Metrosexual (aportmanteau ofmetropolitan andheterosexual) is a term for a man who is especially meticulous about his personal style, grooming and appearance.[1][2][3] It is often used to refer to heterosexual men who are perceived to be'effeminate' rather than strictly adhering to stereotypicalmasculinity standards. Nevertheless, the term is generally ambiguous on the gender and sexual orientation of a man; it can also apply totransgender men, and it can apply toheterosexual, gay, orbisexual men.[4][5][6]
The termmetrosexual originated in an article byMark Simpson[7][8] published on November 15, 1994, inThe Independent. Although various sources attributed the term toMarian Salzman, she credited Simpson as the original source for her usage of the word.[9][10][11]
Metrosexual man, the single young man with a highdisposable income, living or working in the city (because that's where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such asGQ. In the Nineties, he's everywhere and he's going shopping.
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.[4]
The advertising agencyEuro RSCG Worldwide adopted the term shortly thereafter for a marketing study.[5] In 2003,The New York Times ran a story, "Metrosexuals Come Out".[7] The term and its connotations continued to roll steadily into more news outlets around the world.Though it did represent a complex and gradual change in the shopping and self-presentation habits of both men and women, the idea of metrosexuality was often distilled in the media down to a few men and a short checklist of vanities, like skin care products, scented candles and costly, colorful dress shirts and pricey designer jeans.[12] It was this image of the metrosexual—that of a straight young man who got pedicures and facials, practiced aromatherapy and spent freely on clothes—that contributed to a backlash against the term from men who merely wanted to feel free to take more care with their appearance than had been the norm in the 1990s, when companies abandoned dress codes, Dockers khakis became a popular brand, and XL, or extra-large, became the one size that fit all.[12] A60 Minutes story on 1960s–70s pro footballerJoe Namath suggested he was "perhaps, America's first metrosexual" after filming his most famous ad sporting Beautymist pantyhose.[13]
The term metrosexual has also been used in a pejorative fashion to refer to an effeminate or gay man.[14]
Fashion designerTom Ford drew parallels when he described David Beckham as a "total modern dandy", referencing theAesthetic Movement of the 19th century, likening metrosexuality to a modern incarnation of adandy. Ford suggested that "macho" sporting role models who also care about fashion and appearance influence masculine norms in wider society.[15]
John Mercer and Feona Attwood draw parallels to earlier shifts in the gestalt of masculinity and the corresponding reaction of US media, and the media's role in defining contemporary gender archetypes. They highlight the term "crisis of masculinity" coined by political commentator Arthur Schlessinger Jr. who claimed that masculinity was imperiled by women becoming more independent. Mercer and Attwood argue that Simpson, in his articles coining metrosexuality, is a reference to a longer media tradition of writing about masculinity in fluctuation.[16]
Thomas Erik Chris links the term metrosexual to contemporary (as of 2024) masculine archetypal language, likening "metrosexual" to "looksmaxxingalpha male" and "muscle gay", noting the historic parallels in media identity, marketing, andconsumerism.[17]
Over the course of the following years, other terms countering or substituting for "metrosexual" appeared.
Traditional masculine norms, as described in psychologistRonald F. Levant'sMasculinity Reconstructed are: "avoidance of femininity; restricted emotions; sex disconnected from intimacy; pursuit of achievement and status; self-reliance; strength; aggression andhomophobia".[31]
Various studies, including market research byEuro RSCG, have suggested that the pursuit of achievement and status is not as important to men as it used to be; and neither is, to a degree, the restriction of emotions or the disconnection of sex from intimacy. Another norm change supported by research is that men "no longer find sexual freedom universally enthralling". Lillian Alzheimer noted less avoidance of femininity and the "emergence of a segment of men who have embraced customs and attitudes once deemed the province of women".[32]
Men's fashion magazines—such asDetails,Men's Vogue, and the defunctCargo—targeted what oneDetails editor called "men who moisturize and read a lot of magazines".[33]
Changes in culture and attitudes toward masculinity, visible in the media through television shows such asQueer Eye for the Straight Guy,Queer as Folk, andWill & Grace, have changed these traditional masculine norms. Metrosexuals only made their appearance after cultural changes in the environment and changes in views on masculinity.[citation needed] Simpson said in his article "Metrosexual? That rings a bell..." that "Gay men provided the early prototype for metrosexuality. Decidedly single, definitelyurban, dreadfully uncertain of their identity (hence the emphasis on pride and the susceptibility to the latest label) and sociallyemasculated, gay men pioneered the business of accessorising—and combining—masculinity and desirability."[34]
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But such probing analyses into various shoppers' psyches may have ignored other significant factors affecting men's shopping habits, foremost among them women's shopping habits. As the retail analyst Marshal Cohen explained in a 2005 article in theNew York Times entitled, "Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell", the fact that women buy less of men's clothing than they used to has, more than any other factor, propelled men into stores to shop for themselves. "In 1985 only 25 percent of all men's apparel was bought by men, he said; 75 percent was bought by women for men. By 1998 men were buying 52 percent of apparel; in 2004 that number grew to 69 percent and shows no sign of slowing." One result of this shift was the revelation that men cared more about how they look than the women shopping for them had.[12]
However, despite changes in masculinity, research has suggested men still feel social pressure to endorse traditional masculine male models in advertising. Martin and Gnoth (2009) found thatfeminine men preferred feminine models in private, but stated a preference for the traditional masculine models when their collective self was salient. In other words, feminine men endorsed traditional masculine models when they were concerned about being classified by other men as feminine. The authors suggested this result reflected the social pressure on men to endorse traditional masculine norms.[35]
