David Beckham: The decline and fall of metrosexuality

I hope it is over. Can I go and wallow in my body odour without feeling like I have committed the basest of violations of the tenets of human civilization? Rather than snuff it out with the most liberal application of L’essence Dans Seus le Fleur (available for $75 a whiff). Let my unruly hair escape through my baseball cap and all the crevices in between, without having to spend a whole lube of gel, trying to teach it manners. Lay still! Rollover! Down boy! Can I go to the bathroom and with one imperious sweep of my hand knock all the hair products down to the floor, now that I won’t need all those revitalizing mudpacks for my hair? Just imagine how much I’ll save without the massage oils, aromatherapy, blackhead extractions, defoliation, hair depilation, and 15 headed Medusa type electric razors that take off the whole dermis?
A simple Speed stick and a $5 Jergens shampoo, please. Can we all go back to those ways? A shirt that I can flog and do not having to get framed on the wall because it cost me my paycheck? The buyer nowadays is only concerned whether his body is good enough for a shirt, not the other way around. It was enough that you were clad. And I am sick of those Calvin Klein undie ads because the only people who can wear it and look like Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham, are Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham. The last time I bought some, I checked and I still looked like me. All this costs a pretty packet.
The big deal is that the metrosexual is the ultimate consumer. We get gift certificates to tanning salons and hair depilation centres because of this obsession with looking well groomed. Metrosexuality has very little to do with pleasing your partner and everything to do with an acceptable form of narcissism. Actually, Narcissus was the first practising metrosexual, to whom looking good was everything. He drowned trying to see his reflection in the water but nowadays we have vanity mirrors. Otherwise we would have had an epidemic on our hands. Plus, you can’t trust the water. M Night Shyamalan has made sure of that. Even cell phones are part of the phenomenon.
Mark Simpson on David Beckham
“Beckham is the uber-metrosexual, not just because he rams metrosexuality down the throats of those men churlish enough to remain retrosexual and refuse to pluck their eyebrows, but also because he is a sportsman, a man of substance—a “real” man—who wishes to disappear into surfaceness in order to become ubiquitous—to become media.”
“The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis — because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they’re pretty much everywhere.”
So David please do us a favour. Don’t just retire, but when you do, make an announcement that these are the last days of metro and set us all free. Merks, disband and we will think the better of you. Or better still just retire from football and let the people who care nothing for sweaty jerseys play. There is nothing a Speed stick and a clean shirt cannot solve. But tweezer our eyebrows in the process! Did anyone tell Michael Musto about that part? Lets just get over: Yeah, we lost but we still smell good. Yaaaaaarrrrghhhh!!