Sports Calendar

Certainly if April’s Cargo was aimed at metrosexuals like me, it missed. On its letters page, a reader complained that despite following a Cargo article on the subject, his “body sugaring” experience had been unhappy. Every page seemed to wrestle awkwardly with the eternal question: what is the precise ratio between machismo and sensitivity that will get me laid?

For myself, when I came across it, I saw metrosexuality as a light-hearted concept that allowed the question to be asked. Like me, Dylan Jones, who as editor of GQ is proud to count metrosexuals among his readers, refuses to be embarrassed by it. “I don’t,” he says, “think metrosexual is a pejorative word. I think it’s absolutely fine.” Is he one? “Yes, bits of me are metrosexual and I would rather be called metrosexual than a reader of Nuts.”

Nevertheless, Merriam-Webster Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2003 is in trouble. It has been commercialised, parodied, turned into a marketing niche. Men resent it. It is one thing to covet designer labels, another to be labelled yourself.

Noguera of Zoo agrees. “The guys we sell to would hate to call themselves anything like that. I would be offended if someone called me metrosexual , just because— it sounds so bloody wet. If you launched a magazine with the strapline ‘for the metrosexual man’ you would sell no copies at all. What kind of a prick would describe himself as metrosexual?” Pricks like Dylan Jones and me, I suppose, but what is interesting is that even as metrosexuality is being clubbed to death, puppyish new labels are springing up to replace it. Marian Salzman’s new book, The Future of Man, coins “übersexual”.

Metrosexuals, Salzman says, look like “sad sacks incapable of retaining their sense of manhood”. Übersexuals are indisputably Real Men but they also change nappies and speak about how they feel about it. Übersexual celebrities include Bono and George Clooney.

And then there is the Heteropolitan, invented this year by Men’s Health magazine to describe men who enjoy the pub and the grooming parlour but are “surprisingly committed to relationships and family life”. We look, I suppose, to David Cameron.

But what’s in a name? Übersexuals and Heteropolitans sound to me like metrosexuals riding the same road with new number plates. If metrosexuality is dead, it is the word, not the idea. And when the concept itself finally dies it may be because it no longer needs to be expressed. My communicants at the altar of youth, the guys in charge of Zoo and Nuts, don’t accept the terms of the old battle with which Microwave Man and I re-engaged two years ago.

“Young men don’t have those hang-ups. They don’t have those internalised discussions about whether something is masculine or not,” explains Noguera. And Hilton asks: “What is your feminine side? What are these emotions that women own, anyway?” Oh glorious, gel-enhanced, totty-phoaring youth! Tomorrow — how could I not have seen it? — belongs to you.

The Übersexuals

George Clooney
Gary Lineker
Pierce Brosnan
José Mourinho
Ewan McGregor
Brad Pitt

The Heteropolitans

Vernon Kay
David Cameron
Andrew Flintoff
Heath Ledger
Jamie Oliver
Jonathan Ross