Not Safe For Work (Or Much Of Anything Else)

"I think the male libido is in decline — and I blame the feminisation of men that has taken place over the past 15 years or so. Like most trends, this one began in America and has now crossed the Atlantic. I remember being shocked on first entering the bathroom of an American male in 1995. There, carefully lined up on a stainless steel shelf, was a larger array of beauty products than you’d expect to see in Cheryl Cole’s boudoir. Admittedly, this was a sophisticated New Yorker in his mid-30s — a metrosexual, if you will — but even so. Did he really have to go to bed every night wearing a mask of Kiehl’s Facial Fuel? It seemed extraordinary.

Fifteen years later, it is now the norm. British men in their twenties spend a small fortune on cosmetic products. Back in the eighties, we would have been worried about being called 'gay' if we used fake tan, but that fear has gone the way of the Sinclair C5. When I find myself in the West End on a Friday night, I see young men who have clearly spent as much time getting ready as your average woman. And I’m not just talking about Old Compton Street.

At the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man, I do find this trend pretty reprehensible. Vain women are bad enough, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a vain man. In Shakespeare’s plays, over-attention to dress is always the hallmark of a fool, from Osric’s bonnet to Malvolio’s garters. Since the dawn of time, manliness has always been synonymous with a complete indifference to personal grooming. It’s not simply that real men don’t eat quiche; they don’t moisturise, either.

Surely, it is this gender reversal — with men becoming more like women as women become more like men — that accounts for the decline in male sexual desire. It is hard to imagine a metrosexual throwing a woman over his shoulders and marching off into the primeval forest — he’d be too worried about messing up his hair."

-- Toby Young, on the sad world feminism has created - and the sad men, too - creating an existence where no one is really sexy, or fun, but just sad and desperate, according to The Telegraph.