The Metrosexual

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2003, the word "metrosexual", meaning a well-groomed heterosexual man, exploded all over the English lexicon. It invaded the news, TV, and even American politics. On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the origins of the metrosexual, and how trend forecasters, marketers, David Beckham, Sex and the City, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy helped make the metrosexual possible. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the early 2000s, Maryan Saltzman was an executive at a global advertising firm who specialized in market research.
0:15.0	Though that's a pretty dry description of what she did.
0:18.0	I guess I'm called a transpotter at one point in my career.
0:22.0	I was responsible for the sex survey for Aspar magazine and I would
0:28.7	come up with really lovely and more friendly questions like who should sleep on the wet spot?
0:33.1	She also asked questions that Chikily tried to get at how men were feeling about their
0:37.2	relationships and their masculinity.
0:39.2	Do they have any kind of envy about the fact that gay men had better
0:43.5	relations with women than they did more conversational
0:46.4	relationships.
0:47.2	Another question, do they want to be the best friend,
0:49.2	the best lover, or the best shopping partner?
0:51.3	The answer she got, alongside once from more exacting surveys
0:54.4	stood out to her. She began to suspect that a trend was afoot.
0:58.4	Between 25% and the third of men were straight men who wanted to increasingly adopt more characteristics
1:06.1	associated with gay man. Marion was not the only person to have noticed what seemed to be a new subset of self-identified
1:14.0	heterosexual men. I am so confused is he gay or is he straight. This is from an episode of
1:19.3	sex in the city that aired in August of 1999. It, it's not that simple anymore.
1:24.0	The real question is, is he a straight gay man?
1:27.0	Or is he a gay straight man?
1:29.0	The gay straight man was a new strain of heterosexual male
1:32.0	spawned in Manhattan as the result of
	...

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