Though I feel that the nature of weblogs is "disregard the archives, pay attention to the updates coming down the line," sometimes a poor soul wanders through the ghost town of past posts and feels compelled to leave a comment behind. I mean, a real live commenter! Sometimes even the latest material can't afford that luxury. So it was with an item from September 4, last year, which garnered the following sentences:

At this point it dawns I should give some more context for such a comment. This old entry was a reaction to a post (lost in some kind of "info-calypse") from She's Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe, where its author, Kat D., discussed these so-called "metrosexuals."

So who are these metrosexuals?

For that we need to go to the on-line article Kat was reacting to herself:

Meet the metrosexual
He's well dressed, narcissistic and bun-obsessed. But don't call him gay.
By Mark Simpson
July 22, 2002

Mr. Simpson's jumping point is discussing the captain of the English football [Don't call it soccer! - id] team for the 2002 World Cup, David Beckham, who, while being nominally straight, indulges in some very queer behavior, like "wearing sarongs and pink nail polish and panties belonging to his wife, Victoria (aka Posh from the Spice Girls), having a different, tricky haircut every week and posing naked and oiled up on the cover of Esquire," up to posing for "a glossy gay magazine in the U.K." According to Mr. Simpson, this hetero man's tarting is the revealing behavior of a metrosexual.

...to determine a metrosexual, all you have to do is look at them. In fact, if you're looking at them, they're almost certainly metrosexual. The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis -- because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere.

I would have thought the "metrosexual" meme began with this article, but according to The Word Spy, Mr. Simpson has been waving this term around since 1994, when he used it in an article for the U. K.'s Independent titled Here come the mirror men:

The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men's style press, magazines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eighties and is still growing (GQ gains 10,000 new readers every month). They filled their magazines with images of narcissistic young men sporting fashionable clothes and accessories. And they persuaded other young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.

Some people said unkind things. American GQ, for example, was popularly dubbed "Gay Quarterly". Little wonder that all these magazines — with the possible exception of The Face — address their metrosexual readership as if none of them were homosexual or even bisexual.

By the way, The Word Spy defines the term "metrosexual" as "A dandyish narcissist in love with not only himself, but also his urban lifestyle."

OK, that should cover our bases as far as the "who exactly are they." As for the "why is it that there's all of these guys out there," Mr. Simpson explains it as a simple matter of marketing.

For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn't shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image -- that's to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that's the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser's walking wet dream.

And maybe this also explains "why shouldn't men be allowed to look after themselves just as religiously as women do:" because women needn't do so either; it's all an advertising construct.

Oh, that not good enough for you? Fine, try this one on for size: based on the culture I grew up with (a very macho Mexican culture), men shouldn't because it's prissy. There! How's that for an answer?

Then again, machismo is mostly coded homophobia, and homophobia is usually a reaction to supressed homoeroticism. So...

{Edited on April 27, 2003. Changed "an advertising construction" for "an advertising construct".}