Manners Maketh Metrosexuals

Featured image via Cobrasnake©

It’s easy to mock the matcha-wielding-loafer-wearing-mod-cut heterosexual man in 2025. In fact, it’s cheap. His name is probably ‘Felix’ or ‘Ollie.’ His voice is posh and low, like a constant yawn. He has silver earrings, clear eyes, and strangely luminous skin. 3 pairs of wool trousers. He is fundamentally contrived. He represents the shallow imitation of soft-masculinity, an uncanny disguise invented to sleep with or ‘date’ women – bear in mind that the word ‘dating’ in London is equally as meaningless as the word ‘masculinity’. 

This is to say: the man who semi-consensually strangles you during sex is the same one who wants your Jill Sanders flats.

But this cliche critique of the easy metrosexual target is cheap because it conveniently forgets its own history. Heterosexual men only perform (homosexual) affects of feminine sensitivity because only five years ago, they were sexually and romantically rewarded for doing so by the very women who now mock them. It’s an unfair but classic amnesia. Women fashionably make fun of the same men they desired six seasons ago.

The only mistake heterosexual men have made – an error that exemplifies their charm –  is being unbelievably late to the cultural party. The average man has only now cashed-in his golden ticket: the thinner the sole of his shoe, the more women he will win. 

But the costume party ended two hours ago, and you never want to be stuck alone at afters. As the unstoppable trickle-down of culture seeps into the masses, the average man adorns his loose-fit Diesel jeans (two silhouettes out of style) without realising that it’s now the Hedi-Slimane-manorexics who’ve been pulling all the girls. But the erotic allure of heterosexual stupidity persists: the man doesn’t understand this, and thus continues to perform what he believes to be a successful illusion of à la mode softness. This ignorance makes him hot.

Such is the tension between men and metropolitan decadence. The scent of testosterone will always overpower the scent of Le Labo. A gorilla in Rick Owens is a Silverback nonetheless. The heterosexual will – that masculine concentrate that built the pyramids and Parthenon – cannot be constrained in a handstitched straitjacket. Most heterosexual men dress to advance their romantic-sexual prospects, or to intellectually masturbate to the concept of themselves through the eyes of others. But isn’t that the metropolitan mode? London is a deviant sandbox that rewards style over substance. Don’t hate the small-plates player, as it were, hate the natty wine game.

I both deeply empathise with, and am profoundly disturbed by, performances of masculinity. My whole life has been a series of ill-fitting acts of palatable and unpalatable manners of manhood. My adolescence was a theatrical effort to win over men for validation and women for affection. Homosexuality is no-man’s-land in the incessant trench warfare between the sexes and I’m caught in the cultural crossfire. Woke women insist on my inherent misogyny and trad men insist on my inherent effeminacy. Though neither group ever says this to my face because my pecs are at least a -cup and something as basic as big biceps and a vaguely Australian accent is enough for people to think I’m incapable of participating in a politically sensitive conversation. They are half right.

But performative men are far more sinister to me than men that are unapologetically uninterested in pretending to be cultured. Metrosexuals steal the creative valor of queer people for their own hedonistic purposes (the best fashion designers are gay guys and the best DJs are dolls). 

The metrosexual adorns this uncanny but ultimately passing costume of stolen chic for his own goals. But he still perceives the queer people he benefits from as ornamentary and trivial – a joke that happens to be the necessary stepping-stone towards his prized weapon of seduction: worldliness. A psychoanalyst in Berlin told me three years ago that all people are homophobic. “It doesn’t mean that all people will hate you”, he said, “but that all people will treat you differently”. I now understand what he meant.

I prefer the authenticity of masculinity fifteen years ago, its clumsy critique of sissiness (what hegemonic culture labels ‘homophobia’). It blatantly refuses to conform to in-vogue standards of performative tolerance. It’s refreshing, even brave. Trad-mascs – those looksmaxxing historical-sentimentalists with a psychopathic twinkle in their eye – have the courage to say what they think, knowing it eradicates almost every possibility of romantic-sexual success. Many metrosexuals I’ve encountered are similarly prejudiced, no matter how many layers of virgin wool their feelings are smothered by. But they would never dare say it. They are fashionably allergic to sincerity and sacrifice. They know there is only one thing you aren’t allowed to be in London: uncouth. 

Editing your moral-political appearance so methodically is far more sinister to me. It represents the over-civilised ability to seamlessly shapeshift your feelings into a comfortable image that soothes whoever you are speaking to. This is the poetic way of saying you’re a liar. Other favourites include: ‘tact,’ ‘savoir-faire,’ and ‘he just gets along with everyone.’

The rise of the metrosexual (and the inevitable fall in the next decade) is a result of London reaching the end of its decadent tether. Metrosexuals epitomise the mimicry and manipulation metropolitan life rewards. They are desperately trying to produce charm but the instruction manual on how to do this is about 5 years out-of-date. So where else should they turn?

I don’t blame Felix when he plunders a battered pair of vintage McQueen lace-ups from the sordid depths of Vestiaire, successfully lowballing an unassuming victim in Derby. Because he knows the next time he’s on Kingsland Road his investment will be worth it. His date, blonde and gorgeous, will notice the shining leather. She’ll smirk slyly to herself, and think: “I know what I’m getting myself into. But I want to do it anyway.”