by Jenny Burton
Toby Miller, Professor of English, Sociology, 
and Women's Studies and Director of Program in Film and Visual Culture at the University of California, came to Brisbane over April and May 2006 as a Queensland Government Smart Returns Fellow and Distinguished Visitor at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). As part of the Queensland Government's Smart State initiative, the Fellowship program invites back previous residents who have made a distinguished global contribution in their field of professional work. Prof Miller is a prolific academic author, editor, international speaker, and respected public figure. With over 20 authored/edited books, and around a hundred book chapters and journal articles published over an academic career spanning 20 years, he has addressed public audiences worldwide through television appearances, radio presentations internationally and in print and online, the latter mostly for BBC World News.
Currently he is the editor of international journal Television & New Media, co-editor of Social Identities, US associate editor of Social Semiotics, and consulting editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and his areas of research interest include media and cultural studies, social, cultural and political theory, class, gender, race, sport, and citizenship. In his role as Distinguished Guest, Professor Miller gave 6 public lectures at QUT informed by his current research into Hollywood's global dominance, the emergence of the metrosexual, new media (in particular news), entertainment and the games industry, global academic futures, and cultural citizenship. The following discussion draws from and revolves around Miller's longstanding interests in sport, gender, sex, politics, and the media, and more recently his work and lecture on the metrosexual, a topic which offers an opportunity to explore the confluence of these themes.
Jenny Burton spoke to Toby Miller on his visit to Australia and this interview took place at the Creative Industries Precinct, Queensland University of Technology on 25 May 2006.
JB: After your arrival there was a change to your scheduled public lectures here at QUT. Your paper on the metrosexual replaced your lecture on The Entertainment Media, which you incorporated into the following week's scheduled talk on Information Media, the topic then becoming a discussion about Infotainment. Why the decision to include this metrosexual paper at the last minute?
TM: Once I'd arrived I wanted to broaden the constituency of people who might be interested in what I'd have to say beyond the usual crowd of creationists, and I wanted an opportunity to cover more of the terrain that is part of my professional work, to include metrosexuality, cultural citizenship, and the clash of civilizations, as well as material that touches on issues of policy or media studies.
JB: My own research on the metrosexual was stimulated by the absence of critical academic discussion around commercial masculine grooming cultures, particularly in British cultural studies and the phenomenon of the new man, which tends to annex beauty to the wider theoretical works of fashion, with grooming making fleeting, untheorised appearances. Also, I was quite overwhelmed by the comparative lack of work coming from the Australian academy on new masculinities; period. What stimulated your interest in the metrosexual?
TM: I often write about things because people ask me to, and I was asked to write something about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which had also been the case with a request to write about Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and the 'First Penis.' After I'd done the 'First Penis' essay some years ago in Our Monica, Ourselves, I was updating it and became interested in talking about ways in which the advertising industry had, along with associated sectors, been trying to constitute new kinds of subjectivity; or as they would say, tap into and recognize new identities. So, I'd been doing a lot of work on what appeared to be a) the discourse of the new man, or whatever term one uses, but b) the material correlatives of this, at the level of commodifying industries and conduct by men and those around them. When I was re-casting the Clinton material for potential later use, and writing about Queer Eye For The Straight Guy for GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, I came to learn of the discourse of the metrosexual, which I'd not previously been familiar with. It seemed like an interesting area to visit on this particular topic, not necessarily as an accurate description, but as a purposive, efficacious prescription. Now I've almost finished a book called Madeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention. It will feature some of this work as part of a wider argument about cloning sameness in the US, from faith to pharmacology.
