Relevance of metrosexuality in the post modern society

Amita Bais

Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur (C.G.)

ABSTRACT:

This report helps us to come across the connectivity of metro sexuality in the post modern society by explaining the relation between the metro sexuality and post modern society. It help us to understand what is metro sexuality, the concept of postmodernism and also try to link the emerging trend of metro sexuality with respect to postmodern society.

INTRODUCTION:

Gender roles are changing, and could be one of the reasons why so many people find it difficult to find and maintain successful relationships. People appear to be remaining single for longer periods of time. This could be because it has become difficult, at times, to understand, accept and deal with, practically, the new gender roles that society has developed. Of course, the various roles of women have gone through the most dramatic evolution, believed to have changed more in the last two generations, than in the last two millenniums. Women have achieved near equality to men in education, the workplace, and many other places, thanks to politics, mass media, and urbanization.

The sexual revolution has been instrumental in freeing our minds. Many women are supporting themselves and raising children, without the help of a man. The independent woman does not want to be controlled or told what to do. All of these components, have ensured that women will never again, be in a junior position to men, in society, over all. Just as women’s roles have changed, so have men’s enter “metro-sexuality”.

WHAT IS METRO SEXUALITY?

The term originated in an article by Mark Simpson published on November 15, 1994, in The Independent. The term “metro-sexual,” has become the buzzword of that year. Metro-sexual are defined as, “a narcissist in love with not only himself but his urban lifestyle; a straight man who is in touch with his feminine side” metro-sexual have been identified as men who enjoy shopping, fashion and beauty products. This is a new subculture of men that are going mainstream with their lifestyle which includes excessive grooming and interest in fashion, which have typically been regarded as feminine behaviours.

Mr. Simpson, in his intriguing article for Salon.com last year, wrote: "The typical metro-sexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis -- because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere."

According to Mark Simpson:-

Metro-sexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levi's jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping.

The topic has been the focus of extensive media attention. Articles have appeared in a variety of periodicals, ranging from the Economist to the cover of the New York Times Sunday Style section. Television programs have helped popularize this trend; with television programs such as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” helping men adopt the metro-sexual lifestyle through proper grooming and shopping trips. There is now even a book titled, “Metro-sexual Guide to Style”. Thus, the importance of appearance, once mainly a women’s issue, has now come to the forefront for men. As men have begun to take over some of the duties that women have always controlled, this has facilitated a shift from the somewhat rough, rugged males, to metrosexuality.

There are now women working right alongside these men in the office. Sexually homogenous advertising has also contributed to the metrosexual identity. This new male breed can exhibit the following traits, for starters: matching ensembles for every occasion, perfect hair, indulges in manicures and pedicures, and smelling good, too. He can enjoy shopping, the opera and even watching chick flicks. By all appearances, one might assume that he is gay, however, it is simply a man, who is completely in touch with his feminine side, and comfortable being so.

According to the Urban Dictionary, a metro sexual is, in reality, a modern, enlightened, sort of Renaissance man. secure and confident, capable and cool, typically well educated and stylish. Heterosexual with a twist, not gay by any means, but he probably has a few gay friends, and can easily be mistaken for gay by rednecks and jock types. Often the only straight guy in a fabric store, antique shop, or the like, who was not dragged there, against his will, to appease a woman.

A metrosexual may or may not appeal to everyone – whether women are attracted to them, or men aspire to be more like them. In any case, whether society ever becomes comfortable enough to truly embrace them, remains to be seen.

What is Post modern Society?

Some sociologists believe we are now moving into a new and very different type of society. The social change, that began to accelerate 300 years ago, has continued at such a pace that the theories and assumptions we had about modern society no longer explain the society we find around us.

Postmodernism seems to be a loss of faith in the ideas of the Enlightenment. It is argued by postmodernists that people have become disillusioned with the idea that we can use science and rational thought to make the world a better place. People have become disillusioned with the idea of progress. There is greater understanding of negative effects of so-called ‘progress’, such as pollution, environmental damage and damage to human populations.

We are also seeing the disappearance of old certainties. In the past gender roles, ethnic differences, social class differences were all clear cut and people generally conformed to societal expectations. Today the old distinctions are blurring and people choose who they want to be, and how they want to behave.

