metrosexuals, losers, and dumb gays
New writing on metrosexuality, dumb gays discussing "demure," 80s synth albums, and American diners.
Remember me? The one who made grand pronouncements about how this newsletter would be released regularly? Unfortunately, my faithful readers, I’ve been distracted as I deal with the cursed year of 2024. I was also busy on my annual trip to visit the United States of America, specifically making my pilgrimage to Las Vegas (and also going to a wedding in California). I’m also famously not good at being brief or writing casually, which leads to this long-overdue new issue.
I had originally planned a pebble around Bart Summer, based on some stray tweets I saw posting screencaps of Bart Simpson being the chilliest bitch alive — plus a tweet that reads: “having a bart summer. i have hepatitis A” — but sadly, summer in all its Bart and Brat iterations feels like it's on life support. I’m looking forward to autumn so I can wear one of my two sweaters and light prayer candles for a cozier, less stressful end to this year, but I know there are at least two more heat waves left to rock my ass (including one starting tomorrow).
I deeply apologize to the pebbleheads who wanted some fresh content in August, but even I need a break sometimes. Anyway, a species of penguin likes to leave pebbles in their partners’ nests to show they care. I am that penguin.
Welcome back, and welcome to issue nine of 5 pebbles.
01) an excerpt from ‘remembering metrosexuality, the trend that taught straight men it’s ok to be a little gay’
“Precise, smooth, and powerful:” the sexual energy rippling through Gillette’s 2004 ad campaign nearly leaps from the page — not because razors were suddenly sexy, but because its star, David Beckham, was known at the time as “the biggest metrosexual in Britain.” With a freshly shaved head, glistening muscles, and a green-tipped razor in hand, the image cemented what the world already knew, by way of a £40 million global ad campaign. This British soccer star — this man who wore pink nail polish and, occasionally, his wife’s panties — was seen as the peak of masculinity that year, and nobody else came close. As Gillette’s tagline went, Beckham was “the best a man can get.”
Beckham may have been the gold standard for The Metrosexual, a “type” of man that entered the popular consciousness in the mid-2000s, but really the inspiration for the movement looked more like Stefon from Saturday Night Live. The character, played by Bill Hader, stopped by Weekend Update with highlights in his side-swept hair and Ed Hardy’s rhinestone regalia covering his body to let viewers in on the hottest new spots in nightlife. Stefon’s outfits were modeled after 2000s nightlife looks, a fitting visual metaphor for the chaotic, homoerotic overtones of the early 2000s.
To read my full essay, please click here.
02) it seems like nobody wants to stop being a loser these days
For someone who is an ocean away from the United States of Freedom I left behind, I sure do love to crane my neck over my garden wall (it’s made of some semblance of a work/life balance and public healthcare, fyi) and see what the culture is up to over there. While I sat on an airplane hurtling through the air from Amsterdam to Berlin, the third and final flight on my journey home from Nevada, I finally took time to read the very good essay “The Mainstreaming of Loserdom” by the newsletter Telling the Bees. I’m unfamiliar with this particular newsletter, but the writing here was a great mix of factual and scathing (see below), and I will be subscribing.
“People simply aren’t connecting the way they used to, and I won’t be the bad guy for pointing out that it doesn’t surprise me that people are desperately lonely while also saying their favorite hobby is… staying home,” they say, before delivering this kill shot: “The people screaming from their rooftops about how they don’t go anywhere and don’t have any friends aren’t the same people writing 70,000 words of Harry/Draco smut, I’m sorry! I know my people, and this feels different. It feels more sinister. Posting fanfiction online is a bid for community. Scrolling on your phone is not.”
I won’t quote the entire piece (though the thought did cross my mind), but you should absolutely read it. Spoiler alert: The author says not to shame people for being terminally online and unable to grasp the concept of partying or having a robust social life, which I'm afraid I have to disagree with. Bed rotting is going to do more than give you bedsores; it’s going to rot your mind and make you willingly embarrass yourself on social media by theorizing people at parties just wish they were checking their phones.