JB: In that GLQ article you suggest that one way to understand Queer Eye is as a professionalisation of queerness; a form of management consultancy for conventional masculinity. In my research area these management consultants, taste-shapers, cultural intermediaries, whichever you will, are the grooming editors of men's glossy lifestyle magazines and they're all women. So, I think it's quite fascinating that the traditional hegemony of masculinity seems to be opening up to embrace knowledges and practices of women and gay men who were previously marginalized and/or ridiculed by it. In your book Sportsex you cautiously suggest that commercialization of the male body has positive potential for destabilizing gender polarities, with capitalism's (unintended) undercutting of crucial aspects of patriarchal relations, but in your more recent discussion around Queer Eye and the metrosexual you don't mention anything about their potential contribution to mainstream acceptance and tolerance of queers. Do you think that the wave of gay programs, characters, advertisements and so on that you talk about in that paper, and your forthcoming chapter in Dana Heller's book, may challenge deep-rooted discourses of homophobia within traditional masculinity and masculinist popular culture?
TM: Well one can only hope so! Sportsex was written at a time of great hopefulness for destabilizing gender politics. It was also written as a polemical move to try to show that sports, so long derided by the left and some feminists (though not the many feminists involved in sport) as being irredeemable for progressive politics, could be something in the arena of progressive change, however accidentally and however contingently. Perhaps the difference that you've witnessed-and it's not a difference that I was aware of until you mentioned it-is because the wholesale commodification of male subjectivity witnessed in something like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is actually about re-asserting, re-solidifying very conventional masculinity. That conventional masculinity has long relied on women's work and queer work, or gay work at least, for its style. Think simply of the fact that traditionally, about three quarters of men's underwear in Australia has been bought by women, and think of the fact that hairdressing salons, particularly those that are beyond the conventional barber shop, have had higher proportions of gay men historically than many other professions. You see that there has always been a contribution by women and gay men to straight men's look and professionalism. The question is, has that ever led to a feminization of the public sphere or recognition of the legitimacy and centrality of queerness? Maybe not up to now, so perhaps I'm just feeling a little more negative about that; maybe it's because, unlike the case of Sportsex, I'm not trying to be polemical about an area that I want to bring to people's attention so that it's not just the province of those who love or hate sports, but the province of all people who think the popular is worth analyzing. Maybe it's also that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy did seem as though it was the ultimate in commodification/governmentalisation of queerness as a set of techniques that could be applied and then cast aside. At one level one might say, 'why not,' or 'fair enough' or whatever, but again, if it's done in the service of retaining conventional straight masculinity, then one has to ask how progressive it actually is. These things are not laid out in advance for us to read off with certainty; they emerge historically and spatially, both in terms of their own lives and, even more, our analysis of them. So I've only spent a short time here in Australia. Whilst I'm familiar with, and was no doubt a contributor-in a minor way- to Australian masculinity in the past, it's hard for me to say precisely where queerness and conventional masculinity collide right here right now; that's much more an area in which you're an expert.
JB: Thanks, but not really, well not quite yet anyway! Specifically to your research area then, in Sportsex you suggested that while it's still about toughness, sport is equally about beauty, with the NFL now marketing its players as sex symbols. Is this necessarily a new thing, after all we had 'gorgeous' George Best, Kevin Keegan, Formula One's James Hunt, and over here Warwick Capper.
TM: Captain Cucumber as he was affectionately known!
JB: But they were all marketed as sex symbols, so what's changed?
TM: Right. You're absolutely correct they were marketed as sex symbols. Warwick Capper was promoted to the gay male market as part of the decision to move the South Melbourne Swans football club from Victoria to New South Wales to become the Sydney Swans. It was felt that other codes of football in Australia had traditionally eschewed the gay audience and so they were an available target. Some of the things discussed in Sportsex were appearing quite early in 1986, 87, 88. In the case of James Hunt, that's a very specific instance because of the nature of motor sports; it's an individual sport, a ruling-class sport, and many of the sponsorships associated with it are for, let's say, unusual rather than typical men: high-performance vehicles, colognes, you name it. I think Hunt was part of that ethos. George Best certainly is an interesting case because one of the things that marked him out was the same thing that marked out The Beatles; namely, apart from extraordinary skills specific to the industry they were in, there was also an ordinariness about them. Association footballers can look quite ordinary-the men involved don't have superhuman bodies like linebackers in the National Football League or centres in the National Basketball Association. And Best represents a moment in history when a certain ordinariness twinned with beauty was of great significance. You see the same thing in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. television series just a couple of years earlier in the United States, which was designed to show people in the US that not necessarily tall, not necessarily physically massive men could be objects of sexual appeal to women. It was meant to be the everyman's version of James Bond. Best, like a number of other subsequent football players, embodied replicables ordinariness, of course twinned with beauty and exceptional skill. But to look at the guy, particularly when he was young and before he was hugely on the booze, he was a wraith of a figure. So it seems to me that yes, you're right, there are examples from the past. I think one can explain them as related to the trends I talk about in Sportsex.
