25 Quotes by Mark Simpson

The artistic disposition is little more than an extreme form of sulking.

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.

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’?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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