Modernism always celebrated the new and considered ideas from the past to be ‘old-fashioned’. Postmodernism borrows from the past and combines a wide range of styles together - a ‘pick and mix’ approach. A good example of a postmodern building is a shopping centre called the Trafford Centre, in Manchester. This looks like St Paul's Cathedral from the front, a Norman castle from the back, inside one section is the deck of an ocean liner, and in another is a Victorian palm house.

Distinctions between the cultures of the different social classes have been blurred, for example by the use of opera as a theme tune for the football world cup. The process of globalisation has also meant the blurring of traditional cultural boundaries. Today Coca-Cola can be found in the remotest regions of the world.

The concept of a postmodern society is a very controversial one. Many sociologists accept that society is changing a great deal but do not accept the term postmodern. Some sociologists, including Anthony Giddens, prefer to describe society as in a stage of ‘late-modernity’.

Post modernity is not a theory or discourse on psycho-social risk, danger and despair; rather it tries to understand the nature of contemporary autonomous individual, diverse and differentiated, and secular challenges facing the modernity, identity and tradition.

Significance of Metro Sexuality in Postmodern Society!

In postmodern society, physical appearance has become increasingly central to defining personal identity, as evidenced by the proliferation of features in newspapers, magazines, and television concerned with the health, shape, and fashioning of the body, and by the advent of a plethora of products and technologies for modifying the body, such as diet pills, exercise programs, and cosmetic surgery. Individuals are now expected to undertake regimes of body maintenance designed to sustain and improve their health and physical appearance, and failure to do so is seen as a sign of moral laxity.

In our modern consumer culture, a new conception of the self has emerged- namely, the self as performer-which places great emphasis upon appearance, display, and the management of impressions. This replaces the nineteenth-century concern with character in which primacy was given to such qualities as citizenship, democracy, duty, work, honor, reputation, and morals. Whereas previously, greater emphasis was placed on other sources of identity formation than that of personal appearance, increasingly, the self is defined primarily in aesthetic terms-that is, in terms of how one looks rather than in terms of what one does. This aesthetic cult of the self is a fundamentally contradictory project. On the one hand, it is a project that has been increasingly seen in individualistic terms in which the fashioning of personal appearance is conceived of primarily as an expression of individual identity. In contrast to earlier epochs where one's outward appearance was taken to be indicative of one's social role or status, now it is seen, first and foremost, as a projection of one's inner self. As Anthony Giddens argues, under the conditions of high modernity, the body has become a self-reflexive project, integral to our sense of who we are. While in pre modern societies, modifications and adornments of the body were governed by traditional, ritualized meanings, the body in modernity has been secularized and is more frequently treated as a phenomenon to be fashioned as an expression of an individual's identity, rather than in accordance with some traditionally given system of meaning. In contemporary culture, we have become responsible for the design of our own bodies.

However, at the same time as the artistic cult of the self has been increasingly visualized in individual terms, there has been a de individualization of the self. In place of the Enlightenment notion of the self as a unified entity with a fixed essence, it is now seen as something that is fragmentary, decentered, and constantly mutating. Indicative of this is the increasing ease with which individuals adopt and discard various guises in the world of postmodern fashion, where no single style reigns supreme. Confronted with a combination of different styles derived from a diverse range of sources, individuals today are more likely to experiment with a wide range of different "looks" as is symbolized, for instance, by the radical "makeovers" in appearance undergone by celebrities such as Madonna and Michael Jackson. The typical postmodern fashion habitué as a "style-surfer" who treats identity as something that is infinitely flexible. Rather than regarding the various guises that one adopts as expressive of a "self," which exists independently of them, the self is defined through the masquerade-there is no self apart from the masquerade. In this sense, the self is "depersonalized," being dissolved into the various masks that one adopts.

The contradictory nature of postmodern "body" projects leads to a paradox. At the same time as the fashion of individualism grows ever stronger, appearance has become less expressive of the individual. The more importance we invest in reading appearances as a sign of individual character and personality, the less they reveal about individuals, as the looks we adopt become more depersonalized. While we continue to seek to discover exposure of the self in outward appearances, at the same time, the meaning of items of dress and other forms of bodily beautification have become more and more confusing.