JB: You also suggested in Sportsex that sportsmen are commercial figures as well as athletic ones. Again, doesn't sport have quite a long commercial history with grooming products in particular? In the 1950s Denis Compton endorsed Brylcreem in advertising campaigns. As early as 1910 in the US Gillette were sponsoring major league baseball, and in return players and teams advertising its products, and particularly after World War Two the main spokesmen for grooming products in advertising came increasingly from the sporting world. If these players 'branded' grooming products in say the 1950s, what's so different do you think about Ian Thorpe and David Beckham for instance?
TM: Really, really good points. Obviously any time you posit a huge epistemological or commercial break, when you say 'newness is here,' you open yourself up to legitimate criticism from those who have a more acute historical sensitivity, and there is no doubt that there is a lead that can be drawn back to Denis Compton or Keith Miller, also a cricketer from that era paid to make Brylcreem part of his habitus.
JB: Cricketers, footballers and Brylcreem, Henry Cooper for Brut. Did you have Brut 33 here in Australia? Henry Cooper the popular boxer advertised Brut in the UK
TM: Henry Cooper/'Enry's 'Ammer-absolutely! Don't remember about Australia, though. My adolescence was split between three countries. And yes, there are very important connections into the past. I think the shift is that it's so widespread. It's also often not connected to things that were considered absolutely everyday appurtenances of a man's life, whether working class or middle class, like gel to hold the hair in place so that it wouldn't look sloppy when wearing a suit or whatever. Of course Compton and Miller, ironically, either didn't use the product they were endorsing, or they were endorsing a product that didn't work, since their great manes of hair would notoriously fly off their heads, as it were, in chaotic directions that no merchandiser would have been happy to see! I think there was a lot of this, as you say, but in a much more conventional way that didn't touch on sexuality. It was much more about conventional masculinity and the minimal amount of toiletry work required. Someone's got to shave, someone's got to have a pomade to hold their hair in place, so why not this? I think the Henry Cooper Brut is a very interesting case. I'd forgotten about that and should have written about it for Sportsex, because it was an instance of somebody who represented very conventional white working-class masculinity via pugilism, albeit with a heart of gold and a certain sophistication-one used to see that in his performances on quiz shows on television after his retirement-endorsing Brut. I think it's fair to say that Brut, which of course had Cary Grant as a board member and spokesperson, was attempting to take what was seen as gay, or very much a ruling-class activity, namely personal grooming at a high level, and turn it into something teenage boys would want to do across classes, across races within the British and I think Australian context. So yes, that's a harbinger of later developments. But just looking at the personal grooming statistics, I think you can see that it's now 10 year-olds who are having body splashes aimed at them by companies and are taking up these options as consumers. I think you can see in the statistics I lay out in my essay for Dana Heller's makeover book that something really dramatic has changed-at least at the targeting level-in the last five or six years. Again, I do think that this is not necessarily unprecedented, and you're absolutely correct to help us with some additional historicisation.
JB: Yes, but that's a really great answer to my question. Masculine grooming and beautification can be traced back centuries not just to the 1950s, and sport has a long commercial association with grooming products, but pre-teen consumption of beauty products and practices among young boys mostly is unprecedented I think. Class and Brut and Henry Cooper is indeed interesting. Brut, and in the UK Denim, were the first fragrances really marketed to working-class men, appearing alongside established upper class colognes such as Blue Blazer, James Bond-style Old Spice, and so on. Anyway, in your discussions around the metrosexual you talk a lot about middle-class men. Is the metrosexual a middle- rather than working-class phenomenon?
