Confessions of a Retrosexual
By Richard Cohen
Saturday, December 27, 2003; Page A25
Am I a metrosexual?
I've been asking everyone that question ever since I apparently became the last person in the world to discover the term. This happened last week when I came across the word seemingly a dozen times in various newspapers and wondered, if you'll pardon my English, what the hell it meant. As an old Washington hand, I was doubly perplexed since Metro is what the subway is called in the nation's capital. Is a metrosexual someone who has sex on the subway?
Somehow I knew this could not be the case -- you can't even eat on the Washington Metro -- but knowing what it could not be still left me wondering what it is. Having spent the weekend with some young people, I asked them all and they all said they were not sure. It seemed that a metrosexual was a heterosexual man with certain homosexual characteristics -- such as cleanliness, I was told, or neatness, I was told, or a compulsion toward good grooming.
I then plunged into a computer database and discovered that the word "metrosexual" has appeared in print more than 1,000 times in the past year -- where was I when all this was happening? -- and that, true enough, it has something to do with going to the gym and having facials and caring about things that real men are not supposed to care about, like their appearance.
By now I was confused. It is true enough that I care about my appearance and that I pay a king's ransom for a haircut and that I have my shoes shined almost compulsively and that I go to the gym, not every day, but often enough so that with any luck I will live forever. In all those ways, plus the narcissistic self-regard that is essential and common to all columnists, I am definitely and maybe even highly metrosexual.
On the other hand, I have never had a facial. It is simply out of the question and most definitely not why my grandfather came to this country. I also have never had a manicure, and while I feel less strongly about that than I do the facial, I don't see it happening in the near future. I have had a massage -- but just once and then only because I was injured and in quite a bit of pain. Not that I complained, mind you.
If these are the qualities of a metrosexual, then my late Uncle Joe, a full partner in a very important accounting firm, was maybe the first. He had manicures and massages galore. He minded his appearance and had plenty of fine suits. He cared about food and knew how to tip waiters and captains and maitre d'hotels, which is as lost an art as tying a bow tie, another thing he could do. Yet he was an immigrant from Russia who never even went to college. Today maybe he would be called a metrosexual, but he, I'm sure, would just call himself a man.
Howard Dean pronounced himself a metrosexual and then characteristically said he wasn't sure what that was -- but whatever it was, he wasn't. Among politicians, Arnold Schwarzenegger may be the most metrosexual of them all, since no man ever paid more attention to his body -- except maybe Richard Simmons, another category altogether. Ronald Reagan is a metrosexual and so was Kemal Ataturk, a regular clotheshorse and ladies' man who single-handedly modernized Turkey.
Saddam Hussein, a dapper dictator in his salad days, was a metrosexual but emerged from his hole a pure heterosexual. Tim Russert is not a metrosexual, George Stephanopoulos is, Bill Clinton is an omnisexual, Ann Coulter is a psychosexual and Strom Thurmond was just a pig.
As for myself, I am still perplexed. I am a fervid fan of the late Cary Grant, who was the best-dressed actor ever to appear on the screen. (Just watch how his trouser pleats don't open when he crouches on a rooftop in "To Catch a Thief.") All Italians are metrosexuals and some French are, but not the British, because, among other things, they can't keep their socks up. For vacations, I prefer the Metrosexual Belt.
Still, what this makes me I cannot say. In going around and asking people, I got various answers until one young woman flat out told me that I am too old to be a metrosexual. That makes me a seniorsexual, I suppose -- a metrosexual on Lipitor -- and explains why I never got a facial.
I forgot.
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