Metrosexual
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English
Etymology
Blend of metro, city, and sexual. Some have argued for a blend of metro, city, and heterosexual.
Noun
metrosexual (plural metrosexuals)
- A young male concerned with self-image, self-indulgence and money.(Usually urban, heterosexual, probably affluent)
- A young man who is seen, sociologically, as having attributes common to homosexuals, but is in fact heterosexual.
Synonyms
Translations
- Catalan: metrosexual
- Czech: metrosexuál
- Dutch: metroseksueel
- Esperanto: metroseksulo
- Finnish: metroseksuaali
- French: métrosexuel
- German: Metrosexuell
- Piedmonteis: gadan
- Polish: metroseksualny
- Portuguese: metrossexual
- Romanica: metrosexual
- Spanish: metrosexual
- Swedish: metrosexuell
See also
- ambisexual
- gender-bender
- unisex
Etymology discussion
- Various Web references attribute the creation of the word to Mark Simpson in an article in The Independent in 1994.
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. —Mark Simpson, "Here come the mirror men" The Independent, November 15, 1994 - Source - Wordspy article
- Mark Simpson confirmed the attribution in this 2003 web article.
- Discussion shows early Internet references in alt.homosexual - 1 Dec 1996 by Greg Parkinson: [1]
- Raised to greater UK public awareness by Channel 4 program Metrosexuality in Feb 2001
- Raised to American and Global public awareness by Mark Simpson in July 2002 in an article for the US based web site Salon.com.
Definition discussion
- Mark Simpson's own definition of 2002 is "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 modelling, 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."
- But in his 2003 commentary on the 1994 creation, Mark says "Truth is, I was not being entirely serious when I first wrote about metrosexuality back in 1994, shortly after the publication of my book about contemporary masculine identity, ‘Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity’. That’s to say, when I wrote about how male metrosexuality was coming out of the closet and taking over the world, I was being slightly satirical about the effect of consumerism and media proliferation, particularly glossy men’s magazines, on traditional masculinity. But then, this wouldn’t be the first time a satire on consumerism was appropriated by consumerism to hasten the process it sought to critique."
External links