TM: Not in terms of, for instance, statistics about body grooming products over the last five or six years. It seems to be quite cross-class, assuming we're talking about major advertisers, PR firms, and so on in the First World. But I think when it comes to some associations with metrosexuality, they are a bit more middle class. They involve things like being in wine bars. Most beefy working-class guys might go to a wine bar from time to time, but I think the assumption is that they are happier in a pub with sawdust on the floor and beer on tap rather than wine! And of course the assumption in many ways is that the metrosexual is not so caught up in homosociality and heteronormativity. The Metrosexual enjoys women's company at least as much as men's, and not necessarily in the interests of romance or sex. In terms of heteronormativity, he's interested in gender-bending. Now some of these things applied in the past with working-class fans of David Bowie or Marc Bolan, but not necessarily in a longstanding way that was thoroughgoing and animated their overall orientation. So I think there's something about it that still has quite middle-class connotations in British and US contexts.
JB: Your lecture in the series at QUT was titled 'Metrosexuality: A Marketing Fable?' Do you think the phenomenon of new masculine narcissism is primarily driven by advertisers and marketers?
TM: Well, if you look at some of the data available in the US in particular, which is assiduous of course in cultivating this kind of intelligence, then clearly there are big problems with eating disorders and performance-enhancing drugs amongst men. By problems I mean people struggling with weight, eating disorders of the kind women have long experienced. These are partly narcissistic, psychological worries to do with an image to the outside world in general, or specifically to potential lovers. They are also rational responses to occupational pressures. That is partly about image and partly about corporations wanting to diminish health care costs: they don't want to pay for people who have large amounts of time off work, who tend to lead unhealthy lifestyles. So there are all kinds of things here that are not just about psychology. Not to say that these issues are equivalent to what women go through; but they're on the way, and certainly when it comes to eating disorders, the new reports are quite staggering.
JB: Certain theorists I've encountered in my work infer that male beauty consciousness is primarily a marketing creation. Is it this simple? Do men use toiletries and cosmetics because advertising tells them to? Obviously there has been massive growth in male skin care, cosmetics, toiletries, procedures-all this kind of stuff. Do you think that is mostly an effect of advertising?
TM: That's a really good question. Some part of it is to do with advertising, because supply and demand operate in a very convoluted and complex way. You can only get a good answer to which came first, the supply or the demand, or whether they came coevally, after very thorough, massive, longitudinal ethnographic work. It seems incontrovertible that you're seeing a media effect in a fairly classic way. When products are advertised and consumed en masse, that looks like a case not of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but a real case of this happened, then this happened, and they are causally related. At the same time, there are other influences. Public-health campaigns about skin care to do with exposure to the sun are obviously important. Public-health campaigns about the risks of obesity and the necessity to engage in a so-called healthy lifestyle are of course part of advertising; but they're more than advertising-they're about trying to govern the population. It gets very difficult, it seems to me, unless you are swallowing whole the rhetorics of marketing, to buy into the psychologisation arguments and techniques about why people do or don't do things. I'm not able to do that kind of work. I'm not inclined to do that kind of work. What I'm more interested in is a) the artifact of purchase that follows the artifact of advertising and b) the logics and material practices that are set in play by advertisers. Whether or not these are accurate renderings of the public mind or its desires I don't really care actually, and I'm not sure I could ever understand. What I'm interested in is: these renderings have effects, so how do they operate and how do they generate truths? That's my project in this field as much as anything else.
JB: We come from quite different perspectives exploring the metrosexual phenomenon, you from a political-economy perspective me from more of a cultural-economy perspective.
TM: I don't know. I leave that for others to decide! The big questions that I try to answer in all my work are really to do with the interlacing of the political economy and political technology of subjectivity. I'm trying to understand the struggle, the money, the labour, and the forms of identity and popular knowledge that circulate in and around the materiality of personhood.
JB: I suppose then that the main difference in a political-economy and a cultural-economy approach, as I employ it in my work, is that cultural economy actually is concerned with accurate renderings of the public, of the cultures of consumers as well as producers. Using this cultural-economy model, for me, actually brings some agency on the part of men themselves into the equation.