We could all do with being less online, but I also feel weird reading this because it’s so far outside of my reality. I may not be Berlin’s biggest cheerleader, but living for six years in this city and immersing myself in nightlife, the art scene, etc, has shown me that the problem of the terminally online, bed-rotting masses is distinctly American. People joke about the European mind not comprehending some American quirk, but it goes both ways. The American mind could not comprehend living in a reality where going out is the norm, where what’s happening online is cataloged by the few (like, me), and where your life and personality don't revolve around what media you consume. Lead an American to water, and they won’t drink; they’ll make a two-part podcast series wondering why they didn’t get into Berghain.
03) social media users once again display the media comprehension skills of a lobotomy convention
The general brain rot of using the internet is already well documented, but it feels like there’s a specific kind of advanced, incurable form of mental atrophy that afflicts (1) stan culture and/or (2) homosexuals. Recently, a viral tweet managed to unite Family Guy, Sabrina Carpenter, and toxic fandom in a way only the internet can. It’s a four-second clip of Peter Griffin dressed in Jessica Rabbit drag (the weirdly sexy cartoon character from Who Framed Roger Rabbit). He attempts to chop wood in the same way Mariah Carey attempted to throw a baseball — badly and girlishly.
I first saw the clip when @didyoujustsaywig posted it on Instagram. I thought it was funny, I shared it on my story (I’ve had Carpenter’s shockingly good new album Short & Sweet on heavy rotation), and I thought that was the end of it — until I checked the comments. One of the most liked reads: “omg yall are so quirky different cool for hating someone popular! u should really talk about it more! louder even!!!” The IG comments section has rapidly become a cesspool over the last year (probably sped up by people leaving Twitter), but fan culture always adds a particularly grim element. Any kind of differing opinion or concept that requires critical thinking — especially when it's directed at someone even mildly popular — unleashes hell.
We’ve had fandom long before social media; Beatlesmania had women (and probably some gays, let’s be honest) fainting at the sight of four visually mid British men. I think the issue here is not with fans becoming parasocial freaks, which is only going to get worse, but rather with the short-term memory of social media. One week everyone is demure and mindful, the next they're unable to process Peter Griffin demurely chopping wood in cunty drag. The Carpenters freaked the fuck out on this clip because they assumed that this was rude to Sabrina Carpenter, but is it? Not really. Even @didyoujustsaywig had to clarify it was not a drag. The fact is, Short & Sweet is not exactly subtle about leaning into (and twisting) feminine tropes in the songs. Seeing people froth at the mouth as they misinterpret a Family Guy clip they incorrectly assume is dragging a basic pop girlie who makes ironic, demure, feminine pop songs fuels my belief that internet connectivity was a mistake.
By the way, speaking of the “demure and mindful” fad, I have to make an aside for the brain-numbing stupidity of writing a micro essay saying things like “the Demure trend is a perfect example of Queer alchemy” and “it becomes an iteration of the old protest chant ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.'" That last quote nearly made me throw my phone out of my window.
It’s fine to be dumb, gay, and a writer (look at me, typing this), but let’s be real here. We do not need to go deep on a microtrend that had the shelf life of milk a month past its expiration date. Failing to recognize that its originator, Jools, was using it ironically to tell people not to be "too much" in social situations is literally the opposite of being here and queer and making people get used to it. Twisting a TikTok catchphrase that lasted 48 hours into a variation on a famous queer protest chant is justification for the Hague, imo. Open the schools because I am so tired.
