Mark Simpson is an English journalist, writer, and broadcaster specialising in popular culture, media, and masculinity. Simpson is the originator of the term and concept metrosexual. He has been described by one critic as "the skinheadOscar Wilde".[1]
Mark Simpson is credited with coining the term metrosexual in a 1994 article for The Independent.[3][4] He also introduced the word to the US in 'Meet the Metrosexual', a much-quoted essay on Salon.com in 2002, leading to the global popularity of the term.[5] This was also the first citation of the UK footballer David Beckham as the ultimate example of the type. Simpson was later credited with introducing the term 'retrosexual' (in the sense of the anti-metrosexual) in 2003.[6]
Described as one of the "Ideas of the Year" by The New York Times in 2006, Simpson wrote on the issue of sport and advertising increasingly using homoerotic imagery, in a process he dubbed "sporno" ("the place where sport and porn meet and produce a gigantic money shot").[7][8] Simpson wrote about "sporno" for Out magazine commenting that: "whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United's Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo to rougher prospects like Chelsea's Joe Cole and AC Milan's Kak', keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a postmetrosexual, increasingly pornolized world."[9] The London Times newspaper also featured sporno in their 'Year in Ideas' list.[10]
In 2010, the global trend spotting website Science of the Time described Simpson as "the world's most perceptive writer about masculinity". The Times of India included 'metrosexual' in their review of the most important words of the last thirty years, commenting: "Much has been written about metrosexuals, but no one has done it as well as the man credited with coining the term, Mark Simpson."
In 2014, Simpson proposed that the age of the metrosexual has passed and is evolving into a new kind of man called the spornosexual. Spornosexual is a neologism, also coined by Simpson, combining the words "sport," "porn," and "metrosexual."[11] It describes an aesthetic adopted by some men who consume both sports and pornography. Such men, in addition to possessing certain metrosexual attributes, carry their own bodies as accessories and are not shy at showcasing them in public. The spornosexual style emphasises heavy, lean musculature, and certain kinds of tattooing. Spornosexuals spend much money and time on physical fitness and upkeep.[12] Some commentators argue that the rise of spornosexuals is another indication of society becoming evermore narcissistic.[13][14]
Books
Male Impersonators
Simpson's first book Male Impersonators (1994) provided the background for his theory of metrosexuality by examining the way men were represented in popular culture – movies, ads, mags, music, male stripping, and comedy – and showing how 'unmanly' passions such as homoeroticism, male narcissism, and male masochism were not excluded but rather exploited, albeit semi-secretly, in voyeuristic virility.
Returning to Freud's theory of universal bisexual responsiveness, Simpson also 'outed' what he saw as the homoerotic subtext of masculinity itself. In particular, Simpson analysed the way movies, ads, pop music, and bodybuilding, had replaced 'real' masculinity, if it ever existed, with something 'sexy and simulated'. In his chapter on Marky Mark and his (then) recent Calvin Klein ads, Simpson argued that the rapper's appearance on billboards in Times Square and on the side of buses 'in his prime and in his underwear', grabbing his 'package' to shift product, graphically demonstrated how the commodification of the male body – 'and gay men's love for it' – had become 'eyepoppingly' mainstream.
The book included a chapter arguing that the real romance in Top Gun was between Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Iceman (Val Kilmer). Quentin Tarantino made a cameo appearance in the film Sleep with Me later the same year as a party-guest making a similar argument.
Anti-Gay
Simpson's collection Anti-Gay (1996), described on the jacket as "the shameful antidote to feelgood politics"', according to The Independent, "divided the gay community". Led by Simpson, various 'non-heterosexual' contributors, such as Bruce LaBruce and Glenn Belverio, John Weir, Peter Tatchell, Lisa Power, and Anne-Marie Le Ble, voiced their criticism of the gay "one-size-fits-all" identity and the gay media's intolerance of anything that wasn't "glad" and "clap happy". Anti-Gay was one of the first "post-gay" books, appearing a year or so before a series of largely conservative American gay books critical of gay culture, such as The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (D Harris, 1997) and Life Outside (M Signorile, 1997), Sexual Ecology (G Rotello, 1998).[15]
It's a Queer World
It's a Queer World published the same year, described on the dust jacket as "hilariously perverse" and "taking a warped look at fin-de-siecle pop culture where nothing is as straight – or gay – as it seems", collected Simpson's popular columns of the same name which appeared in Attitude magazine, and showed how gay and straight culture were converging, a decade before this became a common theme.[citation needed][16]
The Queen is Dead
The Queen is Dead (1998) collected his colourful and confessional correspondence with American writer Steven Zeeland. According to the jacket blurb: "A chance letter sparks off an hilariously doomed transatlantic literary romance involving Marines, glory holes, cats, intellectuals, transsexuals and a bizarre love-triangle rivalry with gay serial-killer and Gianni Versace's assassin Andrew Cunanan." Despite its openly offbeat subject matter, it was reviewed positively: "Something of a masterpiece" wrote Roger Clarke in The Independent.[17]
Sex Terror
Sex Terror: Misadventures in pop culture is a collection of essays, interviews and articles from Simpson's late 1990s journalism, including writings in Attitude magazine and The Guardian. Interview subjects include Henry Rollins, Julie Burchill and Dana International.
