This public reversal of male and female norms of beauty shows why the gerewol festival is the perfect test of modern males’ metrosexual credentials. Metrosexuals are renowned for applying traditionally feminine notions of beauty to men; the Wodaabe, by contrast, actually invert them. They consider men, not women, to embody human beauty. Consequently, Wodaabe men spend more time than Wodaabe women fussing about their appearance (narcissism); ornament themselves in women’s clothing and cosmetics (feminization); and display themselves in sexually provocative contexts (eroticization). So obsessed with male beauty are the Wodaabe that tribesmen may even allow their wives to sleep with a man more handsome than themselves, in order to guarantee the beauty of their sons. Clearly, as far as male sexuality goes, things don’t get much more metro than with the Wodaabe. That being the case, let us see then how Becks fares against some real competition.
Actually, that may explain why his agent seems reluctant (he still hasn’t called, I’m sorry to say). No matter—we’ll push on with the contest regardless. To paraphrase the movie-actor emperors of those Hollywood “sword and sandal” flicks (apparently no real Roman emperor ever used the words): Let the games begin.
Tackling the first leg of Coad’s metrosexual trifecta, just how narcissistic are modern males? Mark Simpson says enormously so, putting it down to male insecurity over their changing place in the world. Stripped of their traditional breadwinning role, he says, men now seek affirmation by virtue of something much more superficial—their appearance. This sounds reasonable, but what evidence is there that modern metrosexuals, and Beckham in particular, are preoccupied with their looks? Plenty, as it happens. One recent survey of modern-male grooming habits, for instance, found that the average man now spends 3.1 hours in front of the mirror per week, almost an hour more than the average woman. Another survey found that over 66 percent of straight men, and more than 80 percent of gay men, had removed their pubic hair at least once to improve their appearance. Beckham’s narcissistic credentials, similarly, seem too obvious to even need comment. His own words, once again, will suffice: when quizzed by Attitude magazine (a publication for gay men) as to why he was so comfortable with his status as a gay icon, Beckham stated, with disarming frankness, that what mattered to him was being admired, and the more the merrier. It is difficult, indeed, to say which quality of Beckham’s this best represents a victory for—his tolerance or his exhibitionism. There is also the not-too-surprising revelation, splashed about by several British tabloids, that Becks spends an average £600 a month on bulk packs of Calvin Klein underwear, never wearing the same pair twice. Given this level of sartorial extravagance, we are probably safe in assuming he spends considerably more than 3.1 hours in front of his mirror every week.
Impressively narcissistic, to be sure, but it might surprise Beckham and his metrosexual emulators to learn that they still come a distant second to Wodaabe males, who were, and are, more likely to spend 3.1 hours per day in front of their mirrors. A pocket mirror is, in fact, the one indispensable accessory of every single Wodaabe man’s costume. Anthropologist Mette Bovin, who studied the Wodaabe for 32 years, noted that even though their country is so sparsely populated that a man may walk for days without seeing anyone, the first thing Wodaabe males did on waking was spend several hours in front of their hand mirrors, prettying themselves with make-up and arranging their hair.4 (Wodaabe men are herders, an occupation that allows a lot of leisure time.) One aid worker who lived with the Wodaabe for a short time similarly reported that their favorite gifts, even more valuable than flashlights and sunglasses, were Polaroid cameras that allowed them to photograph and view themselves instantly.
