manifest whenever they can – they are so hetero that they are not afraid to be pictured in sexy positions…. So although the fetishization and commodification of these bodies are clear, it can be claimed that the hegemonic model of masculinity is preserved – the man as active, dominant, desire also when he is desired.

MS: What you have described is certainly the way that many of the participants in these images would like to see themselves – and also the way many of the voyeurs would like to see the sex-object.

However, the key here is that, as you say, they are presented as sex-objects.  Their exhibitionism is itself, like their narcissism, essentially passive, regardless of what they may or may not like to do in bed or to us the voyeur.  This is a basic tenet of psychoanalysis: exhibitionism, offering yourself up for voyeuristic pleasure, is passive and/or masochistic. 

The sex-object status of men in the visual culture has reached such a pitch that these kinds of arguments that there is ‘nothing passive’ about them because they look at the camera (to check we’re still staring?) or are showing off their lovely muscles no longer wash.  Ironically this kind of argument developed out of 1970s feminist theory about the ‘male gaze’ and the plethora of images of female pin-ups which then tried to explain away the emergence of male pin-ups in the early 80s.  I think this approach was very dubious then, but it’s largely redundant now.  Worse, it reassures the ‘hegemonic model’ of masculinity when in fact it has a lot to be worried about and disguises the real extent of the change that has occurred.

If you compare these pictures with those of say, Arnold and Sly from 1980s Hollywood films, which were also presenting the male body as something to be consumed and enjoyed (the first time that bodybuilders had reached a mainstream audience), most of them look extremely passive.

You can see that the need to disavow passivity in the presentation of sex object males has declined enormously as the culture has got used to this pleasure.  None of these pictures of men showing off their bodies feature a huge gun or a pile of dead Commies.

One is posing as a statue, or mannequin.  Which is fairly passive.  Another is reclining backwards on a chair, legs apart, seemingly ready to let us do what we want.  Another in his shorts looks like he would do anything we asked him to.  Most of them are boyish, rather than mannish.  Ephebes.

DH: The sportsmen-turned-models whom I interviewed for my piece denied the homo-erotic aspects of their half-nude images. They have also claimed that they have no idea of their being gay icons and of having any gay fans, and claimed that they have no desire to be desired by gay men. They were actually very surprised when I brought up these questions.

MS: Then they are fooling themselves.

Or perhaps their surprise is at the fact that you broke the convention and mentioned the inescapable fact that in offering themselves as sex objects they were also offering themselves to men as well as women.  And more to men than to women because all men know that men are more visually orientated than women.

It may be a question of culture or of timing.  In the UK many of the younger generation of male sports stars actively seek out gay fans because they consider their appreciation and judgment of more value than that of women.  Rightly or wrongly they think they have better taste.

Soccer player David Beckham and rugby player Gavin Henson have even argued over their gay fans.  Becks has complained that Henson has ‘stolen’ a lot of his gay admirers and he ‘misses them.’  [Freddie Ljunberg is often suspected of being gay because he remains single - and because he doesn’t violently refute the allegations when presented to him by journalists, merely dismiss them good-naturedly and mention that he has many gay friends; Calvin Klein have learnt their Marky Mark lesson it seems. 

I’m not saying that Sporno is gay in any concrete way, I’m saying that it isn’t terribly straight.   It is one of the effects of a visual and commodified culture that you cannot heterosexualize looking.  The only way you can do that is to not photograph men in a desirable way.  But then you don’t have a visual and commodified culture.  Desirable images of men can be desired, obviously by other males, gay or straight or bisexual – and also women. 

In fact, even if you could somehow stop men looking at desirable images of other men and make sure that only women saw them this still wouldn’t heterosexualise it.  Not only because women are supposed to be looked at and men are supposed to do the looking, but because in my experience women are perfectly capable of treating sex object men in a passive way, no matter how much they flex their muscles.
 