Saint Morrissey
Saint Morrissey was Simpson's "psycho-bio" of the former Smiths front man, written at a low point of the singer's career, and published the year before Morrissey's 2004 comeback. The book prompted some comparisons with the subject's style: "Simpson is funny, clever, honest, irreverent and egotistical: quite the match for Morrissey. More biographies should be written this way."[18] (Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year')[19]
Metrosexy
Simpson's ebook, Metrosexy (2011), collects his writings on the subject of metrosexuality, offering a kind of biography of the subject, which he describes as a "Frankenstein monster with flawless skin". The book follows the term from its origin in an article of Simpson's for The Independent newspaper in 1994, to its international adoption in the early 2000s, the backlash against it and its subsequent Jersey Shore resurgence, to the point where Simpson argues that metrosexuality had come to be seen as simply "normal".
Footnotes
↑ Philip HensherArchived 4 January 2007 at the Wayback Machine , The Independent: "Mark Simpson is a skinhead Oscar Wilde, his bon mots are both alarming and amusing, getting up people's noses and inside their trousers with equal aplomb."; quote used to promote Simpson's books "Sex Terror" and "The Queen is Dead"
Yaoi, also known as boys' love and its abbreviation BL, is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is typically created by heterosexual women for heterosexual women and is thus distinct from bara, a genre of homoerotic media marketed to gay men, though yaoi does also attract a gay male audience and can be produced by gay male creators. Yaoi spans a wide range of media, including manga, anime, drama CDs, novels, video games, television series, films, and fan works. While "yaoi" is commonly used in the west as an umbrella term for Japanese-influenced media with male-male relationships, "boys' love" and "BL" are the generic terms for this kind of media in Japan and much of Asia.
Gaydar is a colloquialism referring to the intuitive ability of a person to assess others' sexual orientations as homosexual, bisexual or straight. Gaydar relies on verbal and nonverbal clues and LGBT stereotypes, including a sensitivity to social behaviors and mannerisms like body language, the tone of voice used by a person when speaking, overt rejections of traditional gender roles, a person's occupation, and grooming habits.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
GQ is an American international monthly men's magazine based in New York City and founded in 1931. The publication focuses on fashion, style, and culture for men, though articles on food, movies, fitness, sex, music, travel, celebrities' sports, technology, and books are also featured.
Faggot, often shortened to fag in American usage, is a term, usually a pejorative, used to refer to gay men. In American youth culture around the turn of the 21st century, its meaning extended as a broader reaching insult more related to masculinity and group power structure.
Effeminacy is the embodiment of feminine traits in boys or men, particularly those considered untypical of men or masculinity. These traits include roles, stereotypes, behaviors, and appearances that are socially associated with women and girls. Throughout history, men considered effeminate have faced prejudice and discrimination. Gay men are often stereotyped as being effeminate, and vice versa. However, femininity, masculinity, and other forms of gender expression are independent of sexual orientation.
Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, including both male–to–male and female–to–female attraction. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be temporary, whereas "homosexuality" implies a more permanent state of identity or sexual orientation. It has been depicted or manifested throughout the history of the visual arts and literature and can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is "pertaining to or characterized by a tendency for erotic emotions to be centered on a person of the same sex; or pertaining to a homo-erotic person."
Straight-acting is a term for LGBT individuals who do not exhibit the appearance or mannerisms of what is seen as stereotypically gay. Although the label is used by and reserved almost exclusively for gay and bisexual men, it may also be used to describe a lesbian or bisexual woman exhibiting a feminine appearance and mannerisms. Since the term invokes negative stereotypes of gay people, its application is often controversial and may cause offense.
