Is a metrosexual a straight man in touch with his feminine side?
This common definition is a more polite version of the “straight men who act gay” line. Implicit in it is the laughably mistaken notion that gay men are by definition in touch with their feminine sides. Actually, male homosexuality could be characterized as less an attraction to men and more of lifelong flight from the feminine — a terror of the womb-tomb and suffocating domesticity. Arguably a straight man is the one who really gets in touch with his “feminine side” — when he gets married. Admittedly, though, gay men — all of them, without exception, even lesbosexuals like me — are no stranger to the phenomenon of male narcissism. And narcissism has been seen as the feminine quality par excellence — even though Narcissus was in fact a bloke. Again, it was the hallmark of the sublimating 19th century and its division of labor that all desire, beauty, sensuality and “weakness” had to be projected onto the female. It’s why the female nude replaced the male nude in art (the male nude