Former NBA star John Amaechi’s coming out continues to blow the ‘gay’ lid on American professional sports (see ESPN extract left).

Not by ‘naming names’, but simply outing from inside the locker room itself the homoerotic metrosexuality of hetero athletes.

Perhaps this is the real ‘problem’ with homos in the locker room (and the barracks): not that their penis will somehow inveigle its way into the hallowed hetero anus during a communal shower - when a happily married athlete is distracted by the steam, his exhuberance, or his dropped hair products - but that the homo can’t be relied upon to not see the homoerotic and name it. I certainly can’t. (Maybe it’s a Brit queer thing: Amaechi is also from the UK.)

The possibility that the team-mate slapping their round firm naked butt might be ‘batting for the other side’ is apparently too much for some to bear. It’s perhaps understandable though. After all, once it’s named it does make it slightly more difficult for those straight guys who are uptight and homo-hating to enjoy their passionate, swooning love of men, virility and the male body.

On the other hand, billboards and other rather public media have been advertising this spornographic tendency for some time now.

Incidentally, it would appear that full disclosure of the antics of the pro locker room is too much to bear for ESPN too: the Amaechi excerpt seems to have been censored. Here’s the unexpurgated version:

“The pro locker room was the most flamboyant place I’d ever been this side of a swanky club full of martini-drinking gay men. Chris’ [Mills alligator shoes were the least of it. The guys flaunted their perfect bodies. They bragged of their sexual exploits. They checked out each other’s cocks. They primped in front of the mirror, applying cologne and hair gel by the bucketful.?”

While some of the snips may have been for reasons of space - or taste: martini drinking gay men and alligator shoes are both fairly objectionable - the circumcision of the mention of straight athletes checking out each other’s manhood seems slightly hypocritical.

Not to mention mean. After all, if the rise of Sporno shows anything at all it’s that we’re all, gay and straight, sports mad or sports indifferent, feverishly imagining that athletes do nothing else in the locker room.

—

In the extract English Amaechi mentions something else that is also rather revealing. He claims that despite his ‘flaming’ friends, his taste for Karen Carpenter, rainbow flag towels and general indiscretion the reason his sexuality wasn’t suspected was down to his un-American-ness. Apparently, the catch-all response to his non-conformity with the iron American laws of guy-ness was ‘”Oh, leave him alone, he’s just English’.”

Which is rather sweet. And does of course help to explain the popularity of fey Englishmen, from Quentin Crisp to David Bowie, Boy George to Morrissey, David Beckham to Tony Blair in a country where home-grown effeminacy can sometimes be more un-American than Communist Islamic drug-trafficking.

Perhaps the extraordinary popularity of the metrosexual Stateside had something to do with the fact he was also English by birth. Though it was America who invented the consumerist and ‘ennervated’, mediated culture that made him possible, if not inevitable. When open metrosexuality threatened to be too popular a sensibility in the US and reveal where the American lifestyle had brought American masculinity there was a backlash against the ‘gayness’ of metrosexuals.

Yet another reason why metrosexual pin-up Beck’s move to the US will make for fascinating viewing. Judging by the American media whirlwind that has greeted Amaechi’s post-retirement coming out, a globally famous sportsman who is very much out-of-the-closet about his flaming metrosexuality and also his fondness for his gay fans and eager to pose for spornographic photo shoots will raise a few Colonial eyebrows. Being English and married with kids won’t, I suspect, excuse him completely, even in LA.

What’s more, he’s being paid a record-breaking fee by his sponsors to persuade a generation of young American males to be ‘English’ too.

The English are coming. Because, as the Amaechi story - and the recent Superbowl Snicker ad debacle - shows, American masculinity desperately needs us.

So Beckham, the uber-metrosexual, the photogenic English athlete who transfigured himself from mere professional soccer player into global me-dia, is leaving Real Madrid Football Club, his home for the past three years, and is now heading for the City of Signs. 

