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Time to put the ugh boot into men who moisturise

By Peter FitzSimons
June 26 2003

Oh, brothers, my brothers, what have they done to you? I refer, of course, to you new breed of "metrosexuals" who have been garnering so much press lately.

You know who you are. You were defined in the Herald and The New York Times this week as "straight urban men willing, even eager, to embrace their feminine sides".

And you are everywhere, most particularly in Sydney Town. You don't buy clobber, you follow fashion. You like going shopping, and are the reason that Grace Bros has a new department for male cosmetics and fragrances, and David Jones claims annual double-digit growth in the same field. You notice what brands of shoes your girlfriend wears - and are quite understanding when she takes HALF AN HOUR to put her make-up on. (But for the fact that she's hogging your own crucial mirror space.)

You don't think David Beckham looks like a complete prat, but love all those fabulously creative ways he does his hair and nails. What muscles you do have don't come from manual labour or playing sport, but from endlessly toning yourself in gyms with mirrors that keep wearing out. You know what "exfoliation" means. You think that you are right on the prow of the "new masculinity". And you are - and let's be fair dinkum about this - a narcissistic dickhead.

No wait! I shouldn't have said that. My problem isn't with you, individually. What gets my goat is that that the whole damn marketing schtick on this "new masculinity" is so all-embracing, so pervasive, so entrenched between endemic and epidemic, that even as we speak there are young blokes out there feeling completely lost and isolated, worried sick about their dirty little secret that all of this stuff leaves them stone motherless cold. Well, enough already. This is the moment where we come out, take a stand, throw our fists in the air and say: "Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars! YEAH!"

To the rest of you, who don't want to come out quite to that extent, let me at least offer some gentle advice. It's OK. It's absolutely OK not to embrace the metrosexual model. You don't have to live in fear, hiding your true desires. Repeat after me: Ugh boots are good, ugh boots are fine. Wear them and be proud. Shampoo? If you must, but soap will suffice.

And no, you bloody well don't need skin-care products. You might end up - like me - with a face that looks less lived in, than lived on, but so what? No one will ever say it lacks character and if your face bears marks of having "stumbled on the side of 12 misty mountains, having walked and crawled on six crooked highways, stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, been out in front of a dozen dead oceans, been 10,000 miles in the mouth of a graveyard," well, as Bobby Dylan says, it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall, and you will enjoy it when it comes.

What would you rather? A face that looks like it's been nowhere, done nothing, and spent most of its time preening on the head of a louche lounge lizard found mostly in cocktail bars? Choose, you bastards! Blancmange or BLOKE?

And where were we? Oh yes, with you young'uns. Look, if you're paying more than $10 for a haircut, you're wasting your money. And a bloke needs three pairs of shoes, maximum. One to play touch footy and basketball with, one to go to work in, and one to go the movies with the missus or the mistress on a Saturday night with. Throw in a pair of thongs with the uggies, and you're done!

Following football is OK. You can thrill to the vision of other blokes running into each other and bleeding upon each other, just as your father did before you, and your grandfather before that, without the slightest guilt. And when you're having a pie with sauce at that footy, and the sauce runs down your chin, wipe it off on your sleeve!

One last thing. Don't be too narky on the metrosexuals. They know not what they do. They are still our brothers, and have just lost their way a little. Do you remember that old gag about what the difference is between a Sensitive New Age Guy and a real Aussie bloke? (Answer: about six beers.) My reckoning is much the same applies here. They'll buy boutique beers and it will cost them a fortune, but sooner or later they will come back to us. It's in their genes. Calvins, maybe, but they're in there all right ...




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Time to put the ugh boot into men who moisturise