Metrosexual

The metrosexual male (there is no female metro-sexuality) is commonly understood, in the North American and British use of the term, to be a young man who, shunning any reluctance and hesitation informed by received notions and expectations of masculine patterns of behavior, engages in grooming to the betterment of his appearance. That is, the metrosexual male will attend to his clothes and hair, will employ hair conditioners, skin creams, and moisturizers, with the understanding that this will render him more attractive to the opposite sex. Such traditionally female concerns with appearance are not perceived to be a challenge to his heterosexuality—his “hetero-certainty” as queer theorists put it—but rather an enhancement of his sexual potential, his “pulling power.” In these respects, the metrosexual represents an emergent consumer group—a group in search of grooming products specifically designed and marketed to a set of needs, and a group with the potential to propel a niche market into the mainstream.

The female, encountering the metrosexual male, will find evidenced a concern with appearance and thus the potential of the male to be “arm candy,” preferable to the rough and ready males otherwise available (unmoisturized, clothing as considered in predominantly utilitarian ways, haircuts standardized and manageable, carrying the sweat and wear of the day, etc.). Furthermore, this concern for appearance, it could be surmised, is indicative of intelligence, character and a general concern for others (the “sensitive man,” akin to the “singer-songwriter” model; not homophobic or racist or given over to violence; a reader; domestic in the sense of a cook, a cleaner, and an ironer), and a creative temperament (the so-called Renaissance man and then “new man” of the late 1980s and onward). And further still, metrosexuality denotes upward mobility; freed from the blue-collar environs of the building site, the factory floor, the lorry cab, and so on, the metrosexual male comes to understand the importance of affective labor in the white-collar environs of the office, the upmarket cafe, and the conference or presentation room. From the working-class female perspective, and in respect to societal affirmations given to postwar embourgeoisement, the metrosexual represents an economic progression from the male role models adopted by the generation of their fathers and grandfathers. With embourgeoisement comes the migration from rural to urban areas and the consolidation of city-center lifestyles, and so the phenomenon of metrosexuality is understood to germinate and occur in the centers of society—the metropolitan areas and their forms of lifestyles. (The earliest uses of the term metrosexual in the popular press, in the mid-1990s, coincide with urban regeneration and the repopulation of formerly [Page 969]desolate city centers.) As Matt Houlbrook notes in his study of London's queer subcultures, the city, with its plethora of available experiences—particularly for the newly arrived and the naive—thus becomes “a productive space that generates and stabilizes a new form of selfhood and way of life … a space of affirmation, liberation, and citizenship” (2006, 3). Metrosexuality thus engenders and finesses further upward mobility.

Such themes of new modes of male presentation and upward mobility underlie the advertising campaigns for male skin moisturizers, which are often provided with the caveat that they are related to shaving, to hair conditioners, and the sexualization of the male body in advertisements for male underwear (the footballer David Beckham, held to be an embodiment of the metrosexual ideal, has modeled for Armani campaigns in recent years). In this way, the social dividend of upward mobility—sexual activity—is understood to be available via a new beauty regime and new concerns of self-presentation, now appropriate to the social spaces of the urban conurbation.

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