Beckham became a Hollywood footballer years ago (around about the time of ‘Becks the virus’, posted below).  Certainly his bosses at Real Madrid seem to have found Becks more style than substance.

But in a metrosexualised world style is almost everything now.  Even and especially in the world of men’s sports.  This is why his lack-lustre performance on the pitch during his time in Spain didn’t prevent his agent landing him a $1M a week salary at Los Angeles Galaxy - the biggest world sports deal ever. 

Galaxy, like Real, have paid a hefty premium for Beckham’s unrivalled merchandising power.  Galaxy also believe, to the tune of a million bucks a week, that Beckham can seduce America, so long peevishly resistant to the sweaty, clean-limbed - and increasingly coquettish - charms of soccer, and ‘open up’ a spectacularly lucrative new young male market in the US.

Whether or not he succeeds, America had better get ready for a little more soccer and a lot more metrosexuality and Sporno.  It was back in 2002 that the US was introduced to metrosexuality and its poster-boy, David Beckham (by, erm, me: ‘Meet the metrosexual’), and look what happened then.  With Becks actually residing and playing in the US the results could be climactic. 

America and Hollywood, so long at the cutting edge of commodifying masculinity, have fallen so far behind much of the rest of the world since the 1990s. Incredible as it may sound, American masculinity needs some tarty tips on how to tart it out more.  Enter Becks, the tartiest tart in Tart-Town.

This is why Beck’s friendship with Hollywood’s box-office king/queen Tom Cruise is more than just another footballer going celebrity chumming.  Cruise, the all-American Dream-boy gone wrong, needs Becks more than Becks needs Cruise who is now globally rather less popular than Becks.  Because this is about media power rather than political or military power, that’s to say the New Power, it’s the inverse relationship of Bush and Blair.

Britain meanwhile will enviously and resentfully watch his every move reflected across the pond, and start to feel like it’s missing out.  And then Becks, currently out of favour here, partly because of last year’s World Cup disaster but mostly because we don’t forgive him for moving to Spain three years ago, will be back in vogue. 

We Brits are fickle like that.

 —- 

BECKHAM, THE VIRUS

He’s one of the most famous humans who has ever lived — even though he’s not that cute, not that smart and not that great a soccer player.

By Mark Simpson

[Originally appeared Salon, June 28, 2003

It hasn’t been like this since the death of Diana. Britain has been suffering from a national nervous breakdown ever since David Beckham, handsome icon of the Manchester United soccer team, announced last week that he was leaving to play for Real Madrid.

The Sun, the best-selling UK tabloid, set up a Beckham “grief helpline” and claims it has been swamped with calls from distressed fans. One caller said he was considering suicide, while several confessed that they were so upset they couldn’t perform in bed. A man who has “Beckham” tattooed on his arm threatened to cut if off. “I cried myself to sleep after hearing the awful news,” said grandmother Mary Richards, age 85. A London cabby, ever the voice of reason, asked, “Has the world gone mad? He’s only a footballer!” But he was mistaken. A footballer is now the least of what David Beckham is.

In the era of soccer that will come to be known as B.B. — Before Beckham — the sport was a team game. What mattered was the club, the team and the player in that order. Then in the mid-1990s, David Beckham — or “Becks” as he is known in that familiar, affectionately foreshortened form with which the British like to address their working class heroes — came along, flicked his (then) Diana-style blond fringe and changed the face of soccer. It wasn’t his legendary right foot that altered the game, but his photogenic face — and the fact that he used it to become one of the most recognizable, richest and valuable athletes in the world, receiving a salary of $8 million per year, earning at least $17 million more in endorsements and commanding a record transfer fee for his move to Real Madrid of $41.6 million.