Nor are the Wodaabe a freakish exception among ancient and tribal cultures. Tuareg nomads of the central Sahara, another surviving ancient culture, also believe that men, rather than women, epitomize beauty.5 So attractive do Tuareg men consider themselves that they, alone among the world’s cultures, veil themselves rather than their women—to protect Tuareg females from the devastating effect of that beauty. Tuareg men, like the Wodaabe, lavish considerable time on their appearance, too, braiding their hair, for example, into elaborate styles—despite the fact that their hair and faces are never seen, since an adult Tuareg male wears his veil even while sleeping. Such narcissistic seclusion may seem extreme, yet it pales, literally, in comparison to those ancient Tahitian men who stayed indoors for their entire lives from boyhood to ensure they achieved the lightness of skin that Tahitian women (and sometimes other men) found so beautiful.6
We modern metrosexuals are even outdone in the narcissism stakes by our own foppish forefathers. The mid-eighteenth-century “maccaroni” men, to give one example, showed an extravagance of dress that leaves Beckham looking like a plain Dwayne. Maccaronis were young British gentlemen who came back from their “grand tour” of the continent’s cultural landmarks sporting exaggerated versions of the fashions they had seen—rouge and face paint, red-heeled shoes, and tight, embroidered outfits. The true mark of a maccaroni, however, was his enormous wig. These powdered, horsehair monstrosities were so huge that the obligatory chapeau bras hat topping them could only be put on by the tip of a sword. Ironically, the inevitable reaction against this extravagance gave rise to the movement that is to us a byword for male narcissism—the dandies. Dandies were young English gentlemen who threw off the wigs, perfume, pumps, and colorful embroidery of the maccaronis, and embraced instead the sober colors and plain-cut clothing of middle-class fashion. Though less flamboyant than their maccaroni forefathers, the dandies were, if anything, even more narcissistic. Their leading light and founder, Beau Brummel, famously took three hours to dress, and changed his shirt as many as four times a day. He also insisted on polishing his boots with champagne. Even the motives driving the dandies’ narcissism seem to mirror those of modern metrosexuals, as this quote from Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish man of letters, illustrates:
A Dandy is…a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object…what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely…that you would recognise his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light.7
Beckham then, and by extension we modern metrosexuals, seems to have lost the first round of the narcissism challenge. Not just gerewol dancers, but also Tuaregs, Tahitians, maccaronis, and dandies apparently would have left us coughing in their powdered, pampered, and perfumed wake. It’s clearly time, therefore, to bring out the big guns—the airbrushing, cosmetic make-up guns, that is. Doesn’t our astonishing invention of male cosmetics (the very phrase was once considered an oxymoron) prove our bona fides as history’s supreme narcissists? After all, one recent British consumer survey found that the average English man now spends £111 a year on cosmetics, just £27 less than the average English woman. Leading the charge, as ever, is Beckham, whose nail-polishing antics were put on display in a cover shoot for GQ magazine in which he appeared wearing mauve nail varnish. So far ahead of the metrosexual pack is Beckham that he has even crossed the ultimate male make-up frontier: use of eyeliner and mascara.
Shockingly sissified stuff, to be sure, but not enough, sadly, to raise even a single, plucked Wodaabe eyebrow. They’ve been wearing eyeliner for thousands of years—in the form of the famous kohl used by every ancient man from pharaohs to Philistines. Wodaabe kohl is made from ground stibnite, a gray crystal, mixed with soot and animal fat, and applied liberally to both brows and lashes. Kohl is, however, just the first ingredient in the Wodaabe male’s make-up palette. The Wodaabe also routinely use that most basic of womanly cosmetics: foundation. Modern metrosexuals, it’s true, have started using this, too, but it costs them no more than a little money and a few sniffs from traditionalists to prettify their faces thus. The Wodaabe, on the other hand, must trek over nine hundred miles for their supplies of makkara, the saffron-colored powdere
d clay that makes their faces radiant, pale, and blemish free. Nor would the outlandish ingredients of modern male cosmetics—cucumber facials, chicken-bone-marrow creams, et cetera—be anything new to the Wodaabe. The whitener they use to paint intricate patterns of dots, lines, and crosses over their kohl and makkara, called doobal, is actually the dried and powdered excrement of the doobal bird.8 Nor did the cosmetic concoctions used by non-Wodaabe ancient and tribal males lack their own bizarre and sometimes hair-raising ingredients. Polynesian men in the Marquesas Islands in precolonial times, for example, achieved those cherished pale skins by applying a mix of coconut oil, turmeric, and the crushed leaves of the paya vine to the skin. It temporarily turned the wearer green from head to toe, before peeling off days later to reveal the desired bleached skin.
