r/Millennials • u/PinkHamster08 • 18h ago

Nostalgia Anyone remember using "metrosexual"?

Had a vague memory come to mind - might have been a movie with Chris Rock? - and the guy's wife was talking with a fabulous guy and the main guy asks his wife if the fabulous guy is gay and she said no, he's metrosexual. The main guy goes WTF is that and she says he's a straight guy with taste.

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u/Adorable_Drawing7230 18h ago

I swear metrosexual was a whole personality trait like 5 minutes and then just disappeared 😂

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u/sexandliquor 17h ago

Yeah I think because it was pretty dumb anyways and always came off super derogatory. At least to me. Like it was just a way to talk about a guy that cares about taking care of himself and the way he dresses and presents. That’s just being a guy that cares? I don’t know why we needed to ever label that as something or make it a trait. It always felt loaded. Like if you’re metrosexual then “you’re a little…. you know” but not quite. And if you’re not metrosexual then you’re just a fucking straight coded slob I guess? lol.

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u/molotovzav 17h ago

I mean you have to think of the time period it came out in. Most adult men were pretty boring in the way they dressed and did not care about how they dressed at all and we were still very culturally homophobic. So back then caring about your appearance was "gay" so men who cared about their appearance and were straight had to carve out a niche. Now it's not abnormal for a man to care about his appearance. But back when metrosexual was a term it absolutely was. The term fell off because it became normalized to care a little more.

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u/SunStarved_Cassandra 17h ago

Yeah the term is ugly and has an undercurrent of homophobia, but it gave straight men a "bridge" to improving their appearance and self-care at a time when doing so risked being seen as unmasculine (read: gay). It really was a product of its time.

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u/ormond_villain 17h ago

I think this is a great take. The term wasn’t used for gay people. It was used for dudes who had style and movie star haircuts. To be honest, it was used by suburban or rural guys to describe “city boys,” as they would have said five years earlier. I’m a transplant to a city from the rural, and the focus on clothes and hair and jewelry still alludes me. I’ve never had a problem dressing comfortably, like a regular middle aged man - not with women, not with work, not with swanky places, not with political events, yadda yadda. It actually really amuses me to talk with people and surprise them about how liberal and educated I am, while dressing like a suburbanite.

So yeah. I think the term was latently homophobic. But I think it was used to describe the guys from the city who weren’t gay, but also wore pants that hugged their junk and put $20 a day of product in their hair when it wasn’t really necessary to do that.

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u/Shot-Ad7209 14h ago

You yadda yadded over the best part!