ROMEO is a leading man. He has a winning smile and an easy charm. And with a
Latin-lover name like that, he ought to. But last week Romeo Stodart, one of
the Magic Numbers pop group, was feeling distinctly uneasy. He had just been
thwacked by the fat police.
The band stormed off the set of Top of the Pops after the presenter, Richard
Bacon, introduced them thus: “What do you get when you put two brothers and
two sisters in a band? A big fat melting pot.”
“We thought it was unfunny”, said Stodart. “We made a stand because it’s all
about being true to ourselves. You see us how we are and that’s it. There’s
no hiding, we are totally ourselves.”
The fleshy foursome had already endured being called chubby, metabolically
challenged and writing songs “to diet for”. So the Magic Numbers walked away
and became a band on the run. Well, waddle.
All right, enough fat jokes. Podgy people have had enough. Perhaps we plumbed
new depths in the annals of body tyranny last week when The Sun published a
hall of shame of “moobies” — its neologism for male boobs. Among those
mocked for their droopy chests were Peter Stringfellow, Danny DeVito and
Michael Winner.
After male boobs, it was the turn of the stomach. We do not know how Tony
Blair took it when his prime ministerial midriff was dismissed as flabby by
one tabloid last week. A photograph of him diving into the sea off a yacht
was captioned “Hunk or Chunk?” “Has Mr Blair been piling on the holiday
pounds?” it asked.
What is happening to us as a nation? Was Churchill’s girth ever a matter of
debate? Or John Major’s moobies? Surely this wasn’t what was meant by the
body politic.
Still, if Blair is smarting over the unflattering pictures he has only to lean
across the breakfast table and ask Cherie how she has coped over the years
with constant jibes about her appearance.
And that’s the point. First Cherie, now Tony. Men are being increasingly
subjected to the same scrutiny as women.
For centuries it has been woman’s fate to be manipulated and rendered
inadequate by the tyranny of perfection. As generations of females who have
attempted to diet, tweeze, shave, bleach and exfoliate their way to a
beautiful body might say, “Welcome to the real world. Now it’s your turn.”
The aesthetic imperative has arrived for men.
Women have long succumbed to magazines that promised them “Thin Thighs in 30
Days”. Now monthlies such as Men’s Health urge the male readers to “Flex
Your Pecs” and “Lose Your Gut”. This is true gender equality and — Ouch! . .
. there go those nasal hairs — it hurts. Men are discovering what women have
always known: beauty comes at a price.
Of course, male charms have always been prized. Adonis, the beautiful youth of
Greek legend, has inspired many poems and paintings over the centuries.
Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a lake and pined away.
Helen of Troy may have been the most beautiful woman in the world, but
Paris, her illicit lover, must surely have had his own allure.
But that was nearly 3,000 years ago. This is now. The late 20th century
celebrated the charmlessness of skinhead, punk and grunge. Somehow men who
rejected fashion have fathered boys who can think of nothing else. Recent
research shows that males of all ages are worrying about their appearance as
never before. A sample of teenage boys, average age 15, canvassed by a teen
magazine earlier this year said that they agonised about their physique as
much as teenage girls did.
And last week Mintel, the consumer research company, released its latest
profile of the British male. No fewer than one in seven men were said to be
“anxiety-ridden” about the pressure of wanting it all: health, wealth, more
time, better homes, jobs and holidays. How they looked was part of the
problem.
Certainly many men are finding the whole aesthetic imperative alarming. And
now we have the phenomenon of “fat lit” as weighty males record their
struggles with their mammoth appetites and exploding waistlines.
Eric Schlosser blazed the trail in America with his self-abasing Fast Food
Nation. Now the British columnist David Aaronovitch, hitting 46 and 18
stone, has given us an account of checking into a fat camp. And William
Leith, who has spent years wrestling with his weight, has recounted the
struggle in his gruesomely honest The Hungry Years — Confessions of a Food
Addict.
Leith recalls the men’s magazines that exhorted him to become an Adonis: “Lose
your gut. Shrink your gut. Firmer abs in 28 days. Get better sex. Get more
sex. Get her to agree to anything.”
They told him how to get a six-pack stomach. “Me, I have a one-pack”, he
writes. “My stomach looks like dough after it has risen, before it has been
baked.”
He remembers seeing a television advertisement for Reebok running shoes in
which a fat, disembodied belly chases a man all over town, with the slogan
“Belly’s gonna get ya!”. “That’s my belly. That’s my belly out there,” he
admits. “It looks like dough.”
Leith’s book, however deft and amusing, is a serious attempt to understand the
narcissism of our society. Where do these aesthetic tyrannies come from?
After all, the outer is not the inner: having a flat stomach says nothing
about one’s spiritual wellbeing. We are not superior people for being slim.
Nor are we pathetic for having a paunch.
Leith argues that the market economy is feeding our insecurities. “Consumerism
makes us feel needy and insecure and hollow,” he says. “It has already done
that to women; now it is the turn of men to be objectified.”
Grooming products for men are booming. “I think people are now critical of
men’s appearance in a way they never were”, says Neil Hourston, planning
director of the advertising agency TBWA. “It used to be the case that
looking ‘rough and ready’ was okay. Now if you do look rough and ready,
people think you look rough and not ready for work. Now you have to look
groomed and natural.”
Men are pursuing physical perfection even to the operating table. According to
the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, the numbers of males
undergoing cosmetic surgery, including rhinoplasty (nose jobs), earpinning
and facelifts, rose by 64% between 2003 and 2004.
It seems that men are only too willing to be victims, as vulnerable as any
woman who thinks she will feel better if she buys a new lipstick or loses a
couple of pounds. As an acquaintance said last week: “It seems like abs are
to men what boobs are to women.”
Are men the new women, abs the new boobs? Are we seeing the feminisation of
society? Are men all turning into Bridget Jones, counting their glasses of
pinot noir (the new chardonnay) and totting up their calorie intake every
day? No, says psychologist Oliver James, author of Britain on the Couch,
it’s more complex than that. “I think homogeneity is being imposed upon men
and is making them feel inadequate,” he said. “At the same time there is
double pressure to be an alpha male and be beautiful with it.”
If the male sex is becoming increasingly bewildered, we can hardly blame it.
The stakes are being raised every day. We have already lived through New
Man, New Lad, New Bloke, New Dad and Emo Boy — the latter a new man but much
more weepy. We are falling over men who are in touch with their feminine
side. Things have gone too far. Now they have to rediscover the masculine.
According to Marian Salzman, a trend-spotter who popularised the “metrosexual”
(a man who uses moisturiser and is in touch with his feelings), the next big
thing in male sexuality is the Ubersexual. In her book, The Future of Men,
she describes Ubersexuals as “supremely confident (without being obnoxious),
masculine, stylish and committed to uncompromising quality in all areas of
life.”
A near-relative of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch or Superman, the Ubersexual is the
most attractive, most dynamic and compelling man of his generation. But
here’s the catch. Every man thinks that of himself, doesn’t he? Cesare
Bonazza
