On the metrosexual:
“The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis - because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they’re pretty much everywhere.”
On Beckham’s move to America:
“America needs Becks. Becks is one of the most popular people on the planet, at a time when the US is one of the most unpopular. That unpleasantness in the Middle East may have something to do with it, but I suspect the problem is more to do with the way that 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.”
On Becks and Cruise’s relationship:
“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.”
On President Bush:
“When Air National Guard absentee and former male cheerleader George W. Bush famously dressed up in Cruise’s “Top Gun” costume and used the USS Abraham Lincoln as a giant, nuclear-powered strap-on, that was as brazen an exhibition of cross-dressing as there’s ever been.”
On the Hummersexual:
“The so-called ‘menaissance’ in the US against metrosexuality is mendacious. This isn’t retrosexual at all, but Hummersexual: a noisy, overblown, and frankly rather camp form of faux masculinity that likes to draw attention to itself and its ‘old-fashioned’ manliness, but tends - like driving an outsized military vehicle in the suburbs or wearing leather chaps in bars - to be a tad counterproductive.”
On Sporno:
“Why are Euro soccer stars Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg household names in the US, a country which has generally less interest in soccer than socialism? Because these Sporno stars- athletic young hustlers who are happy to be ogled barely dressed on Times Square billboards and in Vanity Fair-advertise a willingness to put out, or at least get it out, to get ahead that is about as all-American as you can get. Ljunberg’s Calvin Klein clad basket of giant Swedish meatballs is the dish everyone wants to dine on and he seems more than happy to feed us. “
On the new, proudly metrosexual Bond:
“Bond is now the Bond Girl of the opening credits. It’s his silhouette we see - and nary a dancing naked babe in sight. Perhaps to compensate for this, in the actual film he gets his tits out a lot. He emerges from the sea glistening, showing off his pumped boobs, like Ursula Andress in ‘Dr No’ - save his nipples are more prominent. Bond has finally become his own Bond Girl.”
On Christ’s penis:
“Jesus’ organ - because it was never used and was the product of a penisless birth - was as holy as all others were damned. His foreskin or prepuce became a holy relic, so holy that there were thousands of them. Hence the taste test, a medieval version of the Pepsi Challenge: chewing on the shrivelled leather to determine whether it was wholly or partially human. Saint Agnes imagined she was swallowing the Holy Prepuce at Communion (with no gag reflex).”
On buddy movies:
“An all-guy marriage is about as All-American as you can get. God may have created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but in the imagination of the American Wilderness, forever on the run from domesticity, he created us Adam and Steve, Huck and Tom, Butch and Sundance, Starsky and Hutch.”
On Brokeback Mountain:
“Is there a support group for people who didn’t like ‘Brokeback Mountain’? We must, if the rave reviews and the newspaper reports are to be believed, be a very tiny - not to mention vulnerable - minority. Am I dead inside because I didn’t experience the torrent of emotions I’ve been reading about? Am I as emotionally crippled as Ennis because I didn’t blub and hug after sitting through this ‘visceral’ movie, but instead wanted to go and ‘help with the roundup’?”
On Colin Farrell:
“Farrell’s Alexander isn’t haunted, or driven, paranoid, or threatening, terrifying or charismatic: his eyes are just too close together. When wearing his giant war helmet in the battle scenes his beady little eyes look blinking out like Marvin the Martian. Likewise he is utterly lost in Stone’s movie. Farrell’s face is as blank and thoughtless as the world that has made him a “star”. It’s difficult to believe that anyone would follow him to the 7-Eleven let alone the edge of the world.”
On Diana’s crash:
“Looking at the pictures, snapped at night with flash photography (like many of the pictures of Diana), it’s difficult not to wonder at how such an expensive, glamorous, chauffeur-driven, bodyguard-accompanied limousine could end up such a shapeless mess - or how such a mess could have been a car at all, let alone such a famous one. To wonder how a limo whisking someone from the Paris Ritz could have turned so suddenly into a hearse. To wonder just how mangled the expensive, glamorous Diana was. Celebrities tend to lead car-crash lives, and if they also happen to have car-crash deaths then who can blame us if we want to slow down and take a good look?”
On Eminem:
“And then in 2001 the man who rapped ‘I don’t want no damn Grammy’, appeared on the damn Grammys, in that very disturbing duet with the evil fairy godmother of showbiz pop blandness, Elton John. Millions of viewers were treated to the sight of Slim Shady conscientiously sucking the Grammys’ cock while a pink-polka-dotted bewigged Elton sucked his.”
On masochism:
“Apparently, a good sadist is hard to find. But, I can reveal, a good masochist is even harder to find. Whenever I hear the words: “Use me! Abuse me! Do anything you want to me!’ My heart and manhood always sink. Not because I have any problem with the idea of using someone. Rather, it’s that I know that not far behind this invitation to selfishness are always the words, ‘Not that! This! Not there! Here!.’