Other tribal men, too, put Beckham and his metrosexual emulators to shame in their use of beautifying cosmetics. Papuan men of the Mt. Hagen tribe, for example, are known for their gorgeously painted and ornamented faces—these days displayed annually in the grand Mt. Hagen Cultural Show. But Mt. Hagen men, in the old days at least, also painted their faces daily with red, blue, yellow, black, and white clays. Their motives, once again, exactly mirrored those of modern metrosexuals. Sexual attractiveness was prominent, of course, but so was an aim often quoted by modern-day lawyers and investment bankers: business success. Some Papuan men, indeed, combined the two—Trobriand Island men who went on long-distance kula trade voyages painted their faces to charm their (male) trading partners into falling in love and giving them a better deal.9 This might seem like wishful thinking, but a recent economics study did, in fact, find that time spent grooming is one of the strongest predictors of a modern male’s salary level.10
Some tribal men went even further than either the Wodaabe or the Papuans. Young Nlaka’pamux Indian men of Canadian British Columbia, for instance, changed the patterns and colors on their painted faces three or four times a day. African Nuban males were just as extravagant, seldom appearing in public without whole-body artwork of painted patterns or animal motifs. (Nuban male cosmetic use was not solely motivated by aesthetics, however. It frequently had direct sexual consequences: if a girl was particularly impressed by a Nuban man’s make-up at a tribal dance she might throw her legs over his shoulders in a none-too-subtle signal that she desired an assignation.11) If ancient and tribal metrosexuals, then, make Beckham look like a sissy boy who’s broken into his big sister’s Revlon case, what about Becks’s fabled hairstyles? After all, Golden Balls reportedly gets his mane done at least once a week (though he claims, belying the extravagance of his underwear budget, that he gets these weekly do-overs gratis from a mate). Then there are those eighty-nine hairstyles—surely they testify to Beckham’s supremacy as hair-horse extraordinaire? Here, admittedly, Beckham does have it over Wodaabe males, who never cut their hair. This is not from sloth, however, but from the Wodaabe belief in the beauty of long hair. Rather than cut their locks, Wodaabe men actually tug on them to make them longer. They do, it’s true, shave their hairlines high up on their crowns in preparation for gerewol, to increase the length (and, therefore, beauty) of their faces. But this still doesn’t equal Beckham’s revolving door of hairstyles, so it seems Posh’s hubby has won this round by default.
* * *
Cosmetics for carnivores
All body ornamentation is a form of communication, according to anthropologist Ted Polhemus. What message, then, we might wonder, was intended for those who saw Chief Guangol, a leader of the Oromo people of Ethiopia encountered by explorer James Bruce in the eighteenth century? Bruce wrote that Guangol:
…had long hair plaited and interwoven with the bowels of oxen…which hung down in long strings…he had likewise a wreath of guts hung about his neck, and several rounds of the same about his middle…below which was a short cotton cloth dipped in butter…his body was wet and running down with the same…and the day being very hot an insufferable stench of carrion soon made everyone…sensible of [his] approach.12
I have never come across an explanation for this extraordinary outfit, but I’m willing to hazard a guess. The fierce Oromo warriors over whom Guangol was chief were noted for their cult of feasting on raw meat. Indeed, Bruce wrote that Oromo warriors preferred their meat so rare that at some feasts they cut their steaks out of live, screaming cows. Might it have been that Guangol’s rotting clobber was actually intended to display his access to the commodity that made him a successful warrior chief—raw, red meat?
* * *
Or has he?
