Four years ago, I went to a wonderful wedding on an island in the Thames, between a hot young MBA and a hotter, younger stand up comic turned newspaper columnist. The columnist, protocol be damned, decided she was going to give a speech at her own wedding, and gave a corker. The highlight was when she started to talk about her new groom's bathroom cabinet, and whether she'd ever manage to get any space in there for herself. She recalled a conversation with her father: "Don't worry, I said, you're not losing a daughter. You're gaining one."
I would like to think that this wedding constituted the impetus for the coinage of America's latest buzzword: after all, everybody knows that the US imports everything cool from the UK. But, alas, although the word did indeed take root in England before crossing the pond, it had already been around for five years when the wedding took place.
Still, the meme took off incredibly slowly. Its first significant appearance in the US came in July 2002, when queer theorist Mark Simpson, the man who'd first introduced the term in the Independent in 1994, wrote an article in Salon called "Meet the metrosexual". One year later, an article by Warren St John headlined "Metrosexuals Come Out" appeared in the New York Times, and the meme metastasized from snowball to avalanche, helped along by a report from advertising agency Euro RSCG called "Metrosexuals: The Future of Men".
In the meantime, it's undergone an interesting emasculation. Simpson says 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". Now, we get Dan Peres, the editor of Details, opining humourlessly on the subject at washingtonpost.com. In the introduction to the chat session, the editors define a metrosexual as "a new kind of male: one who takes care of himself -- pampers himself -- and is not ashamed of getting facials, buying grooming products and shopping", but by the time the chat is over, Peres has said that "if you feel comfortable and confident with your own taste and sense of style, then yes, you may well be a metrosexual", and that really, what we're talking about here is nothing more or less than being a gentleman.
Yet going back to Simpson's Salon piece, we find this:
Mr. Beckham, candid to the point of blatant exhibitionism as he is, is not being entirely honest with us about his sexuality. Outing someone is not a thing to be contemplated lightly, but I feel it is my duty to let the world know that David Beckham, role model to hundreds of millions of impressionable boys around the world, heartthrob for equal numbers of young girls, is not heterosexual after all. No, ladies and gents, the captain of the England football squad is actually a screaming, shrieking, flaming, freaking metrosexual. (He'll thank me for doing this one day, if only because he didn't have to tell his mother himself.)
It's clear what has happened here: as the term has become more mainstream, it's, well, become more mainstream. At this point, if you believe Peres, it applies to anybody who "knows the difference between a daisy and a daffodil"; Simpson himself quotes the marketing report (of course, it's the marketers who have really pushed this concept) saying that a metrosexual is "any straight man who has a salmon pink shirt in his wardrobe".
Maybe something got lost in translation: after all, pretty much every straight man, in the UK at least, has a salmon pink shirt in his wardrobe. John Major used to wear them the whole time, and he's about as far from a metrosexual as can be imagined. The only men I can think of who only wear white shirts are bizarre zealots like Ross Perot and John Ashcroft, who aren't so much anti-colour as they are opposed to any sign of sexuality whatsoever.
I think what's going on here is that a debate which has long been going on in the gay community is being expanded into the straight community. Metrosexuality is a response to sissyphobia, which is the idea – common to men both straight and gay – that there's something offputting about effeminate men. As Patrick puts it on the Gothamist comments board, "the guys who get the most shit are not necessarily those who are gay but rather those who act gay, a high percentage of whom are straight".
Why did the joke at the wedding get such a big laugh? Because caring about personal appearance, owning lots of Product in the bathroom, is considered effeminate. And that's precisely what keeps a large proportion of straight men from buying designer clothes or investing in their appearance, even if the basest of men's magazines – I pick up the copy of Loaded I have lying around from my July 19 entry – have pages and pages full of grooming products along with £280 ($445) leather Hermes sandals.
So while Peres is keen to place clear blue water between metrosexuality and the success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I'm not so sure: both are phenomena which have caught on across the country and which have served to increase the country's general comfort level with effeminate heterosexual men.
On my recent trip to California (yes, that's why this site hasn't been updated in so long), I met extremely straight, suburban, Republican men from towns like Tustin and San Jose. All had heard of metrosexuals, and none of them seemed perturbed by the concept, although they might never swing that way themselves. I doubt they'll be booking themselves in for manicures or shelling out hundreds of dollars for designer trousers any time soon, but that's not the point. The point is how they will react when they meet men who do fall into that category: will they respond with fear and aggression, or will they be more likely to embrace such predilections as just another lifestyle choice, like a preference for ice hockey over baseball?
As Simon Dumenco writes in New York magazine, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy "brings gay style—and wit—to the hinterlands. The show makes homosexuality and shopping nonthreatening for straight men (the latter may be the bigger achievement)." He continues:
The real agenda at play these days is, of course, the Buysexual Agenda. As in: You are what you buy (not who you sleep with). It’s a uniquely American idea that the nation that shops together stays together. If homos and heteros like the same moisturizers and the same jeans, why can’t we all get along?