On Action Man [‘G.I. Joe’ in the US:
“It was my parents who had planted the suspicion of Action Man’s masculinity in my head and turned me into a closeted Action Manophile: ‘No, Santa won’t be bringing you one of those dolls, Mark.’ ‘He’s not a doll!! He’s a soldier!’ Of course, they were entirely correct in their concerns. Despite his butch trademarked name and rugged camouflaged gear, he was clearly Passive Man, as was betrayed by the advertising copy that shrieked at you to: “Move him into action positions!” Action Man: on land, on sea, and legs in the air.”
On movie musclemen:
“We expect as a matter of course that our male leads these days will have perfect pectorals, bounteous biceps and corrugated steel stomachs that speak of thousands of hours of sweat, tears and neurotic dieting. ‘Brad Pitt’ is now Esperanto for ’six pack’. What, after all, is the point of being a film star if you can’t hire the most sadistic personal fitness instructor in town and feast on egg white omelettes and rice cakes? And why should we puny punters pay good money to gaze up at men on the big screen who aren’t themselves bigger than life, but sport waistlines that speak of no life at all?”
On gay marriage:
“It’s a straightforward matter of equality: it’s outrageously unfair that heterosexuals shoulder alone the burden of keeping divorce lawyers in Italian sports cars.”
On internet cruising:
“Gays have become the unpaid secretaries of desire, filing and cataloguing human weakness. Promiscuity is now a form of bureaucracy. Tedious, eye-straining, number-crunching slave work.”
On Captain Kirk:
“James Tiberius Kirk, the famously gung-ho Starfleet Commander, went commando, swinging boldly where no man had swung before. This was the crucial difference between the sweaty, highly Freudian original ‘Star Trek’ series and the sexless, sweatless P.C. ‘The Next Generation’. Can you imagine Jean-Luc Picard not wearing spotless knickers with a built-in containment field, changed twice a day and incinerated after use?”
On ‘Queer Eye For the Straight Guy’:
“There is, it has to be said, something very tired about all this ‘aren’t gay men fabulous!’ twittering. Someone needs to say to the decidedly farty looking Fab Five and gay men in general: ‘Ohmygoodness! Look at YOU! Who does your hair? David Furnish?’
On oral sex:
“Every man would suck his own penis if he could, but that’s why God gave every man except Jeff Stryker a penis shorter than his backbone - to make sure they expended an awful lot of energy doing other things to get blow jobs. Things that might seem to some rather daft and pointless otherwise, but without which the world would be a duller place - things such as rock ‘n’ roll, politics, cunnilingus, religion, and odd-jobs around the home.”
On the British:
“Whatever class you are born into, your destiny, your happiness, your salvation, is not your property and certainly not your right. If you try to escape your British birthright by becoming something you’re not, then you will be Found Out. And everyone will point and laugh and call you a wanker.”
On Nixon:
“Nixon was a man who strutted around like the proud possessor of a real tonsil-teaser. Perhaps this is why he was inaugurated in 1969. However, a special Senate committee was set up to investigate the true dimensions of his masculine virtue, calling witnesses and threatening to sub-poena certain ‘tapes’ which would reveal the actual extent of his naughtiness. Exposed as a liar, Tricky Dicky was forced from office in disgrace, proving that there’s nothing the public hates more than a pussy-teaser who doesn’t deliver in the luncheon-truncheon department.”
On Whitney Houston:
“The supersonic nuclear blast-wave of Ms Houston’s version of ‘I Will Always Love You’ - “IAEYAEYAEYAEYAE!” - just flattens everything before it. Whitney’s voice didn’t need any soul; it was pure Will. Whitney is speaking a frightening truth here about romantic love: it’s a form of egotism, perhaps the purest. “I will always love you” is a stalking, psychotic declaration of a love for one’s own ability to love, regardless of all obstacles, such as, say, the beloved’s total indifference. In fact, next to Ms Willpower’s transcendent egotism, that other bullying Mistress of the 1980s, Ms Blonde Ambition, is just a goofy backing dancer who got lucky.”
On the history of swimming:
“Every night was wet jockstrap night (without the jockstrap) at the Roman baths, and especially well-endowed bathers were likely to be greeted with a round of applause. During the reign of notorious size-queen Emperor Elagabalus, those who hung low at the baths were promoted to high office.”
On Australia:
“Raised on ‘Skippy’, Rolf Harris and swimwear catalogues I too yearned for a country where the sun shone all day everyday, where everyone was your mate, kangaroos could talk and ‘Speedos’ was Australian for ‘Y-fronts’. And then I visited Australia. And it quickly dawned on me that Australia, like Australian skin, is much better in long-shot. Australia is much more Australian from a distance. Close up, it’s just not really worth 24 hours of recirculated flu viruses, deep-vein thrombosis and ‘Love Actually. It’s been left out in the sun too long.”
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007