TM: Well, I can't comment very much on your work other than the essay I read, but I didn't see anything in there that seemed different from the things that I would think important. But I'm not doing ethnographies of metrosexuality, by and large, so I'm not in a position to make claims about that-otherwise I'd just be making it up, and I try not to make stuff up! At the same time, when I do work on conflict, struggle, and so on, it's understood that there is, there can be, in many instances purposive, deliberate, efficacious things done by people-of course. Agency when it comes to things like why do 10 year-olds buy body sprays? I've not interviewed them via a random sample in an extensive life-cycle way in order to make such claims.
JB: More my area again I guess! I am doing some ethnographic work to inform my thesis, although not really in the form of a representative sample, more to discover some available discourses among consumers. OK, so perhaps I just take a bit more of an optimistic approach to the metrosexual than you do then. Your discussion around the phenomenon tends a little towards the doom-and-gloom side of things; eating disorders, insecurity about looks and image, men now being oppressed by the 'beauty trap' and so on, but for me this doesn't allow for the possibility that this may also actually be a good thing for individual men and conventional masculinity, allowing men to indulge in some self-nurture. Rather than commercial grooming culture being necessarily oppressive, I think there's a possibility there too that it opens up a repressive area of masculinity that didn't allow men to nurture themselves in a way which for some is undeniably enjoyable, even if it is something that capitalism has taught us to regard as enjoyable! Taking pleasure in one's body, nurturing it, caring for it, protecting it from the elements and so on kind of loosens those old bonds of conventional masculinity, which forbade these behaviours for men and made them taboo. I think men obviously welcome these developments, otherwise they wouldn't buy the stuff. While marketers and advertisers get the products on the shelves, if it's a culture that's not listened to and embraced on the ground, it's not going to take off; so for me, I am interested in the possibility of consumers driving these trends too.
TM: You may well be right. There are unintended consequences of these tendencies, and they may be destabilizing the inequality of looking between straight men, gay men, and straight women; I just don't have any evidence that they derive from men's inherent desires that are only now being met by capitalism. I just don't know that that's the case.
JB: In your work you over-feminize the metrosexual a fair bit and it's hard to tell whether you are being tongue-in-cheek; are you being a 'snarky' sociologist like Mark Simpson, is there something that you don't quite like about masculine aesthetics, masculine narcissism or is it just the advertising bullshit, or as Simpson puts it, "the media gang-bang of the metrosexual" and "metrosexmania"?
TM: Very good questions! I like to write with irony. I think that that gives prose a life and pleasure-for some readers at least. And for me as a writer it's amusing. I don't think coming up with an answer that is always definitive is necessary, particularly when phenomena, as per the metrosexual, are quite new. I don't think that my position needs enunciating over and over again. There's much too much position-taking in cultural studies, there's much too little research in cultural studies, and there is too much investment in authors' investments in cultural studies, at least in the United States where this is sometimes a badge of honor. Whilst my political views are well-known, and I don't shy away from them, I'm not somebody who spends a great deal of time laying out why I'm doing something and what my project is; partly for the reasons I just said, and partly because I'm not somebody who fetishizes method. It's actually to my loss, probably, in terms of the effect I have on people. It may well be that I miss the cultural-studies constituency and the conventional constituency because I am not very interested in people's investments, and not very interested in using methods that have been endorsed by the academy at a high level. It may well be that the work I do would benefit greatly if I adopted a less arch position towards both these things. If I were less tart, then things might be better for me.
JB: So what do you think about masculine grooming? Is it something that you are enjoying seeing appear?
TM: I do think it's nice to look at in many cases, although arguably it's nice to see a man wearing a tight white tee-shirt, tight blue jeans with a bit of stubble and a bit of beer on his breath who's just staggered out of bed. Given all the effort women make to look OK, it seems only fair that men should have to go through something approximating to that level. The other thing, I hope, is that-and maybe this is about embourgeoisement, isn't very valuable or desirable, and may be counter-productive-we'll be able to look one day at figures and narratives to do with things like violence and see some correlation between an ethics of the self and intersubjective ethics in a positive way. Dream on!