Greek love is a term originally used by classicists to describe the primarily homoerotic customs, practices, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. It was frequently used as a euphemism for both homosexuality and pederasty. The phrase is a product of the enormous impact of the reception of classical Greek culture on historical attitudes toward sexuality, and its influence on art and various intellectual movements.
'Greece' as the historical memory of a treasured past was romanticised and idealised as a time and a culture when love between males was not only tolerated but actually encouraged, and expressed as the high ideal of same-sex camaraderie. ... If tolerance and approval of male homosexuality had happened once—and in a culture so much admired and imitated by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—might it not be possible to replicate in modernity the antique homeland of the non-heteronormative?
Castro clone is LGBT slang for a homosexual man who appears in dress and style as an idealized working-class man. The term and image grew out of the heavily gay-populated Castro neighborhood in San Francisco during the late 1970s, when the modern LGBT rights movement, sparked by the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City and the Summer of Love, gave rise to an urban community. The first recorded usage of the term is from Arthur Evans's "Red Queen Broadsides", a series of posters he wheatpasted around the Castro at the time. The look was most common from roughly the mid-1970s to around the mid-1980s. The Castro style regained popularity in the first decade of the 21st century, particularly among LGBT hipsters.
Metrosexual is a term describing a man in an urban, post-industrial, capitalist culture who is especially meticulous and scrupulous about his personal style, grooming and appearance. It is often used to refer to heterosexual men who are perceived to be feminine rather than masculine and having traits typical of effeminate men. Nevertheless, the term does not assert whether a metrosexual is heterosexual, gay or a bisexual man, and the gender or sexual orientation of a metrosexual is generally ambiguous and differs in every man. Some academics consider metrosexuals to be exhibiting narcissistic tendencies.
A bromance is a very close and non-sexual relationship between two or more men. It is an exceptionally tight, affectional, homosocial male bonding relationship exceeding that of usual friendship, and is distinguished from normal friendship by a particularly high level of emotional intimacy. The emergence of the concept since the beginning of the 21st century has been seen as reflecting a change in societal perception and interest in the theme, with an increasing openness of Western society in the 21st century to reconsider exclusivity constraints.
Queer heterosexuality is heterosexual practice or identity that is also controversially called queer. "Queer heterosexuality" is argued to consist of heterosexual, cisgender, and allosexual persons who show nontraditional gender expressions, or who adopt gender roles that differ from the hegemonic masculinity and femininity of their particular culture.
Bara is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as gay manga (ゲイ漫画) or gei komi. The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. Bara can vary in visual style and plot, but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
There are at least three passages that refer to non-heterosexual sexual intercourse in the New Testament (NT), all of which are found in the Pauline epistles: Romans 1:26–27, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, and 1 Timothy 1:9–10. A fourth passage, found in Jude 1:7, is sometimes interpreted as referring to homosexuality. In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus discusses marriage only in a heterosexual context when he cites the Book of Genesis during a discussion of divorce.
Steven Patrick Morrissey, known mononymously as Morrissey, is an English singer and songwriter. He came to prominence as the frontman and lyricist of rock band the Smiths, who were active from 1982 to 1987. Since then, he has pursued a successful solo career. Morrissey's music is characterised by his baritone voice and distinctive lyrics with recurring themes of emotional isolation, sexual longing, self-deprecating and dark humour, and anti-establishment stances.
Spornosexual is a blend of sports and the clipping porno, compounded with sexual. The term was coined by Mark Simpson in 2014 to describe a man "who is influenced in his appearance by the stars of sport and pornography". It recognises young men who use "their toned bodies on social media as a means of feeling valuable in society." Jamie Hakim has described this as a "power-shift of a segment of society who have historically defined themselves through their mind, whilst at the same time defining those they have subordinated - such as women - through their bodies".
Jack Donovan is an American far-right writer and activist. A self-described masculinist, Donovan was an influential figure in the alt-right until he disavowed the movement in 2017. He has at various times advocated male supremacy, white nationalism, fascism, and the political disenfranchisement of women. He led a chapter of the Wolves of Vinland, a Norse neopagan organization and SPLC-designated hate group, from 2014 to 2018.
He-Man is a fictional sword and sorcery superhero from Masters of the Universe media franchise created by Mattel. His first appearance was in comics included with his toy figures. A television series called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe focused on the character and aired for 130 episodes from 1983 to 1985. This television series established traits of the character that would remain consistent in future installments of the franchise.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
