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Man expert Dave Besley received a flood of fresh publicity for his controversial masculinity tome ‘The Retrosexual Guide: How to be A Real Man’ this week, including a euphoric review on Australia’s Fox News portal. “Listen up, men: it’s time to ditch your moisturiser and designer clothes, because the retrosexual has returned,” Fox’s Ellen Connolly declared. “Real men who value biffo, beer and breasts are in vogue again, according to The Retrosexual Manual,” she said.
Besley’s book urges readers to ‘shrug off the nancy-boy image and get back to being real men’, suggesting the consequences will be ‘a return to the stable marriages of the Fifties and Sixties as the man feels free to do things he wants to do and to be himself’. Rival author Dante Moore has also attracted media attention for the best selling new book ‘The Re-education Of The Female’, in which he urges women to submit uncomplainingly to keep their men. “Here’s a little secret, ladies. Men never really ask for anything,” the 33 year old (never married writer) advises. “They command. And believe me, what you won’t do, ten broads around the corner will.”
Both writers’ assessments of the retrosexual phenomenon pale in comparison to the analysis of Mark Sampson, however, who as well as first coining the term ‘metrosexual’ renamed retrosexual ‘hummersexual’ in 2006. Writing in the Guardian, the British cultural commentator ridiculed the ‘unself-conscious, un-moisturised masculinity’ of the retros adding ‘unlike his better-looking metrosexual younger brother – whom he usually refers to as ‘that fag’ – the hummersexual is in denial’. “Guys are guys again, with manly, painstakingly shaped and trimmed beards. They eat manly food, drive manly trucks and read manly books on manliness. Or so you may have read. Truth be told, this is a phoney war,” he suggested.
“The ‘menaissance’ is mendacious. This isn’t retrosexual at all, but hummersexual, a noisy, overblown, studied and frankly rather camp form of fake masculinity that likes to draw attention to itself and its allegedly old-fashioned ‘manliness’, but tends – like driving an outsized military vehicle in the suburbs – to be a tad counterproductive. He thinks he reeks of heterosexuality,” Simpson continued. “But is blissfully unaware that he often seems to have just stepped out of the funkier kind of gay leather/bear bar,” he laughed.
