Mark Simpson (journalist)

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Mark Simpson (journalist) bigraphy, stories - British writer

Mark Simpson (journalist) : biography

Mark Simpson is an English journalist, writer, and broadcaster specialising in popular culture, media, and masculinity. Simpson is the originator of the term and concept metrosexual. He has been described by one critic as "the skinhead Oscar Wilde", The Independent: "Mark Simpson is a skinhead Oscar Wilde, his bon mots are both alarming and amusing, getting up people’s noses and inside their trousers with equal aplomb."; quote used to promote Simpson’s books "Sex Terror" and "The Queen is Dead"

Simpson has written for numerous publications around the world, including The Times, The Guardian, Salon.com, Arena Homme +, GQ Style, Vogues Hommes International, The Independent on Sunday, Têtu, the Seattle Stranger, and Dutch Playboy. In December 2007, GQ Russia placed him in their ‘Top Ten Things That Changed Men’s Lives’.

The term metrosexual

Simpson is credited with coining the term metrosexual in a 1994 article., MarkSimpson.com He also introduced the word to the U.S. in ‘Meet the Metrosexual’, a much-quoted essay on Salon.com in 2002, leading to the global popularity of the term. This was also the first citation of the UK footballer David Beckham as the ultimate example of the type. Simpson was later credited with introducing the term ‘retrosexual’ (in the sense of the anti-metrosexual) in 2003.http://www.wordspy.com/words/retrosexual.asp

The New York Times acclaimed Simpson’s analysis of how sport and advertising are both increasingly using homoerotic imagery, in a process he dubbed "sporno" ("the place where sport and porn meet and produce a gigantic money shot") as one of the Ideas of the Year. The Times newspaper also featured sporno in their ‘Year in Ideas’ list.

In 2010, the global trend spotting website Science of the Time described Simpson as ‘the world’s most perceptive writer about masculinity’. The Times of India included ‘metrosexual’ in their review of the most important words of the last thirty years, commenting: "Much has been written about metrosexuals, but no one has done it as well as the man credited with coining the term, Mark Simpson."

Books

Male Impersonators

Simpson’s first book Male Impersonators (1994) provided the background for his theory of metrosexuality by examining the way men were represented in popular culture – movies, ads, mags, music, male stripping, and comedy – and showing how ‘unmanly’ passions such as homoeroticism, male narcissism, and male masochism were not excluded but rather exploited, albeit semi-secretly, in voyeuristic virility.

Returning to Freud’s theory of universal bisexual responsiveness, Simpson also ‘outed’ what he saw as the homoerotic subtext of masculinity itself. In particular, Simpson analysed the way movies, ads, pop music, and bodybuilding, had replaced ‘real’ masculinity, if it ever existed, with something ‘sexy and simulated’. In his chapter on Marky Mark and his (then) recent Calvin Klein ads, Simpson argued that the rapper’s appearance on billboards in Times Square and on the side of buses ‘in his prime and in his underwear’, grabbing his ‘package’ to shift product, graphically demonstrated how the commodification of the male body – ‘and gay men’s love for it’ – had become ‘eyepoppingly’ mainstream.

The book included a chapter arguing persuasively that the real romance in Top Gun was between Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Iceman (Val Kilmer). Quentin Tarantino made a cameo appearance in the film Sleep with Me later the same year as a party-guest making a similar argument. Although shocking to many at the time, the ‘gayness’ of Top Gun is now generally accepted.

Anti-Gay

Simpson’s controversial collection Anti-Gay (1996), described on the jacket as ‘The shameful antidote to feelgood politics’, ‘divided the gay community’ according to The Independent. Led by Simpson, various ‘non-heterosexual’ contributors, such as Bruce LaBruce & Glenn Belverio, John Weir, Peter Tatchell, Lisa Power, and Anne-Marie Le Ble, voiced their criticism of the gay ‘one-size-fits-all’ identity and the gay media’s intolerance of anything that wasn’t ‘glad’ and ‘clap happy’. Anti-Gay was one of the first "post-gay" books, appearing a year or so before a series of largely conservative American gay books critical of gay culture, such as ‘The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture’ (D Harris, 1997) and ‘Life Outside’ (M Signorile, 1997), ‘Sexual Ecology’ (G Rotello, 1998).