Thomas, over at Good Morning Houston gives yet another example of stupid bullshit themes the media produces by linking to an article written by one “Harry Blount” and printed in The Guardian. (Unless it’s really “Harriet” Blount. Wouldn’t surprise me). As if the spectacle of an American presidential candidate candidate for president (I’ll be damned if a fucking traitor will be described as presidential anything, in this blog) describe himself as a “metrosexual” like some limpwristed Frenchman wasn’t enough, now the geniuses that came up with that wiener winner are back:

Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly, the trio of trend-spotters who popularised the term “metrosexual” in 2003, think men are going to have to harden up their act if they’re going to stand up to the continued incursion of women into the male sphere.
The feminist victory is complete: women have taken men’s jobs, handed the baby over to them for a cuddle at three in the morning and got them to work child-friendly hours.

The victory is complete? No shit, Sherlock. That’s the only way I can describe it, if men are now taking advice on how to be men from people named Marian, Ira, and Ann. The only one who might be male is Ira, and I have my doubts about him.

Her.

It.

Whatever.

Despite all this training, men remain emotionally crippled. They still talk for a cold, brutal six minutes in the average phone call, while women talk for an empathetically correct 20 minutes.

These idiots have never met my friend Kevin. I’m an old-school guy. The phone is need-to-communicate. Not need-to-talk. Kevin definately disagrees. He’lll call up anytime he’s driving somewhere…. just driving somewhere is too boring, but conversation is entertaining! So it’s my job to chit-chat for 20 minutes until he gets where he’s going. I don’t mind a call now and again, but if I’m in the middle of an online game, there are people waiting on me. Or maybe I was doing something else. (Kevin knows it drives me nuts, and does not do it as much anymore–now that’s a friend!) Does this sound like a cold, brutal, six-minute conversation? Well, if it were up to me, maybe. But that’s the way I am; I don’t like yakking on the phone for the sake of yakking.

Throw in the boom in artificial insemination, advances in genetic technology and the possibility of cloning, and man is on the verge of redundancy.

Yeah. Right. The “artificial” stuff’s got to come from somewhere, and personally, I think most women still prefer a service of draft over the bottled stuff if you know what I mean. And cloning would work both ways. (Woot! Love-slave clones! Take me to Gor!)

These batterings to the male ego have, in the past few years, moulded men into an extreme, mutated form of metrosexual — “emo boys”, a label taken from a particularly sappy, emotional, “sincere” branch of indie music.

Well, yeah, if you’re the kind of person who listens to sappy, emotional, sincere indie music, instead of real rock n’ roll, with electric guitars, like God meant us to listen to. I suppose that could “mould” men into something totally fucked up.

Salzman describes emo boys as men “who listen to pretentious ‘you’ve probably never heard of them’ bands, dress with more care and style than most girls, and read in-depth books, while sipping on low-fat lattes before they take their Vespa home. Their hair, a special point of interest, is usually styled to look unkempt, wooshed over to the side. They are generally tall and thin. They appreciate the arts.”

Just for the record, not one damn bit of that fits me.

Bands? You definitly heard of Kiss, ELO, Foriegner, Joan Jett, Def Leppard, Das Skorpians…

My clothes? No holes (well, not many), and clean? Good to go.

Read in-depth books? WTF is an “in-depth book?” I read for entertainment. Exploding spaceships, bad guys getting blown away, elven princesses, evil villians, flawed heroes, a little sex on the side… Deep enough for me.

Hair? Oh yeah, I still have some. Combed it last week. I think it’s time for my second haircut this year.

Tall and thin? Hahahahahahehehehehehe hehehahahahaha hohohohohoh…

Arts? Ok, I like classical stuff, sculptures, painting; anything that I can look at and go, “that’s incredible. I’d never be able to do that in a million years.” If I can look at it and think “I could have puked something that good, and come up with the same line of bullshit after a six-pack,” it isn’t Art.

So what are the Three Furies (of castration) writing about now?

Poor, benighted emo boys. After all this careful physical and emotional styling to fit in with what they think girls like, the terrible thing is, chicks just don’t dig ’em.

