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1 " Tattoos, after all, are a passionate, usually doomed assertion of mastery of your own destiny, or at least a defiant embrace of one that you cannot control. "
― Mark Simpson , Saint Morrissey
2 " Of course, fashions come and go but metrosexuality isn’t a fashion – it’s an epoch. It represents a fundamental shift in what men are allowed to be and to want. Men are now permitted to be ‘passive’ – inviting our gaze. "
― Mark Simpson
3 " In the 21st century men’s tits have not just rivalled but replaced women’s as the touchstone of ‘sexy’ in mainstream pop culture, even when the audience for them is other men. "
4 " Is there a support group for people who didn’t like ‘Brokeback Mountain’? We must, if the rave reviews and the newspaper reports are to be believed, be a very tiny — not to mention vulnerable — minority. Am I dead inside because I didn’t experience the torrent of emotions I’ve been reading about? Am I as emotionally crippled as Ennis because I didn’t blub and hug after sitting through this ‘visceral’ movie, but instead wanted to go and ‘help with the roundup’? "
5 " In a spornographic age it’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us by consumerism as merely attractive, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of nakedly narcissistic male metrosexuality. This masculine coquettish-ness, pleasing as it is, no longer offers an intense enough image. Or provokes enough lust. It’s just not very shocking or arousing any more. In fact, it’s just too… normal. To get our attention these days the sporting male body has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped gang-bang in the showers. "
6 " At the dawn of the second decade of the Twenty First Century, masculinity has been rendered so self-conscious in our mediated, mirrored world that even ‘regular guys’ are apparently just a fashion fad – this season’s accessory. "
― Mark Simpson , Metrosexy
7 " Contrary to what you have been told, metrosexuality is not about flip-flops and facials, ‘man-bags’ or ‘manscara’. Or about men becoming ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’. It’s about men becoming everything. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sexual division of bathroom and bedroom labour. It’s the end of sexuality as we’ve known it. "
8 " The artistic disposition is little more than an extreme form of sulking. "
9 " Bond is now the Bond Girl of the opening credits. It’s his silhouette we see – and nary a dancing naked babe in sight. Perhaps to compensate for this, in the actual film he gets his tits out a lot. He emerges from the sea glistening, showing off his pumped boobs, like Ursula Andress in ‘Dr No’ — save his nipples are more prominent. Bond has finally become his own Bond Girl. "
10 " Nearly thirty years on, despite Pejic’s unpopularity with some feminists and the closet-cases who write for US FHM, 1980s Marilyn and his shameless, shining desire to be desired looks more like a glamorous prophet, preparing the way for the Metrosexy 21st Century. "
11 " The world does not need a ‘gay Elvis’, for the original, with his black leather suit, pomaded pompadour, come-fuck-me eyes and radiant narcissism, was quite queer enough "
― Mark Simpson , Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity
12 " Sex is the theory; porn is the practice. "
13 " 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. "
14 " Spiderman and Superman were closeted bodybuilders: they wore bodysuits that decently covered their flesh and masks that disguised their identity; their lives were rigidly divided between body-less bourgeois respectability and muscular super-hero fantasy; they led a 'double-life' that no one knew about and were never to be seen at the gym. "
15 " bodybuilding has come to be seen as a means by which boys can turn desire into identification. "
16 " He-Man wins the day and thrusts his sword into the air, shouting, 'I HAVE THE POWER!!' as white lightning squirts out of its tip. "
17 " And so we find Fussell living alone in a flat unfurnished except for an exercise machine and 'A cardboard cut-out of Arnold with loin cloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian'. Thus the heterosexual bodybuilder's relationship to homosexuality is revealed as a sad kind of insubstantial shadow of it, a kind of mourning, a ghostly kind of love. "
18 " Not permitted to desire another man's penis, the bodybuilder phallicizes that which he is permitted to desire: his own body. "
19 " There’s a perverse and bitter joy in feeling unique, but you pay dearly. Morrissey "
20 " There’s a famous quote which goes something like, ‘You are what you are, having secretly become what you wanted to be’. Maybe there’s some truth to that. We like to think that society shapes us, but I don’t think that that’s the way it happens. Select, 1991 "