Beckham’s greatest value is his crossover appeal — he interests not only those who have no interest in the club for which he plays, but those who have no interest in soccer. He is the most recognized sportsman in Asia, where soccer is still relatively new. Possibly only Buddha himself is better known — though Beckham is catching up there too: In Thailand someone has already fashioned a golden “Becks” Buddha. He’s even managed to interest Americans, for God’s sakes. The 27-year-old, tongue-tied, surprisingly shy working-class boy from London’s East End has succeeded in turning the mass, global sport of soccer into a mass, global promotional vehicle for himself, reproducing his image in countless countries. He has turned himself into a soccer virus, one that has infected the media, replicating him everywhere, all over the world, endlessly, making him one of the most famous men that has ever lived.

David Beckham, in other words, is a superbrand.

In recognition of this, Becks was the first footballer ever to receive “image rights” — payment for the earning potential his image provided his club — and got them, to the tune of $33,300 a week. In fact, image rights were the main issue at stake in the record-busting six weeks of contract renegotiations he had with Manchester United last year; his worth as a player was agreed at $116,500 a week almost immediately. Then there’s that $17 million a year for endorsing such brands as Castrol, Brylcreem, Coca Cola, Vodafone, Marks & Spencer and Adidas. And Becks just keeps getting bigger. His trusty lawyers have already registered his name for products as various as perfumes, deodorants, jewelry, purses, dolls and, oh yes, soccer jerseys. Such is the power of the Beckham brand that it’s hoped it can rescue the fortunes of Marks & Spencer’s clothing (a high-end British chain that has become a byword for “dowdy”).

But alas, the brand couldn’t save murdered Suffolk girls Holly and Jessica, poignantly pictured last year in police posters in matching replicas of his No. 7 red shirt. When it was still hoped that they might be runaways, the man himself made a broadcast appeal for their return. There was the Becks, eerily right at the heart of the nation’s hopes and fears again.

Beckham has even managed to brand a numeral — 7 — the number on his soccer jersey. A clause in his Manchester United contract guaranteed him No. 7, he has 7 tattooed in Roman numerals on his right forearm, his black Ferrari’s registration plate is “D7 DVB,” and his Marks and Spencer’s clothing line is branded “DB07.” He even queues at No. 7 checkout when he goes shopping. This is often interpreted as a sign of his superstitiousness, but is more an indication of his very rational grasp of the magic of branding. (He may, however, have to settle for the number 77 when he moves to Real Madrid, as the coveted 7 is already taken by Spanish superstar Raul.)

But somehow, Beckham has not yet become a victim of his own success and has managed to remain officially “cool.” Europe’s largest survey into “cool” recently found that Beckham was the “coolest” male, according to both young women and men. Beckham’s status can be attributed to his diva-esque versatility and his superbrand power: “Like Madonna he is very versatile and able to radically change his image but not alienate his audience,” says professor Carl Rohde, head of the Dutch “cool hunting” firm Signs of the Time. “He remains authentic.” Each time he goes to the hairdresser’s and has a restyle — which is alarmingly often — he ends up on the cover of every tabloid in Britain. In other words, whatever Becks does, however he wears his hair or his clothes — or, crucially, whatever product he endorses — he is saying, as Rohde puts it, “this is just another aspect of me, David Beckham. Please love me.” And, it goes without saying, buy me. And millions do.

Becks’ greatest sales success, however, was actually on the football field — though less with the ball than with the camera. He’s the most famous footballer in the world, and considered by millions to be one of the greatest footballers of all time, but arguably he’s not even a world-class player. A very fine one, to be sure, but not nearly the footballer we are supposed to think he is — not nearly the footballer we want to think he is. Sport, you might imagine, is the one area of contemporary life where hype can’t win, where results, at the end of the day, are everything. But Beckham has disproved that, has vanquished that, and represents the triumph of P.R. over … well, everything. His contribution to Manchester United was debatable. On footballing skills alone, he is arguably not worthy of playing for the English national team, let alone being its captain. However, in the last decade soccer has become part of show business and advertising.

