Mark Latham is the former leader of the Australian Labour Party. He once broke a cabbie’s arm in a fight over the fare. The British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott once punched a guy who’d pelted him with an egg. They are both lovely big men. Latham has just written a book in which the key quote is: ”Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and toss bags.” He continues: ”Instead of calling a spade a spade, our national conversation is now dominated by weasel words and the pretence of politeness.” Let’s concentrate on these metrosexuals. We can be as rude about them as we like — they won’t beat us up.
”Metrosexual”, like ”post-ironic”, entered the language without proper interrogation of what, exactly, it meant. Post-ironic went unchallenged because ”irony” was such an important, total concept — comprehension of which was the sine qua non of the sophisticated mind — that all you needed to do was sound out its vowels and everyone would stare at the ceiling and whistle, scared to approach it in case they missed the point and ended up looking foolish.
”Metrosexual” went directly to ”buzzword” because, annoyingly, it was wordplay, and a bit clever. If we can unpick it, it represents the new antonym of ”heterosexual”, which really means ”heterosexually male”, since people rarely use the word of women, however slaggy we are. When men become metrosexual instead of heterosexual, it is because their testosterone has somehow been supplanted by their urban living arrangements.
In another age, this might have meant these men had been effeminised by the bustle of commerce associated with city living. Shopping, consumption in general, through the ages, has been thought of as a feminine pursuit.
But when people call men ”metrosexual” what they mean is: ”Those big cities are full of gays. Those gays are diluting proper men with their gayness.” It is either that, or it is a statement about the Parisian transport system. Latham would probably sue me for even suggesting that he’d heard of the Parisian transport system, or indeed Paris itself, which is notoriously gay.
It is considered, for reasons related to irony, de trop to complain about the use of the word ”metrosexual” as a gay-hating thing, because it was propelled by the chatty and the witty and the headline writers, the people without a gay-hating bone in their bodies. But I think when people like Latham use it as part of a wider diatribe about masculinity, there is real, masculine aggression in it, an observation he would probably proudly avow. It loses its charm in this context, and turns into homophobia.
Academics like Harvey C Mansfield can get away with a statement like this: ”A manly man asserts himself so that he and the justice he demands are not overlooked. He rouses himself and seeks attention for what he deems important, sometimes something big — in the case of the New York [firemen’s] uniforms and the Islamic fascists, the nature and value of Western civilisation …” and still be called an academic (at Harvard!).
This is the effect of conversational seepage. There are certain key phrases (”crisis of masculinity”, ”decline of male culture”, ”new man”, ”metrosexual”) that have osmosed their way into sensible discussion through repeated, uncritical use. But they are not as anodyne and harmless as they pretend. When you draw a parallel between the decline of manliness and the predominance of ”weasel words”, you essentially blame women and/or gay men for dishonesty and dissemblance in public life.
Besides being offensive, this notion leaves unanswered the rather important question that if men were so strong and so straight-talking and so decisive and so un-neurotic, how was their culture strangled so efficiently by birds and nancies in the first place? — Â