In short, memes can make a difference: as metrosexuality becomes more widely understood, it makes the world (or at least America) safer for gay and gay-acting men. And if it takes increased sales of $1,000 messenger bags in order for that to happen, then surely that's a small price to pay.
It's not been an easy week for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The people who brought you one of the biggest public consultation exercises of all time – the one culminating in the decision to award Daniel Libeskind the mandate to design the new World Trade Center site – now have $1.2 billion of federal money burning a hole in their corporate pockets. This is money which is meant to be spent for the benefit of Lower Manhattan, and so the LMDC has tried to ask the area's residents what they think the money should be spent on. The problem is that its Neighborhood Outreach Workshops – or at least two of them – have been chaotic.
Here's the relevant bit from the LMDC website:
Specific LMDC activities and programs are presently funded by a $2.0 billion Community Development Block Grant administered by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the World Trade Center disaster recovery and rebuilding efforts and an anticipated second grant for $783 million targeted for damaged properties and businesses, including the restoration of utility infrastructure, as well as economic revitalization related to the terrorists attacks, and to assist businesses that suffered disproportionate loss of life from the September 11 attacks.
The LMDC scheduled six workshops: for the City Hall/Seaport area; for Battery Park City; for the Financial District; for Soho/Tribeca; for Chinatown; and for the Lower East Side. Only the Soho/Tribeca workshop has yet to happen, and no one is foreseeing any problems there. The first three workshops all went smoothly, too. But Chinatown and the Lower East Side – that's where the shouting started.
The workshops were organised by inviting the LMDC's community and cultural contacts to nominate people who they thought should be involved. In the case of the Lower East Side meeting, which took place this evening at the University Settlement on Eldridge Street, 100 people were eventually invited, 90 RSVPed, and about 50 actually showed up on a hot and muggy Wednesday evening.
Most of the participants arrived in the expectation of a collegial meeting, where community representatives could help the LMDC prioritise the kind of projects it is going to undertake in the neighborhood. What they didn't expect was what they found when they reached the venue: a crowd at least as big as the number of people inside, standing outside with signs and bullhorns, protesting at being excluded from "this secret closed-door meeting". The protest on the Lower East Side wasn't as out of control as the one in Chinatown, where windows got smashed, but it was certainly loud and disruptive. It was organised by NMASS, the National Mobilization Against SweatShops; their main complaint was that "LMDC is not giving out the money they are supposed to give to poor people, instead they are using these funds to build luxury housing to kick poor people out of the Lower East Side and Chinatown."
It was actually a fair complaint, and one with which most of the invited community representatives were sympathetic. In fact, there was a general feeling in the meeting that at least some of those outside – as many as could be accommodated – should be allowed in to participate, since they had at least as much right to take part as any of us inside. But it was not to be, and the LMDC promised instead to hold another meeting in the next couple of weeks to which anybody excluded from this one could come.
Even if they had been allowed inside, however, the protestors would not have been happy. There were many people with identical views in the meeting, and the general feeling was one of mistrust: that they were being used as a "PR vehicle" for the LMDC to be able to claim community consultation while in reality simply ramming through whatever spending decisions its men in suits had more or less already decided should be made.
The LMDC didn't help matters by opening the proceedings with a general overview of the New York City "Vision for Lower Manhattan", which is in reality only peripherally related to the disbursement of the HUD grants. The assembled neighborhood activists were presented with a glossy PowerPoint presentation all about a grand new transit hub, the importance of new communications corridors between the Financial District and New York's airports, and in general the outlines of the plan (which, I have to say, is an excellent one) for integrating the World Trade Center site into Lower Manhattan, and for integrating Lower Manhattan much more effectively into New York City and its environs.
Since the plan has been around for the best part of two years now, the general impression given was one of a process where the big decisions have already been made. While the LMDC thought it was generating genuine bottom-up grassroots ideas for how it should spend its HUD money, the grassroots activists thought they were basically being used to provide a veneer of democratic accountability for a top-down decision-making process which is sorely lacking in transparency and which they had very little trust in, much of the money already having gone to subsidising luxury accommodation in the Financial District.
The LMDC's next big mistake was to ask for ideas under certain headings, one of which was transportation. With the plans for transit hubs and air trains fresh in our minds, it certainly seemed as though the LMDC was pretty determined to go ahead with its large-scale projects, to the detriment of the things which really mattered to the community: things like low-income housing, job retention and creation, and the strengthening of existing neighborhood institutions, from small businesses to arts and community centers.
In fact, while I'm sure the LMDC would love HUD's money to help realise its broader vision, there's no conflict between transit hubs and community outreach. The money for each comes from different places, and money spent on the World Trade Center site is not money which could or would otherwise be spent on the Lower East Side.