Beckham is a hybrid of pop music and football, the Spice Girl of soccer — hence his marriage to one. He is — indisputably — the captain of a new generation of photogenic, pop-tastic young footballing laddies that added boy-band value to the merchandising and media profile of soccer clubs in the 1990s.

Beckham’s footballing forte is free kicks. This is entirely appropriate, since these are, after all, among the most individualistic — and aesthetic — moments in soccer. Unlike a goal, with a free kick there’s no one passing to you, no one to share the glory with. Instead there’s practically a spotlight and a drum roll. And how he kicks! “Goldenballs” (as his wife, Victoria, aka Posh Spice, reportedly likes to call him) has impressive accuracy and his range is breathtaking — along with his famous “bending” trajectory, his kicks also have style and grace. Long arms outstretched à la Fred Astaire, wrists bent delicately upward, forward leg angled, and then — contact — and a powerful, precise, elegant thwump! and follow-through. An Englishman shouldn’t kick a ball like this. This is the way that Latins kick the ball. Beckham doesn’t just represent the aestheticization of soccer that has occurred in a media-tised world — he is the aestheticization of it. Like his silly hairdos, like his “arty” tattoos, like the extraordinarily elaborate post-goal celebrations he practices with the crowd, almost everything he does on the field is designed to remind you that No. 7 is anything but a number.

Off the soccer field Becks is able to use clothes and accessories to draw attention to himself. And does he. The Versace suits, the sarong, and the sequined track suit that opened the Commonwealth Games dazzled TV audiences and confused some foreign viewers who still thought the queen of England was a middle-aged woman. Essentially, Beckham’s visual style is “glam” — more Suede than Oasis (with a bit of contemporary R&B pop promo thrown in). And like glam rock, which was a British working-class style running riot in the decade of his birth, the 1970s, Beckham, the son of Leytonstone proletarians, has a clear image of himself as working-class royalty, the new People’s Princess (though his “superbrand” power has as yet been unable to sell us his wife, who, post-Spice Girls, remains unpopular and unsuccessful). Hence his wedding took place in a castle; at the reception afterward Posh and Becks were ensconced in matching His ‘n’ Hers thrones, and their Hertfordshire home was dubbed “Beckingham Palace” by the tabloids.

Soccer, like pop music, is one of the few ways the British are permitted any success — it is, after all, something both manual and aristocratic at the same time. Becks the football pop star represents and advertises a materialistic aspirationalism that doesn’t appear bourgeois.

Beckham’s tattoos — a literal form of branding — seem to epitomize this. What were once badges of male working-class identity are now ways of advertising the unique Becks brand. “Although it hurts to have them done, they’re there forever and so are the feelings behind them,” Becks has explained. But these are not the kind of “Mum & Dad Always” tattoos his plumber dad and his mates might have had. The huge, shaven-headed, open-armed, “guardian angel” with an alarmingly well-packed loincloth on his back looks more than a little like himself with a Jesus complex. Beneath, in gothic lettering, is his son’s name: Brooklyn. Once his uniform comes off at the end of a match — as it usually does, and before anyone else’s — the tattoos help him to stand out instantly, and mean that he is never naked: He’s always wearing something designer.

Becks clearly enjoys getting his tits out for the lads and lasses — and oiling them up for the cover of Esquire and other laddie mags. While he may look strangely undernourished and fragile in a soccer uniform, as if his ghoulishly skinny wife has been taking away his fries, and all those injuries suggest he’s somewhat brittle, stripped down he looks as lithe and strong as a panther. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do drugs. His body is a temple — to his own self-image — which he never ceases worshipping.

There is however a submissive photophilia to Becks. A certain passivity or even masochism about his displays for the camera, which seem to say “I’m here for you.” Hence perhaps the fondness for those Christ-like/James Dean-like poses with arms outstretched (the cover of Esquire had him “crucified” on the Cross of St. George). Even those free kicks seem to have the loping iconography of “Giant” or Calvary about them.  Truth be told, Becks is there for him, but it’s a nice thought nonetheless.

