MG.co.za – Mark Simpson
There?s a war going on in the United States. A war on metros. After years of living under the cruel designer heel of those triumphant metrosexuals, poor old retrosexuals — alias ?regular guys?? — are fighting back. Old-time, unself-conscious, un-moisturised masculinity is in. Guys are guys again, with manly, painstakingly shaped and trimmed beards. They eat manly food, drive manly trucks and read manly books on manliness.
Or so you may have read. Truth be told, this is a phoney war. The ?menaissance?? is mendacious. This isn?t retrosexual at all, but hummersexual — a noisy, overblown, studied and frankly rather camp form of fake masculinity that likes to draw attention to itself and its allegedly old-fashioned ?manliness??, but tends — like driving an outsized military vehicle in the suburbs — to be a tad counterproductive.
The hummersexual, you see, doth protest too much. Rather than ?reclaiming your manhood?, hummersexuality tends to make people wonder whether there?s some kind of compensation going on. This is a fetishised, ?strapped-on??, unsustainable, gas-guzzling masculinity which, like the metrosexuality it is supposedly a reaction against, is a needy product of consumerism and media. After all, it is Madison Avenue — with its Hummer, its Burger King ?manthem?? (?We are men, hear us roar??) and its Dodge ?Anything but cute?? ads — that styled it.