In postmodern culture, such items, as Baudrillard points out, have become "free-floating" signifiers, signifying nothing beyond themselves. One of the significant features of bodily adornment in contemporary culture is the degree to which it has become "undercoded." That is, items of dress no longer clearly signal attributes such as the class, occupation, or ethnicity of the wearer, but have, to a large extent, been stripped of their meanings, as they are taken off together in unexpected combinations.

The coexistence of these two apparently contradictory trends is indicative of the increasing difficulty that individuals have in creating, for themselves, a meaningful sense of identity through the fashioning of their physical appearance. The more they seek to ground a sense of themselves through the cultivation of a certain "look," the more chimerical this proves to be, as one "look" is no more "real" than any other.

This habit of cultivation of a certain look in the post modern society has given rise to a new masculine gender role i.e. of ‘Metrosexuality’. These new gender roles have created a cycle that may only be averted, by trust. The nuclear family with a hard working father and stay at home mother, is becoming, essentially, a thing of the past, except in affluent society, where finances allow more for the kind of lifestyle of more traditional roles. For some time now, men and women have been taking on more equal roles in relationships and families in the post modern society.

As the roles we are used to having filled by the opposite sex shift, in the post modern society the metrosexual is raising the point of why he has to pay for every date, open doors and pick a woman up at her door since women are now so independent and financially equal. However, these men still enjoy a woman who is domesticated, will handle the housework, and raise children, just as their moms did.

In the post modern period or society as men have begun to take over some of the duties that women have always controlled, this has facilitated a shift from the somewhat rough, rugged males, to metrosexuality. There are now women working right alongside these men in the office. Sexually homogenous advertising has also contributed to the metro sexual identity. This new male breed in the post modern society can exhibit the following traits, for starters: matching ensembles for every occasion, perfect hair, indulges in manicures and pedicures, and smelling good, too. He can enjoy shopping, the opera and even watching chick flicks. By all appearances, one might assume that he is gay, however, it is simply a man, who is completely in touch with his feminine side, and comfortable being so.

CONCLUSION:

Post modernity has created a new sensibility for popular culture. Sensibility means new cultural style as can be seen in religion, tourism, fashion and rationality. Linking the concept of post modernity with metro sexuality one can say that, with the advent of the postmodern world there is a greater acceptance of the feminine side of a man. Earlier a man going to the beauty salon for pedicure or manicure was looked upon only with one thought, “he might be a gay” or “he sure acts like a gay” but now the comments can range from the former to ,”he’s a stylish man” or “he takes good care of himself and always wears latest fashion”. Nowadays there is a latent acceptance of metro sexuality, although this culture is not blatantly accepted everywhere such as in Indian villages, the idea of “macho man” or that of “a man should always behave like a man” are still very much in use. But we can definitely see a change of pattern, the increasing number of cosmetics for men which are flooding the market for example, fair and handsome men, axe deodorants, hair gels, etc. are but one indicator of the fact that the society has somewhere come to terms with the fact that men can also be fashion savvy, can also look after their appearances, a job that was considered that of a women only few years back.

This culture is just in its nascent stage, there are many questions which need to be answered such as whether this metro sexual behavior would lead to an overlapping of gender roles as created by the traditional society. , how would this behavior effect the consumer market and the economy of a nation? , would this co blending of the feminine and masculine traits in a man would be harmful for individual identity?

From the beginning of gender socialization, a boy is taught to be a man, he is supposed to be the breadwinner and the head of the family, taking care of one’s appearances, getting ready and looking good are all attributed to women but the postmodern world has presented a different scenario, it has rejected the old norms and gender roles and has created an idea for a new world. It remains to be seen that where this new world does takes us and what effect will it have on us as individuals or as a society.

REFERENCES:

· Caste, Class, Power; Andre Beteille

· Doshi,S. L. (2003) Modernity,Post Modernity And Neo-Sociological Theories, Jaipur: Rawat Publications.

· Indian Sociological Thought, B.K. Nagla, Rawat Publications

· http://www.articleinput.com/e/a/title/physical-appearence-in-postmodern-society/

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/postmodernism

http://www.onlinedatingmagzine.com/colmns/datinginsideout/32-metrosexual.html

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/metrosexuality

Received on 06.10.2011

Revised on 26.02.2012

Accepted on 11.03.2012