The suspicions of the attendees notwithstanding, then, I think the exercise was useful. It's clear, for instance, that there's precious little interest in, say, traffic-control measures, but that many people are very interested in a genuinely community-focused redevelopment of Seward Park. If there was unanimity on one thing, it was this: that the Lower East Side does not stop at Houston Street, and that the LMDC should concentrate its attention all the way up to 14th Street rather than drawing lines in the sand which bisect longstanding communities.
In reality, however, the whole exercise felt a little bit fraudulent, and smelled of political pandering. Look at this map: it's the boundaries of the assembly district of New York State Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, one of the three most important politicians in the state, and a key mover behind this community outreach program. It should help explain why the Lower East Side and Chinatown – the "problem" meetings in the outreach program – are included in it at all.
Do we Lower East Siders really need HUD help more than any number of neighborhoods in Harlem, or Brooklyn, or the Bronx? Were we more severely affected by the events of September 11 than commuter towns in Jersey or Long Island? Not really. The Lower East Side is not Lower Manhattan, and what people were asking for this evening is exactly what they would be asking for had September 11 never happened. This federal money was meant to go to help repair the gash which appeared at the bottom of this island that day; it was not meant to subsidise the Lower East Side Boys' Club, no matter how worthy a cause that might be.
If I were the HUD, I would consider the shouting and the demonstrations in the Lower East Side and Chinatown to be evidence – if any were needed – that the impact of September 11 is a bit like gravity, decreasing with the square of the distance from the center point. There's little controversy over what needs to be done for the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center, because they were genuinely devastated by the events that day and because their needs are being intelligently (if not adequately) addressed by both the LMDC and the mayor's office. Get much beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, however, and quotidian neighborhood concerns – the kind of things which can be found in any community in any city in the world – rapidly outweigh anything directly or even indirectly related to the events of September 11.
But try telling that to NMASS.
About ten years ago, a small and fiery magazine was started up in England by Toby Young and Julie Burchill. Called the Modern Review, its slogan was "low culture for highbrows", and it was a real breath of fresh air. Here was an intelligent magazine which took Hollywood product seriously, running excellent pieces by the likes of Ray Sawhill on films which were more generally considered beneath contempt.
Unfortunately, it's all gone downhills from there. Young and Burchill had a huge fight; Young torched the magazine, ran off to New York, and managed to seriously annoy just about everybody he met before throwing in the towel, moving back to London, and writing a snarky book about how crap American media types are.
In New York, meanwhile, Sawhill remained at Newsweek, but has evidently failed to exercise any control over the magazine's coverage of popular movies.
Big films are always surrounded by vast amounts of hype and anticipation, and so it's all well and good that Newsweek should run a long on-set feature about the making of the next Harry Potter movie. Gothamist ran the meta-story today, and it didn't take long for a consensus to coalesce in the comments section: in the words of the great Jen Chung, "It's a totally shitty article".
There is, of course, no reason why stories about Harry Potter should be worse than stories about art-house films, or stories about international geopolitics. I know that not all of Newsweek's writers can be stars like Fareed Zakaria. But surely they can do better than this. Running through the article, what do we find?
Clichés galore.
Innacuracy and exaggeration.
Simply bad writing.
Finally, there's this completely inexplicable sentence, which comes at the end of a passage about Cuaron's anti-war politics. Voldemort is a little bit like Bush, he says, and Blair reminds him of Fudge, another character in the book. What do we conclude from these outspoken opinions?
"Cuaron’s scrappiness is either refreshing or worrying, depending on your stock portfolio."
Depending on your what? I guess the views expressed could be construed as being refreshing if you were anti-war, or worrying if you were pro-war. But in what bizarre parallel universe does that have anything whatsoever to do with the stock market?
Amazingly, it took two different writers to come up with this garbage. It reads like it was tossed off as quickly as possible, on the grounds, perhaps, that the subject matter didn't merit any more serious effort. That's profoundly depressing: we're living in a world where truly excellent popular films like Catch Me If You Can or Pirates of the Caribbean have to compete with dreck like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.
Newsweek can and should provide a service to its millions of readers. These are people who are interested in Hollywood and who want to know about what's going on there. Articles like this only serve to increase cynicism about films as entertainment industry Product, backed up by brainless hype, and certainly not anything to be taken seriously.
James Surowiecki this week has an article about how films might open with enormous box-office success on their opening weekend, but that beyond that first week, success is all about word of mouth and how much people actually like the film. In other words, the first weekend is the triumph of hype, while the size of the rest of the theatrical run is much more correlated to popular and critical reaction. Newsweek should be concentrating on the latter, but seems to have been dragooned instead into supporting the former. Once again, the interests of the advertisers have won out over the interests of the reader.