Gender Roles In 'Metrosexy' By Mark Simpson

Roles that have traditionally belonged to that of a woman such as spending too much time in the bathroom to get ready and being ‘high-maintenance’, seems to have been reversed (culturally?), and can now be applied to the opposite sex.

Always looking perfectly put together, hair gelled, clean-shaven, chiseled muscles (is this an archetype; is every metrosexual muscular?), and clothed in designer apparel, the metrosexual man seems (be certain) to be on the rise.

Coined by British journalist and author of Metrosexy: A 21st Century Self-Love Story, Mark Simpson, {hyperlink to his website www.marksimpson.com} the “metrosexual” man refers to the urban, sophisticated (modern?), straight (Simpson has said in previous works that metrosexuality encompasses multiple sexual orientations) men who perform grooming rituals that are considered to be feminine. In other words, it is the new age (“new age” can also refer to the spiritual movement) man who is in touch with his feminine side and not afraid to show it.

Simpson claims to have first used the term in an article for the British newspaper, The Independent, twenty years ago in 1994. He explains: “The piece was about my visit to an exhibition organized by GQ magazine – full of exhibits by their advertisers it was called ‘It’s a Man’s Word’. I reported that I had seen the future and that it was metrosexual. I joked that consumerism had decided that heterosexual men were obsolete and were to be replaced by metrosexual ones instead. But I was being quite serious too.” Simpson states that he used the word as a means to ‘out’ male vanity and passivity and the way that masculinity was “no longer always active, never passive; always looking, never looked at; always hetero, never homo.” (Copie...

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...ut there's plenty of different ways a man can dress well. He just needs to be clean, organized and demonstrative of effort. A man who can show me that he invests on himself, is a man worthy of a second glance from me.”

Although the definition of masculinity is very black and white, there is a lot of gray popping up, making the term easy to redefine and for men to leave their marks and create a revolution. (Is it that likely?)

As Simpson puts it: “It’s not about flip flops or facials or manbags or manscara – or even about men becoming ‘girly’ or ‘gay’. (Copy-and-pasted from http://bit.ly/NEoEF0) It’s about men feeling more at liberty to become what and who they want to be. A collapse of more repressive, stoic ideals of masculinity - ‘real men’- and their replacement by more sensual and sometimes self-centered ones.” (Again, how new is male self-centeredness?)

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