So long metro, hello ubersexual

By Andrew Adam Newman
October 17, 2005

The  trend-spotting authors who popularised the term "metrosexual" to categorise straight men who exfoliate, wear Diesel jeans and spend more time in front of the bathroom mirror than their girlfriends have decided that the two-year-old phenomenon is, well, so two years ago.

The new ideal, according to Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia and Ann O'Reilly in their new book, The Future of Men, is the "ubersexual".

In contrast to metrosexuals, who, the authors write, risk being "sad sacks who seem incapable of retaining their sense of manhood in post-feminist times", ubersexuals "mark a return to the positive characteristics of the Real Man of yesteryear (strong, resolute, fair)".

Yet they are poised to not only change a nappy but to discuss how they feel about it.

And unlike metrosexuals, "ubersexuals don't invite questions about their sexuality". The authors recently released a list of the "top 10 ubersexuals," with U2 singer Bono at the top, followed by George Clooney and Bill Clinton.

Salzman, an advertising executive, says that she was consulting last year for a men's skin-care line when she "realised there had been a backlash against metrosexuality, against the softness of it", and it led her to recommend "more clean-smelling than perfume-y" items.

"Men, in my view, don't want products that are derivative of female products," she says. "They want things that are male rather than female."

While identifying a tribe of metrosexuals ostensibly helped marketers reach that market, Salzman says her purpose was to sell her book.

When the three authors' previous book, Buzz: Harness the Power of Influence and Create Demand, was published in spring 2003, they said they "wanted to prove our own hypothesis, that you could buzz something around the world without paying for advertising".

The term "metrosexual" never appeared in that book, but Salzman used it during interviews, saying that she was running focus groups with trendily shod straight men. (The term was not their own: it was coined in 1994, derisively, by Mark Simpson, a culture critic who derided "commodity fetishists" he encountered at a London men's fashion expo.)

A flurry of articles about metrosexuals appeared in publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The Economist and The Financial Times. The premiere of the hit television series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy also lent currency to the term. The word of the year for 2003: metrosexual.

Salzman said that ubersexuals would stand out as a distinct group, distinguishing themselves by reading Esquire or Sports Illustrated, shopping less but more discriminatingly, and favouring men over women as their closest friends.

Daniel Peres, editor of Details, a magazine described as the "metrosexual bible", said he grew to despise the word.

"It turned more into a marketing tool, with businesses and publishers jumping on it, not a strong anthropologic look at the genders."

- New York Times
