Mark Simpson on the decline and fall of male modesty Telly seems to have been hacking my brain lately. The filthiest parts. Just when you thought ITV2, the people who brought us Love Island couldn’t get any more spornographic, and the underdressed, over-muscled guys they insist on making us ogle entirely against our will couldn’t get any sluttier, along comes Bromans. A gladiator-themed reality game show about ‘modern geezers in the time of Caesar’ that seems intent on taking sporno back to its sword-and-sandals (‘S&M’ […]
Spain Spammed By Spornosexuals
A feature in yesterday’s El Pais, the main Spanish daily, by Marita Alonso on the ‘plague’ of spornosexuals (or ‘espornosexuales’) in gyms, on reality TV and dating shows – and the triumph of spornowear (alias spray-on ‘clothes’). I get the blame for it in the first line. Quite rightly. h/t Begonya
How ‘I’m Too Sexy’ Foretold The All-Too Sexy Future
by Mark Simpson 1991’s big, busty novelty hit ‘I’m Too Sexy’ was as zeitgeisty and bitchily funny as it was ear-wormingly annoying. I remember it playing everywhere in London that summer: builders’ vans, barber’s shops, caffs, pubs, nightclubs, funeral parlours. OK, I didn’t actually hear it in funeral parlours but I’m sure that even the dead didn’t escape it’s strutting beat and croaking vocal. A perfect trashy radio song for a then still trashy London that was, back then, all mouth and no trousers. Of […]
Danish Hairstyles
And British kinkstyles. (The safe word is ‘Simon Cowell’)
The Smiths is Dead – Long Live The Smiths!
“The Smiths are sooooooo depressing!” said every naff twat you knew in the Eighties – which was millions upon millions. But, annoying as it was, every time you heard that lazy dismissal it confirmed something deeply, almost sexually satisfying: that most people simply didn’t deserve to be Smiths fans.” I wrote an essay for Rolling Stone celebrating the 30th anniversary of the demise of The Smiths, explaining why we’re really lucky that they split in 1987.
‘Love Island’ – ITV’s Primetime Spornotopia
‘Utopian fantasies have long gripped the human imagination. Famous, brainy – but sadly, not very buff – thinkers such as Plato (in the 4th Century BC), Thomas Moore (in the 16th AD) and HG Wells (in the 20th), sketched out what an ideal society might look like. But their philosophical visions were never realised. It wasn’t until the early 21st Century that someone finally had the brilliant idea of ditching ethics for aesthetics, taking a sun-drenched island, covering it in decking, astroturf, pools, lip gloss, and […]
Heavy-Handed Muller Light
As you will know all too well if you’re a regular visitor to this blog, I don’t have a problem with male ‘objectification‘. More please. But there’s objectification and there’s objectification. Despite not being altogether innocent of sadistic tendencies, I’m not sure I’m also cool with treating hot ‘objects’ that gladden the eye as idiots who deserve a good slapping for making us perve over them. OK, I might think it sometimes, but I probably wouldn’t say it out loud. But food giant Muller have […]