Mark Simpson's Blog, page 19

Irritating Male Skincare

Men’s skincare commercials can be the pits. What’s the point of ‘all natural’ ingredients if the ad brings you out in a rash? This one from the butchly-named Bulldog currently airing on UK television, is one of the most irritating I’ve seen – in a very competitive field. In it two bearded elves beavering away in Santa’s workshop talk about how much they ‘love Christmas’. Then the one on the left announces: ‘We spend all year making gifts for people all over the world but […]

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‘I’m Nobody’s Nephew’ – Rare Quentin Crisp interview

‘So you sit there. There’s the nail, and there’s the piece of wood. And you wait.’ Probably for the Great Dark Man to bang it in. Broadcast on UK television in 1975, the day after The Naked Civil Servant aired, thrilling and shocking the nation, this fine interview by the great Mavis Nicholson is one that I don’t recall seeing before. Though of course, Crisp didn’t really do interviews – he declaimed. Gloriously. Crisp was forever in the dock, making a final, impassioned appeal to […]

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VAIN 1 – In Praise of Personalised Plates

By Mark Simpson Personalised number plates are the pits. The egotism of them! The silliness of them! The waste of them! The motoring equivalent of a sovereign necklace, their only value is warning everyone that the driver ahead is a BI6 DCK. Or so I used to think. And I suspect many of you may have done so too. Personalised plates or ‘vanity plates’ as they are sometimes called are booming. According to the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency almost 350,000 registrations were sold over […]

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Staring At The Male Boobs of Baywatch

‘You should look at my face’, saysAlexandra Daddario to Zac Efron after accusing him of staring at her breasts. ‘I’m trying,’ replies Efron, ‘but it’s so close to your boobs.’ So far so Babewatch. But the recently-released trailer for the upcoming Seth Gordon directedBaywatch movie knows times and tastes and focal points have changed. After this exchange about boobs, the very next scene shows Efron stripping off his shirt and flashing his tits and abs on a jetski. The boobs on display in the...

French Farms Now Equipped With Gyms & Waxing Salons

We’ve seen a great deal of male pin-up tit-ilation over the last decade or so, in which men in traditionally masculine occupations get their clothes off and their tarty on as they occupy the traditionally ‘feminine’ and ‘passive’ position of the glammed-up calendar girl. And they’ve turned out to be naturals. It started with the famous Dieux du Stade sporno calendars, spreading to firemen, Mormon missionaries, Catholic priests, rowers and then pretty much to the entire male sex. Menhaven’t bo...

Balls on the Box: Male Grooming’s Groping For New Markets

‘Male grooming’ is still booming and boldly going where no ad has gone before – groping male consumers in the hunt for new markets and new frontiers of needs. And this TV commercial currently airing in the UK is very bold, as Julian and Sandy would say.It features a man playing with his balls on prime time. ‘Only a few decades ago if you wore underarm spray you were not considered to be a REAL MAN,’ says the strangely robotic (butch?) voiceover, as we watch […]

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Notes on Hipsterism

By Mark Simpson While everyone else in the 80s wanted to look like they’d walked off the set of Blade Runner or Top Gun, Peter York looked and sounded like he’d stepped out of Dangerous Liaisons.Whenever the co-author of Style Wars andThe Sloane Ranger Handbookpopped up on telly, as he often did back then, talking about trends or ads in a dapper Saville Row suit, his hair looked like it should be powdered and bowed, and his upper-lip beauty-spotted. In BBC Four’s recent TV doc […]

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Older Drivers: One Foot in the Grave – The Other On The Brake

By Mark Simpson You’re stuck behind a MG Rover that is going a little slower than you would like. It’s driven by someone with white hair, glasses, and perhaps a hat and driving gloves. They are taking their time at junctions and traffic lights while peering over the steering wheel like that ‘Kilroy Was Here’ Second World War graffiti that they are probably old enough to have drawn themselves. Suddenly the idea of bringing in compulsory re-testing of drivers who are over 70 becomes very […]

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Pietro Boselli – Spornosexual Philosopher

The ‘world’s sexiest maths teacher’ is living, geometrically consistent proof that spornosexuals don’t have to be dumb. And also that for all their self-sexualisation, spornos can be romantico. Angelic, even. Though if angels look like Pietro who needs Hell? Signor Pietro Boselli, with his cherubic facial features, those bucolic, rosy cheeks that belies his 27 years, and that smiley submissiveness, puts me in mind somewhat of Antinous, the beautiful young male lover of the Roman Emperor Hadri...

Sassy Misandry: Abusing Men isn’t ‘Bloomin’ Awesome!’

‘Does the empowerment of women have to take the form of beating up on men?’ Yours truly in the Daily Telegraph on the painful corporate cliche of sassy misandry.

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