Metrosexual man bows to red-blooded übersexuals

Paul Harris in New York

The Observer, Sunday 23 October 2005

It's good news for traditional American men. The metrosexual is dead: long live the übersexual.

After dominating US style and fashion for several years, the ideal of the modern male as someone who cared about fashion and skin care as much as a woman did is about to be swept aside by a return to old-fashioned, masculine values: fine wines, cigars and red-blooded heterosexuality.

'Ubersexuals are confident, masculine and stylish, and committed to uncompromising quality in all areas of life,' said Marian Salzman, co-author of a new book, The Future of Men. Salzman, a vice-president of the global advertising firm JWT, is the trend-spotter who first promoted the rise of the metrosexual, a term lauded and derided in equal measure, as it described a new sort of man who aped women's tastes.

Now, however, maleness has hit back, she says. While metrosexuals were obsessed with self-image and lifestyle, the übersexual is politically aware and passionate about real world causes. The metrosexual has women who are his best friends, while the übersexual respects women but retains men as his closest confidants. The metrosexual grooms his hair: the übersexual grooms his mind. The metrosexual reads Vogue and Cosmo, the übersexual the Economist and the New Yorker.

Celebrity metrosexuals include Jude Law, Orlando Bloom and David Beckham, whose good looks can be seen as slightly womanly. Their übersexual counterparts include George Clooney, Donald Trump, Pierce Brosnan and Bill Clinton, who are fashionable and wear tasteful clothes, but are unashamedly masculine, not least in their often complicated and very heterosexual lifestyles. Salzman's book proclaims the world's leading übersexual as the rock star and anti-poverty campaigner Bono.

But all this is unlikely to provide much comfort for the ordinary man, who is now being told to dump his feminine side and try to become an alpha male. 'Ubersexuals are the most attractive and compelling men of their generations. They are confident, masculine and stylish,' she said. Even so, any men hoping that drinking beer and watching football on TV will be back in vogue have had their ambitions dashed.

The Future of Men warns that being an übersexual is not a licence for bad behaviour. 'Ubersexuals do not give into the stereotypes that give guys a bad name, such as disrespect towards women, emotional emptiness, ignorance of anything outside sports, beer and burgers,' said Salzman.

Ubersexuality has caused a stir in areas of American cultural life not normally bothered by fashion trends. Rush Limbaugh, the notorious 'shock jock', recently mused that übersexuals sounded rather like him. 'This is what men were before feminism came and neutered them,' he thundered.

Salzman probably did not have Limbaugh in mind. But some female commentators - and probably many other women - are celebrating the passing of the metrosexual. 'What woman wants to compete with a man for mirror time?' asked Jenice Armstrong, a columnist on the Philadelphia Daily News .

"It hurts to be beautiful" has been a cliche for centuries. What has been far less appreciated is how much it hurts not to be beautiful. The Beauty Bias explores our cultural preoccupation with attractiveness, the costs it imposes, and the responses it demands.

Beauty may be only skin deep, but the damages associated with its absence go much deeper. Unattractive individuals are less likely to be hired and promoted, and are assumed less likely to have desirable traits, such as goodness, kindness, and honesty. Three quarters of women consider appearance important to their self image and over a third rank it as the most important factor.

Although appearance can be a significant source of pleasure, its price can also be excessive, not only in time and money, but also in physical and psychological health. Our annual global investment in appearance totals close to $200 billion. Many individuals experience stigma, discrimination, and related difficulties, such as eating disorders, depression, and risky dieting and cosmetic procedures. Women bear a vastly disproportionate share of these costs, in part because they face standards more exacting than those for men, and pay greater penalties for falling short.

The Beauty Bias explores the social, biological, market, and media forces that have contributed to appearance-related problems, as well as feminism's difficulties in confronting them. The book also reviews why it matters. Appearance-related bias infringes fundamental rights, compromises merit principles, reinforces debilitating stereotypes, and compounds the disadvantages of race, class, and gender. Yet only one state and a half dozen localities explicitly prohibit such discrimination. The Beauty Bias provides the first systematic survey of how appearance laws work in practice, and a compelling argument for extending their reach. The book offers case histories of invidious discrimination and a plausible legal and political strategy for addressing them. Our prejudices run deep, but we can do far more to promote realistic and healthy images of attractiveness, and to reduce the price of their pursuit.

THE BEAUTY BIAS

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