Metrosexual man bows to red-blooded übersexuals

Via Paul Harris at the Guardian Unlimited:

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 .

Posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 10:33 am.