Metrosexuals

Although it entered popular parlance in 2002, winning the "Word of the Year" award from the American Dialect Society in 2003, both the term metrosexual and the social phenomenon that it names have their origins in the mid 1990s. According to British journalist Mark Simpson who is widely credited with having coined the term in a 1994 article for the Independent, metrosexual denotes "the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that's where all the best shops are)." In short, the term metro-sexual actually names an explicitly gendered yet ambiguously sexualized form of narcissistic male consumerism and style consciousness made possible by self-imposed abstention from the financial entanglements typically associated with being the breadwinner in the context of normative heterosexual family life.

In its original formulation the term was considered especially applicable to a supposedly new breed of heterosexual men whose self-consciousness about their bodies and sophisticated tastes seemed to link them to a form of fashion-conscious consumerism more typically associated with women and some members of one highly visible, highly affluent, city-dwelling segment of the gay male population in the United Kingdom and the United States. Subsequently, however, the term came to be used in a more general sense to describe any man whose claim to a particular sexual identity was rendered either suspect or altogether irrelevant by his utterly narcissistic obsession with his own sophistication and superior physical appearance.

As with many trends, especially those linked in some way to fashion and consumer culture, the idea of metrosexuality began to be dismissed as passé almost as soon as it entered mainstream consciousness. In 2004 Simpson himself bemoaned the general public's failure to recognize the double-edged critique of classism and heteronormativity implicit in his original explication of the phenomenon. By 2006 a number of a journalists and cultural commentators were declaring an end to the era of the metrosexual and heralding the welcomed return of a rougher, less refined ideal of upper-middle-class heterosexual masculinity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flocker, Michael. 2003. The Metrosexual Guide to Style: A Handbook for the Modern Man. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Simpson, Mark. 1994. "Here Come the Mirror Men." Independent November 15.

Simpson, Mark. 2003. "Metrosexual? That Rings a Bell …" Independent June 22.

                                         Colin R. Johnson