Whereas the metrosexual was a cultural observation, the term is used in marketing and popular media.[6][5] In this context, the metrosexual is aheterosexual, urban man who is in touch with his feminine side—he color-coordinates, cares deeply aboutexfoliation, and has perhapsmanscaped.[36][37]
Devon Powers, a professor of criticalmedia studies atUniversity of Michigan, uses the early 2000s US media coverage of metrosexuality as a case study in defining the concept of trend journalism.[38] In her analysis, she argues that the early-2000s US media interest in metrosexuality was driven by marketers who have co-opted the term from 1990s queer culture as part of an ongoing effort to get men to shop more,[39] claiming that by this point, the concept of metrosexuality had evolved from a subversion of traditional masculinity into a drive for masculine consumerism.[40] Moreover, Powers uses this case study as part of her thesis, that while trend journalism attempts to explain emergent cultural phenomena, that it may also play a role in trendsetting.[41]
John Mercer and Feona Attwood echo this, arguing that changes in the polysemic definition of masculinity are not only reported and categorized in media"in the business of ‘producing’ masculinity", but that this model of masculinity is generated is one constructed by media .[42]
While media representations often present the metrosexual as a 'stylish heterosexual man', the term can also be seen in use in popular discourse, often pejoratively, to denote homosexuality or effeminacy (Hall, 2014a: 329), making a connection between an overinvestment in grooming and appearance and compromised masculinity, or at least illustrating a rather ambivalent attitude to modern masculinities. This is often evidenced in media reportage on the growth of the male grooming consumer sector, a development that is more often than not directly linked to the emergence of the metrosexual.
While it is often regarded as commonsensical to identify the central role of the media in the cultural construction of femininity in its many guises, it is equally important to note that the media have played an equally vital role in identifying and extoling masculine archetypes, values and their variants, or by calling the same values into question. Indeed, the 'crisis of masculinity' – a term that has been used routinely to describe everything from representations of male angst in 1950s Hollywood cinema to the plight of working-class youth in contemporary urban settings – was first coined by the political commentator Arthur Schlessinger Jr in an article of the same name in Esquire magazine in 1958. It is in this process of identifying what it means to be a man and consequently giving a name to new iterations of masculinity that the media can be seen as being in the business of 'producing' masculinity, and this is an activity that has gathered pace in recent years. [...] Indeed, this debate, in its contemporary sense, is at least as old as 1958, when Schlessinger argued that the crisis of 1950s masculinity was in fact to be attributed to the growing emancipation of women, and has been a fairly constant way in which reportage has tended to account for the evolution or shift in masculinities – and especially masculine representations – ever since. So when Mark Simpson (2002) writes, with a witty and altogether knowingly polemical turn, that the metrosexual represents the 'emasculation' of straight men, his argument, designed to provoke, is referencing a popular journalistic tradition of writing about masculinity as a site not of fixity and stability but instead of flux and uncertainty, which, at the time he wrote those words, was already half a century old
These habits and inclinations toward presenting health and wealth have hardened with the passing of time, like a particularly sculpted torso. To put this in more Shakespearean terms: Metrosexuality by any other name (say, a looksmaxxing alpha male, or muscle gay) smells just as strongly of whatever scent we're being marketed that day.
I elucidate my arguments with one historical case of trend journalism—the coverage of metrosexuality in the New York Times in June 2003.
The occasion for Warren St. John's piece was that marketers had come to embrace the term "metrosexual," which had been floating around queer culture since the 1990s. Originally, the word was used derisively to describe what happened when marketers attempted to get men to shop more: they used "sensitive" (read: gay or gay-seeming) men in their pitches, since they assumed "real" (read: straight) men didn't invest in their appearance (St. John 2003). [...] St. John declares that "America may be on the verge of a metrosexual moment." To prove this, St. John relies heavily on marketers, who serve as experts on the existence and viability of the metrosexual demographic.
Yet by the early 2000s, metrosexuality had been defanged of its critique, less a commentary on capitalism and gender than a full-on embrace of masculine consumerism. Metrosexuality also began to refer to men who embraced what until that point had been known as stereotypically feminine activities, including hair and skin care regimens, fashion, and wearing bright colors (St. John 2003; Paskin 2020). St. John's article is a commentary on these shifts but, as noted above, it also played a decisive role in normalizing and promoting them.
In this chapter we focus in particular on one of these media-generated models of masculinity: the figure of the metrosexual, and his place in a succession of figures of masculinity and male sexuality. The 'metrosexual' – a term coined by journalist and cultural commentator Mark Simpson (1994, 2002, 2005) – can be seen as a contemporary development related to the earlier figure of the 'sensitive, nurturing, caring' 'new man', alongside fashion and grooming-related representations of men which use a 'vocabulary of "style"' to present the male body as an object of desire and looking (Nixon, 1996: 164). The metrosexual, therefore, is not without precedent. Indeed, the construction of media and commercial spaces for 'the display of masculine sensuality' (Nixon, 1996: 202) and the sexualisation of men's bodies have been the subjects of a degree of academic attention since the 1990s (MacKinnon, 1997; Bordo, 1999).
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