No.
Fucking.
Shit.

Goddamn, you stupid bitches (Ira included), did you think we learned to climb down out of the trees, challenge every animal on this planet for supremacy, and build a fucking civilization with metrosexuals? Go ahead. Pull the other one. And Ira, they ain’t gonna give you any, so stop sucking up to them and grow a pair.

Now listen up. We got here because we were men, even before we were homo sapiens. When Shere Khan the tiger decided to eat Mowgli the jungle boy, Mowgli didn’t try to understand him, he grabbed a goddamned burning branch and said, “Try this new invention. It’s called FIRE, asshole!” If women were hardwired to avoid men like that, who could survive and prosper in a dangerous environment, we’d never have made it from stone knives and bearskins to ICBM’s and body armor. The proto-human race would have died out around Shere Khan’s lunchtime.

Soon after the evolution of emo boy, Rachel Elder wrote in the New York Observer how much she and her sex loathed what she’d taken to calling “whimpsters”.

“It’s not that he’s femme-y or secretly gay,” wrote Elder. “He’s straight, all right. But this new breed of sensitive straight guy is tricky. He looks masculine enough, in a scruffy, tending-toward-boyish way. But he’s vulnerable, emotional, subject to mood swings and fits of self-searching.

Which just goes to show that American women have a fucking clue. English women used to, that’s why England ruled the oceans and a worldwide empire, while the French, Germans, and Russians argued over who was top dog on a tiny pissant continent that’s too damn cold in the winter, and full of Frenchman, Germans, and Russians during the summer. But then the ladies got all Victorian and quit putting out. Within a couple of generations, the rest of their empire waved bye-bye. Apparently, from this drivel now coming out of the “United Kingdom” today, things haven’t gotten much better. The most macho PM they’ve produced in the last 50 years was a woman (although the current one isn’t bad). Which proves that the English still got it, they’re just not sure where they put it.

“He’ll sound sensitive. He is sensitive — but often more sensitive to his own emotions than to those of the woman sitting across from him at dinner.

“She may very well be sipping her pinot noir and wondering why her emo boy is droning on at such length about himself. Could it be that what she thought at first blush was sensitivity turns out to be good old-fashioned self-absorption?”

Could it be she needs to learn to hang out in bars where they make real drinks? And find real men?

In all this blizzard of acronyms, of whimpsters and emos, Salzman and Elder may be on to something.

Ya think? Drugs are a distinct possibility here.

The whole problem with the metrosexual phenomenon was that it confused sensitivity about your looks with sensitivity for your fellow human. Show me a man who exfoliates, and I’ll show you a man who looks in the mirror more times than he asks anybody a question.

The whole problem with the metrosexual “phenomenom” is that it was cooked up by a bunch of people who couldn’t tell the difference between image and reality. They imagined what men would be like if they designed them, and sent millions of young impressionable women on the hunt for the image of the “perfect girl’s guy.” Predictably, they got the reality of girly guys. Well, duh.

The average 18-year-old scaffolder walking down Newcastle’s Bigg Market on a Saturday night will certainly have ironed his expensive short-sleeved shirt, put gel in his air and dabbed on a bit of moisturiser before going out for the evening. It won’t stop him redesigning your face with his bag of chips if you ask him whether he’s a metrosexual.

Oh, the nausea… I may hurl.

David Beckham,the high priest of metrosexuality, may have cupboards full of sarongs and styling tongs. It doesn’t make him any more sensitive when it comes to pondering whether to have an affair with Rebecca Loos.

Follow that link for David and tell me it was the sarongs and tongs that made a lesbian switch sides for a while. Yeah, right. As for him, that decision was made below the waist, and don’t doubt it.

So, what’s the answer for confused homo sapiens, shoved from unthinking, bring-home-the-bacon lunk to self-obsessed whimpster in the space of a generation.

To stop listening to fucking idiots like these!

The answer, according to Salzman, is more acronyms and buzzwords.

You weren’t listening, dude. To me, anyway.

