Not just sticks and stones (20 July 2009)

Why should the term "metrosexual" be any more acceptable than "dandy" and "invert" were? Isn't this the same problem that confronts every attempt to name an otherness under a category (in this case the "beautiful man") without reducing its legitimate diversity to merely an abortive attempt to be "normal"? Against the gruff masculinity of those who live "closer to the earth" (or who at least always have dirt on their shoes) who are more attuned to the "natural order" of procreation and the diurnal rhythms that regulate our bodies, it's the weirdos sipping espresso and drinking cosmos instead of pounding beer who think it's acceptable for a man to pay attention to his cuticles.

But of course, there's no such thing as "natural beauty"--beauty is always a judgment; not every "natural object" is beautiful--do we really mean this term to apply to the twisted and the mutant? The aestheticizing rituals to which our homemakers have always been subject are precisely the attempt to add (or even replace) beauty to the natural. Hence the term "beautiful man" is doubly offensive. On the one hand, it is the man (or Diotima's "lover") who, while not himself beautiful, is that which pursues beauty, who provides for it, who creates it in his art or in the body of the one he is able to dress and pamper. But, then, what does it mean for such a man to himself be beautiful? Only insofar as he is then not a lover (perhaps only a lover "of himself") or a man. Instead we have the man who is "as beautiful as a woman".