Thanks to metrosexuality, boys don’t cry — it’ll smudge their eyeliner

Picture this: a concert, sponsored by a local radio station, filled with typical concert… Picture this: a concert, sponsored by a local radio station, filled with typical concert attendees — basically a group of people covered in bad tattoos, mud and one anothers’ sweat bouncing around like hyenas on crack.

Occasionally a band goes on and the inevitably cute, male lead singer is projected on monitors bigger than most Little League fields. The sweaty, mud-covered hyenas with “Mom” tattoos go nuts. They love it; they can’t get enough of it. This is their band, their song, the deepest expression of the burning in their souls, and, also, some girl just showed her tits.

Now picture this: An ugly guy gets on stage. He’s wearing magenta lipstick and you could plant corn in his face, that’s how deep his crows’ feet are. His hair is a black, electrocuted mop. He’s like a bruised, drag version of Elizabeth Taylor. He’s fallen down the ugly tree and hit every branch.

The hyenas are confused; many, a good 25 percent of the 68,000 or so people in attendance, flee. Who is this man who has the audacity to get up and be ugly?

Never mind the fact that ugly guy is good, really good. Never mind that his voice is strong enough to break down walls, invasive enough to crack any concrete exterior, to wind its tendrils around your atria like kudzu and break your heart.

The fact is that he is ugly. And that just won’t fly.

It’s been a year since the recent bout of foppishness known as “metrosexuality” hit the mainstream, and this is what it hath sown. Straight men who play it gay — or what our conception of a gay man should be — now set the agenda for how men are treated. But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Wasn’t that Rudolf Valentino in eyeliner and rings, Elvis in sequins, Prince at any given moment? So now we have men with pressed jeans and perfect, waxed chests, men with every hair in place, every nail polished, men as women in some weird, mass-marketed genderscrew.

And resultantly, we’re trained to be just as repulsed by ugly men as we are ugly women. Metrosexuality was originally hailed as an equalizer — men now have to endure what women went through. All that dyeing, polishing and ironing was supposed to make them able to relate to women, to be more sensitive.

But just as computers have failed to reduce paper shuffling, so too has metrosexuality failed do any of these things. Instead we judge and are judged by our appearances. It’s more equal, yes, but that means we all lose equally.

So trained are we to be repulsed by ugliness that we suck our teeth, we turn our heads and hope the video cameras broadcasting the show will focus on the hot guitarist or fit drummer. So trained are we that we turn away from one of the best sets of the day, from Robert Smith and The Cure making us question the negative repercussions of getting out of bed in the morning.

Dave Eggers, in a piece in June’s Spin, longs for a world where “woman could become popular with a face that could melt cheese.” Being lactose intolerant, I’d prefer marshmallows, but he makes my point.

With all that’s wrong with the world, shouldn’t the least of our worries be what people look like? What if all our rock stars weren’t pressed and polished, if an ugly person at the mic didn’t trigger some anti-Pavlovian response where we all stop salivating?

And it’s everywhere. Pretty people sell — duh — but as we get uglier, fatter, meaner and less literate, it’s time to see someone in the media who’s not Mr. Joe Waxed-Chest or Miss Betty Sue Facial. Even our ugly people are pretty now — they’re quirky or distinguished or however people describe crooked noses and gray hair.

Only shallow people don’t care what things look like, said Oscar Wilde. But shallow people only care what things look like, and, increasingly, we’re moving in that direction.There’s something raw, organic and authentic about someone who doesn’t look like they’ve been through a spa anytime recently. Call it a credibility gap, but the fact that musicians are spending more time on facials and less on music makes me trust them less than those who aren’t.

Now, I’m never one to turn down boys in eyeliner, but enough is enough. Metrosexuality may have made it OK to appreciate the male form, but, one year after it came out to the mainstream, this is what it’s done.

It’s made Smith, the original boy in eyeliner, ugly. And, while boys may not cry, that still don’t make it right.

Sydney Bergman thinks that Karen O and Smith should have beautiful freak-babies together. Email her at