THE RUMOURS in the press that metrosexual man is dead have been greatly exaggerated.

It’s partly wishful thinking by those who were never happy with the seismic shift in masculinity that he represented, but mostly it arises simply from the endless need of the media and marketing industries to repackage old wine in new bottles. The metrosexual is dead. Long live the metrosexual . . .

In fact, the metrosexual — by which I mean narcissistic, sensitive, modern man — is anything but dead. Barring a nuclear winter or a strike by personal fitness trainers, the process of metrosexualisation, which has been under way since the 1980s and which introduced us to the male striptease in advertising (all those Levi’s ads) and men’s magazines (GQ, Arena, FHM), is going to continue. The global economy depends on it.

And it really is global: there has been enormous interest in the metrosexual in countries including India, Russia, China and Mexico. Men are half the population, so, except perhaps in North Korea and rural districts of Iran, they can no longer be left unmolested by advertising and fashion to go about earning money for their wives to spend.

Men must go to the shopping centre. They must buy their own underwear. They must check out other men and what they wear. They must be self-conscious. They must be consumers.

The same media that proclaims the metrosexual deceased also fêtes this year’s Big Brother winner: a Geordie metrosexual disco dancer who turned out to be straight but had the tabloids speculating on his orientation for weeks. It also publishes coquettish, semi-naked pictures of such modern male heroes as Gavin Henson, David Beckham and Freddie Ljungberg, not to mention the shaved, pumped pectorals of the entire Chelsea squad.

Moreover, in a Western world in which women have integrated into public life and as a result are no longer dependent on men in private life, men’s sense of self is no longer delivered by the workplace, or by being a husband and father. In fact, men today often don’t have a father — the metrosexual generation is one of “bastards”, raised by single mothers and fathered by corporate capitalism in the form of Nike, Sony and MTV.

Men’s identity, even more than women’s, is influenced by advertising and by how they spend their money. After all, unlike women they cannot rely on childbirth to provide them with at least one truly visceral, “real” experience. So metrosexualisation continues apace, even if this month it has been rechristened “übersexuality”.

It is worth recalling my original definition of the metrosexual, as distinct from the rather nebulous “family-centred, sensitive New Age guy” that marketeers dreamt up two years ago. A metrosexual is a male “living within easy reach of the metropolis because that’s where all the best shops, bars, gyms and hairdressers are. He may be officially heterosexual, homosexual or even bisexual, but that is immaterial because he has taken himself as his own love-object”.

Male narcissism and self-awareness, heavily influenced by advertising, is at the root of metrosexuality. Selfishness, not selflessness, is the key. The metrosexual may depend on consumer goods for his sense of self-worth, but compared with his father he is independent of women.

He isn’t — and never was necessarily — “in touch with his feminine side”, unless you consider self-regard to be an essentially feminine quality. And perhaps it is right that it should be that way: men can no longer rely on women, so they must look after themselves. Metrosexuality is, in part, a male survival strategy.

It is not, and never has been, about women. The metrosexual may love women; he may love them more passionately and sensually than his father could. But, unlike his father’s generation, he does not love them at the expense of his own self-love.

Marian Salzman, the author of The Future of Men, is typical of many women today in taking feminist achievements for granted but refusing to see the corollary: if women don’t need men to make them complete, then perhaps, in this atomised world, men don’t need — or, at least, can’t rely on — women to dress them, feed them and tell them what they are thinking or feeling, though they can still, apparently, rely on them to nag their menfolk and tell them what their future is.

Can you imagine what would happen if a man published a book called The Future of Women, in which he said that women must dedicate themselves more to men and their children? And that this would come about simply because he said so? According to Salzman, men are supposed to become more like women — nurturing, domesticated — yet at the same time she insists that they should become, in some indefinable way, more like men. Faced with these demands, men are even more likely to conclude that their own reflection is the only reliable lover.