It seems women are sick of preened pretty boys - the metrosexual could soon be extinct, writes Fionola Meredith
Real men take heart. The public fascination with the "metrosexual" man - once described as "any straight man who has a salmon pink shirt in his wardrobe" - is fading fast. According to a flurry of news stories that appeared this week, both men and women are increasingly dismissive of media images of waxed and pedicured men with hard gym bodies and lycra-rich underwear.
A recent US survey by Harris Interactive showed that 61 per cent of women would rather see a man's hands "rough and working hard" than well-manicured. And 90 per cent of women preferred a man who was "low-maintenance and easy-going".
Men themselves are sickened by the media pressure to wield nose-hair trimmers rather than power-drills. The latest Leo Burnett Man Study interviewed more than 2,000 men from 13 countries about the evolving state of masculinity. More than 70 per cent felt that images of men in advertising were out of touch with reality, while 60 per cent believed their masculinity was defined by their status within the home and workplace rather than how they looked.
This research coincides with a campaign by American Maxim (one of the biggest selling men's magazines in the world) against "mantropy" - a "disease" that threatens to put men "on the fast track to extinction". According to Maxim, symptoms of "mantropy" include excessive fruit smoothie consumption, the wearing of temporary tattoos, ownership of a small dog and indulgence in frequent seaweed wraps. Readers are offered esoteric advice for the prevention and cure of "mantropy": they're warned to avoid ending e-mails with a plural closing (such as "laters", "cheers" or - worst of all - "tootles") and to resist the lure of capri pants. And they're encouraged to indulge their traditional passions for women and fast cars.
In a section labelled "latest outbreaks" on the magazine's website, one Maxim reader records his astonishment at the $150 (€124) his brother spent on "face-wash stuff". "Does he know how many lap-dances that could buy?," he adds with self-conscious bravado.
Of course, the wilder affectations of metrosexuality leave it open to all kinds of ridicule. Satirical magazine the Onion recently featured a spoof press release from the Vatican City, in which a spokesman insisted metrosexuality was strictly prohibited under Catholic doctrine: "The truly faithful will avoid the temptation to adopt this hip urban lifestyle. The devout Catholic must remain on the path toward salvation, no matter how good he'd look in an Armani pullover, and no matter how much he might covet his neighbour's set of Williams-Sonoma lobster forks."
IT WAS QUEER theorist Mark Simpson who first coined the term "metrosexuality", and
it gained widespread prominence through an article he wrote for Salon magazine in 2002. He said: "the typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of the 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 taken himself as his own love-object, and pleasure as his sexual preference."
Later, Simpson identified the smoothly glamorous David Beckham, the impossibly pretty Brad Pitt and, er, Spiderman ("that high-fashion fetish wear, that gym body") as archetypal "metros". He noted that professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and sport attracted the would-be young narcissist.
Simpson said gay men provided the early prototype for metrosexuality: "After the rise of feminism and the fall of the nuclear family, straight men too were increasingly single, uncertain of their identity, and socially emasculated in a world where women were still regents of the private sphere but also competition in the public world."
SIMPSON NOW CLAIMS that when he invented the term he was "being slightly satirical about the effect of consumerism and media proliferation, particularly glossy men's magazines, on traditional masculinity". And yet the very consumerism Simpson was gently lampooning seized on the concept of the metrosexual and marketed it relentlessly to the unmoisturised masses as the future of masculinity.
As a result, the term has lost much of its original irreverent irony. As a powerful mainstream advertising tool, it exists to encourage image-conscious straight men to go shopping.
After all, in recent decades, men have struggled to re-interpret masculinity in a culture obsessed with bodily display and commodification. In a prescient 1965 essay, The New Mutants, critic Leslie Fiedler observed "a radical metamorphosis of the Western male. All around us, young males are beginning to retrieve for themselves the cavalier role once piously surrendered to women: that of being beautiful." These "children of the future" appear to feel they must become "more female than male". And now it seems both women and men have had enough of it.
Former Tory spin-doctor Amanda Platell certainly has. In an article in the Daily Mail, she plaintively asks: "Can we have our real men back?" Platell derides "the triumph of style over substances, of ego over elegance and, most importantly of femininity over masculinity". She wants men to return to their natural state of "rough and ready, taciturn maleness", to become "a bit more like Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester, brooding and brutish".
Such a trend would surely be music to the ears of macho heart-throbs such as Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, who seem to have more in common with an older generation of Hollywood hell-raisers (such as Richard Harris and Oliver Reed) than they do with "metrosexual" contemporaries Jude Law and Orlando Bloom.
Platell's is a tongue-in-cheek approach - but with such polarised "retro versus metro" messages raining down around their ears, it's hardly surprising that young men feel confused about what it means to be authentically male today.
The transient flamboyance of metrosexuality may have passed most men by, but the male appearance-anxiety that fuelled it looks unlikely to disappear - despite the Herculean efforts of Maxim magazine.