JB: Yes. You've read my paper on the discussion in the Australian public sphere about the metrosexual, and how this relies on a discourse of nationality that seems to be quite absent in British debates, and I think it's pretty peculiar to Australia. What kinds of discourses are surrounding public debate about the metrosexual in the States? Anything about national identity and patriotism there?
TM: National identity comes into play with masculinity in the United States, in the last five years in particular, in attitudes to war, to militarism, to seeking an "other" who can be blamed for a whole mixture of things involving national security, domestic security, and the state of the economy. Frequently we are told that however unsubtle, there is a justifiable and beneficially unswerving nature to conservative and neo-conservative masculinity that has given a certainty and purpose to the country that Clintonian metrosexuality did not, because it was more open, looser, less disciplined. I think that is extremely relevant. The other thing is the United States either invents, or certainly commercialises and governmentalises, many amateurish social and psychological forms of thought. It does such things more thoroughly and rapidly than perhaps anywhere else in the world, because its economy has thrived for at least the last sixty years on consumerism. It is argued that the world economy would collapse if there were not a continued obsession with consumerism on the part of citizens and residents of the country, so there's no doubt that the pro- and anti-metrosexual forces within marketing and the bourgeois media, are responding to various necessities. Often the most important of them is not at the geo-political level of 'we've got to show that we're macho men,' but rather at the fundamental and routine occupational level of 'we've got to invent a new neediness, or a new nerdiness, or a new style.' That drive characterizes categorizations of consumers within marketing. Marketing will never rest, will never just sit down and say 'let's look at how old these people are, where they live, what their religion is and their race and gender.' It just can't be satisfied. It has to invent new forms of subjectivity, or uncover them on a regular basis, faster than it would be possible for men to change.
JB: You discuss this relentless categorization of consumers by marketers and advertisers in your work about the metrosexual commercial subjectivity, and yes, it seems completely over the top to consider the sets and subsets of available identities you list there. In asking that previous question I'm kind of fishing for some comparative kinds of discourses that surround public discussion-rather than marketing-around the metrosexual phenomenon in the US. Aside from an over-arching discourse of national identity, media discussion in Australia is compounded with a very distinct anti-English, anti-soccer, anti-Beckham kind of sentiment. Do you get that happening in the US? I'm interested in uncovering oppositional anti-colonial masculinities and how these might shape male beauty consciousness.
TM: Australian anti-Englishness is quite different from the United States. We don't have that particular anxiety that pervades Australia. However, in the United States it is true to say that one of the ways in which British men are criticized some of the time is for being effete and feminized. But you know the crucial thing for Australia, apart from defining itself against Englishness, is that for far longer than any other country that I'm aware of, it had four times as many men as women; what was called a real masculinist overhang-rather like a real wage overhang. Until the twentieth century, the conventional demographic ratios of women to men didn't obtain in this country, and so massive amounts of public culture were organized or ordered around an historically distinct material domination of everyday life by men, and it was numerical.
JB: This demonstrates the importance of contextualizing the historical and culturally-specific uptake and representations of new aesthetic masculinities. That 'masculinist overhang' continues to be crucial in shaping contemporary debates and discourses around metrosexuality in Australia. In her response to your paper on the metrosexual you gave here at QUT, Liz Ferrier raised some interesting points around this, around how a globalized subjectivity or persona is at the same time localized and customized, and also providing some historical context of Australian metrosexuality, with a discussion of her grandfather's grooming, fashion and fetish for tailored stationary.
TM: Her contribution was wonderful, as again it took us beyond the limits of the areas I was working in, which were about recent transformations.
JB: Tell me about your own grooming habits and practices
TM: What would you like to know? I clean my teeth with toothpaste and a brush. I tend to use toothpaste that comes from non-corporate smaller firms that don't use sugar in the product. I shave every second day with a razor, without soap or shaving cream, under the shower while I'm washing my hair. I don't use moisturizer. I put sun block on my face when that seems necessary. Don't use perfumes. I have, under pressure, started using deodorant in the last two or three years after a decade of not doing so!
