The trend-spotting authors who
popularized the term "metrosexual" to categorize straight men who exfoliated, wore Diesel jeans and took longer to primp than their girlfriends have decided that the two-year-old phenomenon is, well, so two years ago.
The new ideal, according to Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia and Ann O'Reilly in their new book, The Future of Men, is the "ubersexual." In contrast to metrosexuals, who, the authors write, risk being "sad sacks who seem incapable of retaining their sense of manhood in postfeminist times," ubersexuals "mark a return to the positive characteristics of the `real man' of yesteryear (strong, resolute, fair)." Yet they are poised to not only change a diaper but to discuss how they feel about it.
And unlike metrosexuals, "ubersexuals don't invite questions about their sexuality." The authors recently released a list of the "top 10 ubersexuals," with the singer Bono at the top, followed by George Clooney and former US president Bill Clinton.
Salzman, executive vice president of the advertising giant JWT, said that she was consulting last year for a men's skin-care line when she "realized there had been a push-back against metrosexuality, against the softness of it," and it led her to recommend "more clean-smelling than perfume-y" items.
"Men in my view don't want products that are derivative of female products," she said. "They want things that are male rather than female."
While identifying a tribe of metrosexuals ostensibly helped marketers reach that market, Salzman said her purpose was to sell her book. When the three authors'
previous book, Buzz: Harness the Power of Influence and Create Demand, was published in spring two years ago, "we wanted to prove our own hypothesis, that you could buzz something around the world without paying for advertising."
The word metrosexual never appears in that book, but Salzman used it while saying that she was running focus groups with trendily shod straight men. (The term was not their own: It had been coined in 1994, derisively, by Mark Simpson, a culture critic who derided "commodity fetishists" he encountered at a London men's fashion expo.)
A flurry of articles about metrosexuals appeared that spring and early summer in publications all over the world, including the New York Times, the Economist, the Financial Times of London and the Boston Herald. The start that summer of the television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy also lent currency to the term.
The word of the year for 2003 for both the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster: metrosexual.
Salzman said that ubersexuals would stand out as a distinct group, distinguishing themselves by reading Esquire or Sports Illustrated, shopping less but more
discriminatingly, and favoring men over women as their closest friends.
Daniel Peres, editor of Details, a
magazine described as the "metrosexual bible," said he grew to despise the word. "It turned more into a marketing tool, with businesses and publishers jumping on it, not a strong anthropologic look at the genders," he said.
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