While Wodaabe men might be relatively uncreative in their hairdressing, other tribal males had hairdressing repertoires that make Becks’s efforts look like pudding-bowl cuts. Mt. Hagen men, for example, style their hair with wigs so enormous they have to be built onto a supportive frame of cane and clay. These monstrosities, which take months to make, comprise tresses of other men’s and women’s hair and marsupial fur cemented with wax and grease, ornamented with scarab beetles and painted in fantastic colors. (These may seem ridiculously extravagant to us, but Mt. Hageners believe that friendly ghosts live in a man’s hair; baldness, therefore is a sign of fortune deserting him.)
Beckham partisans might protest, at this point, that this is still just one hairstyle, however time-intensive, compared to Beckham’s procession of curtain-cuts, cornrows, mullets, and mohawks. Some tribal men, however, arranged and rearranged their hair in styles every bit as varied and bizarre as Beckham’s. The British Consul to Samoa in the late nineteenth century, William Churchward, for instance, wrote that he saw so many different hairdos on men there that he had given up trying to catalogue them. Instead, he noted just the more bizarre ones—like “the mushroom,” where Samoan males clipped their back and sides but left the top to grow into an eighteen-inch crown, which they then dyed dazzling white.13 They also dyed their hair shades of blue, red, yellow, and green—sometimes all at once. True, Samoan men did have a more sedate, traditional style, the fonga, in which their long hair was tied up in a knot—but even that had twelve different names, depending on where on the head the knot was worn.14 Samoan men were so preoccupied with their hair, Churchward wrote, that “one can rarely pass through a village without seeing some branch of hairdressing, either cutting, oiling, combing, liming, or shaving.” Other Polynesian men also indulged, as evidenced by anthropologist Ralph Linton’s writings on the Marquesas Islands, where, he said:
…some men never cut their hair, others did it up in two horns…still others arranged the crown in fantastic ways, [such] as one half shaved, the other long, or the front shaved and the back long, or in a series of shaved strips…[and] in time of war finger bones or other trophies of slain enemies were attached.15
Beckham’s hairdressing hijinks, it seems, would probably have made Polynesian men simply yawn.
Another supposed hairdressing innovation of modern metrosexuals is hair gel. Beckham, after all, uses lashings of the stuff to create styles such as his legendary “fauxhawk.” But this is, as ever, nothing new—prehistoric men were using hair product when Westerners were still covering their syphilitic scalps with ridiculous horsehair periwigs. Churchward’s Samoans, to give one example, shaped their hair by massaging a paste of burnt coral and grease into it. The Wodaabe, on the other hand, along with other North African tribesmen, have dressed their hair with rancid butter for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years. Even northern European men had once been prolific users of lime-based hair product, as this quote by the first century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus illustrates:
The Gauls are very tall with white skin and blond hair, not only blond by nature but more so by the artificial means they use to lighten their hair. For they continually wash their hair in a lime solution, combing it back from the forehead to the back of the neck. This process makes them resemble Satyrs and Pans since…[it]…makes the hair thick like a horse’s mane.
The spikiness of the hair on “the Dying Gaul” statue in Rome shows how similar to modern hair gel th
is was in its effect.
Becks’s supporters might, though, insist that it is really his absence of hair—body hair, that is—that makes Golden Balls a male beauty pioneer. Exact figures on Beckham’s waxing activities are not available, but his hairless appearance in several underwear ads certainly suggests he is no stranger to the hot wax and spatula. Beckham is, in fact, anecdotally credited with driving the explosion of male genital depilation worldwide—the infamous “back, sack, and crack.” This procedure, in which pubic hair is stripped from a man’s scrotum, anus, and buttocks with hot wax, is reputedly the most excruciatingly painful cosmetic procedure a man can suffer, and many cite it as evidence of just how far modern metrosexuals will go in pursuit of narcissistic beauty. But are both these claims really true? Is Beckham truly such a pioneer in the art of shucking right down to his bare skin? And is the “back, sack, and crack” genuinely the most painful method of depilation men have ever undergone?
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