04) neil young’s kraftwerk-inspired, synth ode to his disabled son
I’d imagine that my readership doesn’t exactly lean towards Americana music (except for Eliot, hello), but hear me out. I recently discovered the 1983 Neil Young album Trans, and it's a banger. It’s also deeply weird because after the standard dad rock intro, “Little Thing Called Love,” Young swerves into a freaky new direction. The Canadian-American rocker had begun playing with two new machines—a Synclavier and a vocoder—and decided to strip out all the music he’s made for the record, overdub it, add some weird sequencing, and synth the absolute shit out of it. It’s the sonic equivalent of watching your middle America father slowly turn into a robot.
The obvious reference here is Kraftwerk, but Young’s biggest influence wasn’t the German electronic band; it was the struggle to communicate with his son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. As he explained in a 1988 interview for Rolling Stone:
"If you listen to Trans, if you listen to the words to "Transformer Man" and "Computer Age" and "We R in Control," you'll hear a lot of references to my son and to people trying to live a life by pressing buttons, trying to control the things around them and talking with people who can't talk, using computer voices and things like that. It's a subtle thing, but it's right there. But it has to do with a part of my life that practically no one can relate to. So my music, which is a reflection of my inner self, became something that nobody could relate to. And then I started hiding in styles, just putting little clues in there as to what was really on my mind. I just didn't want to openly share all this stuff in songs that said exactly what I wanted to say in a voice so loud everyone could hear it."
The result is one of that decade's most moving, experimental rock albums. Like its sonic ties to Kraftwerk, these early experiments in synth and electronic feel prescient now that we’re ensconsed completely in a digital world. Young was fully aware of the impending shift, too. “I could feel the world changing,” he explained in 2019. “I knew I was into something cool when I got the two Sennheiser vocoders to the studio. They enabled me to be a robot, to sing through any thing, present my voice as an envelope to the notes I played with my Synclavier keyboard.” As a final point, I just want to say that Young was guaranteed $1 million per album and total creative control during this period of his career, so releasing a record of “synth shit” (as Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro called it) that was an ode to his disabled son was incredibly badass.
05) a perfect day inside chicago’s golden apple diner
I was in the good ole, sugar-coated USA for two weeks, which means I could indulge in the only thing I truly miss about America: eating diner food. Berlin does not have anything close to the vibe of diners, which I could theorize directly relates to how grumpy and painfully dull Germans are as a society. But that’s another rant for another day. I grew up in these kinds of diners. Eating with my family or friends. Sitting down to browse the encyclopedic menu in the morning and evening, and drunkenly at 3 am.
They encapsulate everything about American culture that is cursed and beautiful to me. One of my most prized possessions is an IHOP coffee mug I stole from the restaurant last December while home for the holidays. On my trip, I sat in a diner called Hometown Country Kitchen that may have had the most bland, tasteless food I’ve ever experienced, but my god, could they decorate. Every square inch of the space felt like I was in some local eaterie on the side of a highway in Kansas. The European mind literally could not comprehend the heavy Americana vibes radiating from this restaurant, which I should note was an air-conditioned oasis situated in a strip mall parking lot in Las Vegas in 104-degree Fahrenheit weather.
I mention all this because a few weeks ago, while cooking in my kitchen in Berlin, far from America, I got recommended a podcast episode titled “24 Hours at the Golden Apple” from This American Life. The episode first aired on November 7, 2000, and documents one day in a Chicago diner called the Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. the next morning. I was not prepared for the emotions that swept over me, and I cried multiple times while cooking because the sheer nostalgic force knocked me on my bony ass.
It’s a perfect documentation of a specific era in America, less than a year before September 11 would change the country forever (and seven years before the iPhone would change the world forever). The episode doesn’t just itch my diner-loving bones; it acts as a window into life's multiplicity, celebrating all humanity's differences, pain, joy, struggle, and laughter. I wish I could listen to it all over again with fresh ears.
Want more pebbles? Read my about page, or consider contributing. You can also comment on the posts (if you’re feeling social).
If you liked what you read, please consider forwarding this to your friends; more readers means more contributors, which means more interesting content.
Thanks for joining me and have a nice day!