Mark Simpson's Blog, page 10
November 25, 2020
Goodbye, Mr Bond – Hello Buff New World
Mark Simpson on how Sean Connery’s self-objectification helped sire a generation of young men licenced to thrill So, Mr Bond finally did what Mr Goldfinger expected him to do. Even if it took 56 years. This October, two months after his 90th birthday, Sir Thomas Sean Connery, the first, most definitive, most popular, most alluring, […]
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October 23, 2020
Big Poulaine Energy: Medieval Men & Their Brazen Ways
“It’s a time when tunics are getting shorter and young men would have been showing off their legs…. So low-cut shoes would have accentuated and elongated the leg, all down to that long point.” Men in fifteenth century Europe, their thighs and calves so swole and shapely in their medieval compression pants, were crazy for […]
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October 17, 2020
Egypt’s Spornosexual Pride Parade (Police Academy Section)
The young men of the Egyptian Police Academy put on a pec-tacular display this week in Cairo, surrounded by – and perched on – the butch toys that come with the job. It’s easy to snigger, but it’s definitely not easy to stay rigidly most muscular on those moving tanks, speed-boats and wobbly triple decker […]
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October 6, 2020
Micro Tight Beach Buns
I should probably pretend that I have something interesting to say about this ad for Leorever ‘micro tight’ compression shorts, starring a young blond, pneumatic spornosexual (Michael Dean Johnson) working out on a beach in wet, super-clingy spandex, and covered in baby oil. But, aside from noting that they had to shoot this ad on […]
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October 3, 2020
Bulletproof Boys & Snuggle Huddles
Mark Simpson on America’s manly embrace of BTS & Korean metrosexuality ‘K-Pop’ boyband BTS, also known as the Bangtan Boys, have been getting a lot of love in the US this week with their week-long ‘virtual’ residency on The Tonight Show. Their new single ‘Dynamite’, their first song performed fully in English, also took the […]
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August 29, 2020
All Aboard the Prideful Virchoo-Choo Train!
At long last, the LGBTQ+ community finally has its ‘first fully-wrapped Pride train entirely staffed by an LGBTQ+ crew’. Launched this week by Avanti, it will whizz up and down the West Coast line between London and Glasgow, flying the rainbow flag, educating the public and ‘raising awareness’. And possibly occassionally getting them from A [...]
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August 27, 2020
How I Killed Father Ted
This year is the 25th anniversary of the launch of the much-loved UK sitcom Father Ted. This unpublished interview with writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews – in which I pointed out how many priests drop dead in their hit sitcom – was commissioned by Deluxe magazine in February 1998. The day after I handed [...]
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August 20, 2020
Lockdown Pressups
A week before gyms were shuttered for lockdown back in March, I managed to buy a pull-up bar, a dip stand (great for lower pecs, triceps, inverted rows and drying socks), plus an ab roller. My smugness at successfully planning ahead before home workout equipment transmuted into gold dust was slightly dented however by the [...]
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August 14, 2020
Metrosexual Podcastery
Back in early March I contributed over the phone to a Slate magazine podcast by Willa Paskin on the history of the metrosexual Stateside. I first wrote about my insufferably pretty offspring in the UK’s Independent newspaper in 1994 – but in 2002 I introduced him to the US on Salon.com. Where he quickly spread [...]
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April 9, 2020
Cecil Beaton: Valour in the Face of Beauty
In a world saturated with social me-dear surveillance and suffused with surplus selfies, being interesting becomes ever-more compulsory just as it becomes ever-more elusive. Not only for artists in this brave new connected, visual, attention-seekingworld, but for civilians too.Little wonder that Cecil Beaton, a man who essentially invented himself and his astonishing career with [...]
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