Man must aim to become ubersexual by loading up with “M-ness”. Ubersexuals, according to Salzman, “are the most attractive (not just physically), most dynamic and most compelling men of their generations. They are supremely confident (without being obnoxious), masculine, stylish, and committed to uncompromising quality in all areas of life.

“Compared with the metrosexual, the ubersexual is more into relationships than self. He’s not sensual and not at all self-conscious. He dresses for himself more than others (choosing a consistent personal style over fashion fads). Like the metrosexual, the ubersexual enjoys shopping, but his approach is more focused; he shops for particular items that enhance his collection rather than shopping as entertainment (he has better things to do than hang out at the mall). His best friends are male; he doesn’t consider the women in his life his ‘buddies’.”

In other words, a guy needs to act just like a guy. Well, I’ve got a better idea. Men need to stop paying attention to all the “authorities” who come up with crap like this, and just do it. Be themselves. Nobody likes a faker, and nobody likes someone who slavishly follows the fad of the minute. The ironic fact is, the “man that they’re trying to make” here wouldn’t listen to their drivel long enough to abuse it like this.

After laying out this precise, long list of demands, Salzman distills it down to two people: George Clooney and Donald Trump.

No. Shit. Men’s men, who aren’t going to go for that BS. Well, Trump at least. Clooney’s a H-wood freak, who knows what he’s thinking behind that rugged face? But, what’s this? is the author of the article finally getting fed up with the tripe of Two Nags and a Gelding?

It seems to me that there’s only one quality that links those two men, and it doesn’t appear on the Salzman shopping list. It’s called “Being rich”.

Which is why you don’t see “Ubu Roi” right behind their names!

Salzman prefers to call it “M-ness”, a new Salzman term for maleness; maleness with a twist. M-ness is: “A masculinity that combines the best of traditional manliness (strength, honour, character) with positive traits traditionally associated with females (nurturance, communicativeness, co-operation).

Oh great. Back off the deep end again. More jargon with which to confuse the impressionable, the young, and the retarded.

“A mode of living that is personalised and gender neutral, without being gender ambivalent. Also known as My-ness. A lifestyle that emphasises higher-quality emotional and physical pleasures, male pleasures that come from knowing oneself and one’s potential.”

What the fuck is “gender neutral without gender ambivilent?” And shouldn’t those word pairs have hyphens? Does this nitwit actually think these things up, or is it some random game of mad-libs she’s playing with us all?

A lot of Salzman thinking is best summed up in another acronym — cobblers.

Close. I prefer “bollocks” myself. Fortunately, the author of the Guardian article is about tired of the total bullshit by this point, too.

In what way can Donald Trump be said to specialise in nurturance, communicativeness and co-operation, when he’s best known for being an absolutely bloody ruthless, terrifying philanderer?

Salzman also tends to look at the crisis of modern man without considering the crisis of modern woman. Her team of trendspotters claim they did a lot in the mid-Nineties to popularise the term “singleton”, the thirtysomething Bridget Jones hooked on chardonnay and longing for a husband.

Thereby proving that they’re braggarts, as well as bullshit artists. And seriously in love with battery-powered toys. Worse, if they’re right, they helped cause the crisis of modern woman.

In this book, it’s as if the singleton has stumbled into a corner, died of alcohol poisoning and become extinct. The only reference to the singleton in the book is to her Japanese incarnation: in Japan, unmarried women over 25 are nicknamed “Christmas cake” because no one wants to eat Christmas cake after December 25.

And nobody should be listening to overripe bullshit either. “We will sell no whine before it’s time!”

Well, the Christmas cakes and the singletons are still there. And they’re still keen to find a husband; ie man, metrosexual or ubersexual or whatever, is not yet redundant.

But he could go about pairing with the Christmas cakes and singletons in a more effective way. In among the cobblers, Salzman has a general point that does have a ring of truth to it. If men desperately try to be like women, then women won’t really see the point of them. It’s time for them to be a bit more manly again.

Yep. I can’t argue with that. But let’s look back over this entire article and translate it into plain English (or American English, as we like to call it):

“My stupid lesbian editor told me I have to write an article about this dyke con artist she reads, but I know what the hell I want to be as a man and this isn’t it.”