Hey, here’s a news flash: straight dudes are paying increasingly more attention to their looks and really like to have sex. Here’s another news flash: gay men.
Journalist Mark Simpson coined the term “metrosexual” 20 years ago to refer to the then-groundbreaking trend of straight men essentially queer-eyeing themselves by focusing more on their grooming and personal style. Well that was then and the metrosexual is now the norm. Enter the spornosexual: the jacked up, tatted up, sexed up evolution or (de-evolution) of the straight man, equally inspired by athletes and porn stars.
According to Simpson, the spornosexual cares less about fashion and more about body, body, body:
With their painstakingly pumped and chiselled bodies, muscle-enhancing tattoos, piercings, adorable beards and plunging necklines it’s eye-catchingly clear that second-generation metrosexuality is less about clothes than it was for the first. Eagerly self-objectifying, second generation metrosexuality is totally tarty. Their own bodies (more than clobber and product) have become the ultimate accessories, fashioning them at the gym into a hot commodity – one that they share and compare in an online marketplace.
And the category is: beefcake. So straight guys are starting to look a lot more like gay porn stars and are taking to Instagram to sell what they’re twerking with. In other words, everyone wins.
I guess we could dissect the ever-changing definition of masculinity in a world progressively less defined by gender, and how we as society tend to conflate vanity with femininity and thus homosexuality — but then again we could watch the suitably-named Joe Cocking getting into the shower in this very special report from The Telegraph:
I’m gonna go with the Cocking. As I often do. Take a note, New York Times, this is how you cover hard news.