JB: Me neither, well not anti-perspirants anyway; clogging or closing up one's natural sweat glands-very unhealthy and potentially, I'm sure, quite harmful. So when you wrote/spoke about scoring relatively highly on an on-line metrosexual quiz-with which I'm also familiar-I take it this was because of your answers to the questions pertaining to generally civilized city culture and as you put it, not being caught up in heteronormative and homosocial behaviours rather than on how much product you consume and apply?
TM: I'm a wannabe from way back, always desiring inclusion-but so that I can then exclude myself. Hence the 54% score in the quiz-enough to qualify, not to be central.
JB: Sorry, I thought in your lecture you said you'd scored relatively highly, didn't realize you'd just scraped in! So what about in the past? What kinds of grooming products were British and Australian men embracing in the 1970s and 80s, using your own experience?
TM: Well one thing I did from the mid-80s to the early 90s was colour my hair, which was very popular at that time.
JB: What colour?
TM: Blonde, light. Sometimes like a popinjay. Sometimes like Rod Stewart or John Farnham, while imagining that this was not the case. I once saw Warwick Capper speed past me running round the ragged rocks of Bondi in the late '80s. I tried to catch up to compare and contrast our locks, but I was too old, too fat, and too slow.
JB: Not blue or red then! You mentioned earlier Marc Bolan, David Bowie, and if we look at the Blitz culture like Steve Strange, New Wave, the New Romantics, Goths and cultures like that, in the 70s and the 80s and even in the 90s selective grooming products and practices were actually available to men, cosmetics in particular but only among young men and only centred around discourses of identity and fashion rather than as you said before, longstanding habits. This suggests that the whole media circus the metrosexual has aroused revolves around a newer issue: that it's actually skin care which is more of a permanent as well as a feminine, softening thing. Cosmetics you can remove, you wash them off at the end of the day; but with skin care, it's something that has encroached right into the daily routines of masculinity. It's not just about things like nail polish, hairstyles and make-up-we've had that before-so I think it's the whole concept of nurture and care that's new. Would you agree with this? What's distinct or divergent about the metrosexual phenomenon for you?
TM: We see marketers sexualizing 8 to 10 year-olds, and at the other extreme, men in their 50s seeking occupational advantage via a makeover. So the point you make is an apt one. I had five different brands of nail polish on my fingernails when I was 16, 17, which wasn't that uncommon. It was understood as part of teenage life, as something very transitional, whereas these other things are not. As for the connection to feminization it may also be-though again, this would take a lot of complex comparative historical work-that the advent of industrial capitalism saw, along with imperialism, a harshening and hardening of conventional hegemonic masculinity by contrast to what had been the case before. Now, in the era of service-industry domination in the First World, beyond the domination of manufacturing and agriculture, masculinity may have shifted to become one with that historical moment.
References
Toby Miller, 'The First Penis Impeached,' in Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan (eds), Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest, New York: New York University Press, 2001, pp. 116-33.
Toby Miller, 'A Metrosexual Eye on Queer Eye' GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 1, 2005 pp. 112-17.
Toby Miller, 'Metrosexuality: See the Bright Light of Commodification Shine! Watch Yanqui Masculinity Made Over!' in Dana Heller (ed) The Great American Makeover: Television, History, and Nation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, (forthcoming) 2006.
Toby Miller, Sportsex, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
Mark Simpson, 'Metrosexual? That rings a bell …', Independent on Sunday, 22 June 2003, retrieved June 3, 2004 http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/journalism/metrosexual_jos.html. [1]
Jenny Burton is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology. Her doctoral thesis Male Consumer Beauty Culture: Beauty Consciousness and the New Glossies "For Him" addresses the phenomenon of a popular, feminized grooming culture among Australian men, exploring the social, cultural, and historical contexts of the materialization and rapid growth of the male beauty industry. As an important site where men might 'learn' about grooming products and practices, the research focuses on the birth of (now) mass-market men's lifestyle magazines in the late 1990s, and the genre's discursive communication of a new beauty-conscious heterosexual subjectivity.