I still don’t understand what that was supposed to mean. Sexually attracted to cities? What?
I think it was supposed to be a play on “metropolitan” fashion, as rendered by people who didn’t understand the concept of a sexual orientation and thought that being gay consisted of looking like Earring Magic Ken.
I had assumed that they were using the “sexual” ending from “transsexual”, implying that it was more of a gender and presentation thing.
Maybe, but I seem to recall all the thinkpieces using gayness as a reference point (and I think specifically Queer Eye for the Straight Guy had something to do with it) The term was coined in 1994, gained currency in 1999 and peaked in 2004; it was popular in a time when “homosexual” was considered a neutral term and trans people didn’t get a lot of discussion in news media at all, except as a “news of the weird” footnote.
From what i always understood it was kinda like that song “gay or European” in legally blonde where metrosexual meant somebody presenting in a way that outside people read more as gay but had little or no bearing on their actual sexuality
Yeah, that’s about an accurate summation, I think!
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used in a way without heavy vibes of “pretentious yuppie with who probably has strange liberal ideas about sex” whether it was for a straight person or a gay person, like it’s always kinda used in media as like a dismissive thing
I always felt it meant “insensible-to-derision,” like, there’s this vast bullying energy always ready to be unleashed on outliers, so Normal People tread carefully and concern themselves with Being Normal. Meanwhile, a metrosexual LOOKS gay, and invites bullying, and yet isn’t gay, therefore by the rules shouldn’t be harmed. This tension has to be resolved rationally, which is work, and nobody likes being made to do work.
I think it’s definitely a class tension, too; the metrosexual is well-dressed and dripping with (alien, city) status, and the bully who wishes to erase that status on a technicality (gay) finds, unpleasantly, that they are not allowed to. Continued evolution of just HOW the metrosexual is sexually deviant and therefore a justified target is imo a resentful response to this situation.
Yeah: it was less men calling themselves “metrosexual” for practicing basic hygiene, and more Conservatives cranking up a culture-panic, to goad society into labeling men who practiced basic hygiene “metrosexual”, to then bully them into displaying the boorish, slovenly laziness that Cons have –out of their persistently escalating fears of feminization going back to <thinkthinkthink> Hell the Beatniks in the 50s(!!!)– have increasingly decided to define masculinity with.
Which reveals the whole game on Gender, really. Not that long ago being able and willing to dress well outside of work situations was an expected, virtuous male quality. The coining of the term, and especially the evolution of its politicocultural use, was Less about noticing a new trend and More about cementing this cultural shift away from defining masculinity by “high class” standards(think Cary Grant or, better yet, George Clooney, as he became a sort of leftist bete-noir culture trope for the Right during this period, specifically because of his insistence on older standards of male appearance) and towards defining it by what the wealthy think of “low” working class people(i.e., dirty, smelly, cheap clothes, ugly, unhealthy). Class warfare can be subtle, and political conservativism being weaponized by the rich, through culture war content in entertainment media, to convince their non-rich fellow-partisans to cosplay rich folks’ negative stereotypes of them, is an excellent example of that subtlety.
i'll apple your turnover 