Oh for the love of all that is sweet and holy. Must we really deal with yet another straight guy off-shoot trend? Haven’t we learned our lesson after what happened with metrosexual? No, obviously, because here comes a retrosexual.
Committing trend spotting malpractice, the Philadelphia Inquirer insists it has stumbled upon the new burgeoning class of straight guy. And they actually used the word “menaissance” to describe it. (Okay, they lifted it from a blog, but still.)
Think of him as the anti-metrosexual, the opposite of that guy who emerged in the 1990s in all his pedicured, moussed-up, skinny-jeans glory. That man-boy was searching for his inner girl, it was argued. The retrosexual, however, wants to put the man back into manhood.
In other words, the boy wants to grow up, trading adolescent behaviors – working in a coffee shop, hanging with girls instead of dating them, and worrying about his hair – for a man who can take care of business, according to Josh Weil, cofounder of Youth Trends in Ramsey, N.J., who has tweeted about the macho-man look.
“I’m a strong guy, I’m very comfortable with who I am, I’m carrying around a little attitude,” he said, describing the philosophy.
Say goodbye to the sensitive guy who cries at the drop of a pink tee, or the slacker living with his mother, playing video games. This new man has ambition and aplomb, brawn and brains.
Think Cary Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, or Ernest Hemingway.
Except not only is the retrosexual craze a fantasy — because there have always been manly men walking around, even while the straights were turning themselves gay with hair goop — but it’s an old one at that. Rather, we’d like someone to explore this group of people: the dandy bears. Make that a trend.
Sam
That article is so offensive I don’t even know where to begin. “Hanging with girls instead of dating them” is gay/metrosexual? How the hell are you supposed to know how to relate to women if you never spend any time with them outside of a sexual context? Well, I guess “manly men” don’t need to know how to relate to women: they just wait for their girls to make them a sandwich, then screw them without saying more than a grunt. And “a slacker living with his mother, playing video games” is a metrosexual? If you’re going to just list a bunch of stereotypes, you could at least not mix them up. Not to mention the claim that the metrosexual emerged in the 90’s. I vividly remember it becoming a “thing” in 2003.
*head asplodes*
wmcarpenter
I don’t think this writer has ever read Ernest Hemingway.
Brandon
@WMCARPENTER
Probably not, however as a source of manliness Hemingway was really macho in person. This is the guy who attached a machine gun to his fishing boat.
Garver
@Brandon
and raised cats…
greybat
No wonder nobody reads magazines anymore.