To some he is already a god — literally. In addition to the Thai Becks Buddha, a pair of Indian artists have painted him as Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. In the Far East, androgyny is seen as a feature of godhead — and so it has here in the West as well since the Rolling Stones. As Becks tells us himself: “I’m not scared of my feminine side and I think quite a lot of the things I do come from that side of my character. People have pointed that out as if it’s a criticism, but it doesn’t bother me.” It’s as if when he was a teenager he looked at those grainy black-and-white ’80s girlish bedroom shrine posters of smooth-skinned doe-ish male models holding babies and thought: I’d like to be like that when I grow up. Becks is the poster boy of what I have termed elsewhere metrosexuality. His hero/role-model status combined with his out-of-the-closet narcissism and love of shopping and fashion and apparent indifference to being thought of as “faggoty” means that for corporations he is a pricelessly potent vector for persuading millions, if not billions, of young men around the world to express themselves “fearlessly,” to be “individuals” — by wearing exactly what he wears. Beckham is the über-metrosexual, not just because he rams metrosexuality down the throats of those men churlish enough to remain retrosexual and refuse to pluck their eyebrows, but also because he is a sportsman, a man of substance — a “real” man — who wishes to disappear into surfaceness in order to become ubiquitous — to become me-dia. Becks is The One, and slightly better looking than Keanu — but, be warned, he’s working for the Matrix.

Ultimately, though, it is his desire that makes him the superbrand that he is. Beckham has succeeded where previous British soccer heroes you’ve never heard of, such as George Best, Alan Shearer and Eric Cantona — a Frenchman who played for Manchester United and is John the Baptist to Beck’s Christ — have failed, and has become a truly global star. Partly because the world has changed but mostly because they didn’t want it as much as he did. Becks is transparently so much more needy — more needy than almost any of us is. The public, quite rightly, only lets itself love completely those who clearly depend on that love, because they don’t want to be rejected. Beckham’s neediness is literally bottomless. Like his image, it grows with what it feeds on. He’ll never reject our gaze.

It’s there in his hungry face. He isn’t actually that attractive. Blasphemy! No really, his face doesn’t have a proper symmetry. His mouth is froglike and bashfully off-center. But what is attractive, or at least hypnotizing in a democratic kinda way, which is to say mediagenic, is his neurotic-but-ordinary desire to be beautiful, and to use all the technology and voodoo of consumer culture and fame to achieve this. His apparent lack of an inner life, his submissive, high-pitched 14-year-old-boy voice that no one listens to, his beguiling blankness, only emphasize his success, his powerfulness in a world of superficiality. That oddly flat-but-friendly gaze that peers out from billboards and behind Police sunglasses looks to millions like the nearest thing to godliness in a godless world. People fall in love not with him — who knows what Beckham is really like, or cares — but with his multimedia neediness, his transmitted “viral” desire, which seems to spread and replicate itself everywhere, endorsing multiple products. Becks’ desire, via the giant shared toilet handle of advertising, infects us, inhabits us and becomes our own.

The British for their part, even those calling tabloid papers in tears to declare their lives ruined now that Beckham is moving to Real Madrid, will survive sharing him with the Spanish for a few years. After all, they’re already proudly sharing him with most of the rest of the world — and basking in his reflected, if somewhat synthetic glory. No one buys our pop music anymore; our “Britpop” prime minister, Tony Blair, post-Iraq, is widely regarded abroad as a scoundrel; our royals, post Diana, are a dreary bunch of sods (even her sainted son William is beginning to lose some of his Spencer spark and glow to the tired, horsey blood of his “German” dad and grandmama); and our national soccer squad has difficulty beating countries with a population smaller than Southampton.

But “our Becks” on the other, perfectly manicured hand, is something British the world seems to actually want, badly.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006