Spornography

Yankee Doodle Metrosexual

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, September 4, 2008:

Tom Brady and the New England Patriots open their NFL season at home on Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs. Good thing, too, because I have been worried about him. A nagging injury, cloaked in mystery in the typical Belichick style, had kept him out of all four preseason games. Leaks to the press had localized the problem in his right foot but I had come to suspect that Brady hurt himself at a midsummer photo shoot for this month’s Esquire magazine, when the play calling may have stretched the quarterback beyond his preferred practice.

For the cover of the magazine poor Tom was poured into a wasp-waisted wool suit by Gucci which forced him to hold his breath dangerously. The tightness of the two-button jacket was rakishly offset by an unbuttoned collar and a tie positioned strategically askew. His shoes were credited—and I’m not making this up—to a cobbler named A. Testoni. Brady’s raging five o’clock shadow was not credited to Richard Nixon, but his close-cropped hair was ascribed to “Pini Swissa for Pini Swissa Salon.” (This was clearly the head guy at the shop on Newbury Street in Boston—he even traveled with Brady to the Super Bowl and, ignoring Delilah’s cautionary model, cut his locks the night before the game. The Giants are properly grateful.)

Two crotch-focused shots offset the crotch-focused prose of the story inside, ostensibly the inside story about Tom Brady, superstar. “A big man. Taller, thinner, slower, quieter, and—it must be said—a little more milky white than one might expect. In the glinting angle of a limousine-crafted profile, he brings to mind someone beautiful and iconically male—Tyrone Power, perhaps.” Really.

Further into the story the writer, Tom Chiarella, quotes Tom as saying, “I like home magazines.” ... “It’s hard,” he smarmily continues, “to think of the Brady all squoogie at the sight of a duvet cover or a teak spice rack.”

What is going on here? Have our sports heroes and our media culture gone metrosexual? Is this male impersonator in Esquire the stoic quarterback whom sports fans had cast in the mold of Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees? Or is he truly a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a mincing cartoon? Before we hit the table of contents of the September issue we are made to run a gauntlet of 34 pages of soft-porn ads, from the glowering ambisexual models promoting Hugo Boss or Prada to the glistening torso of David Beckham to the artfully moussed Roger Federer.

The unexpectedly high viewership of the Summer Olympics on NBC owed much to the record performances of swimmer Michael Phelps, but maybe even more, in this new age of spornography, to his preposterously low-slung Speedo, awarded a gold medal by viewers of varying sexual proclivities.

Oh, why should I grumble? Has it not been ever thus? In the years before the Revolution made it America’s patriotic anthem, Yankee Doodle was a song of derision that the British heaped upon the ignorant colonialists, calling them so stupid that they could only hope to attain a foppish stature. The first verse and refrain, as generally sung by children today, run thus:

Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
He stuck a feather in his hat
And called it macaroni.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Yankee Doodle round the world
As sweet as sugar candy.

This seems a mild enough if not fully fathomable jest—hardly a slander. How then to account for the eponymous hero’s enduring power as a figure of fun? What precisely was a Yankee, or a Doodle or, most intriguingly, a macaroni (surely it was not just pasta)?

Some savants trace the history of Yankee Doodle back to a harvesting song of 15th century Holland, Yanker dudel doodle down, sung by laborers who were paid with a tenth of the grain and all the buttermilk they could drink. Others find echoes of the melody in the equally old English rhyme Lucy Locket (“Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it; Nothing in it, Nothing in it, But the binding round it.”) In the days of Cromwell, one of the nicknames which the Cavaliers bestowed upon the Puritans was “Nankee Doodle.” An Albany-area tradition attributes a 1758 incarnation of Yankee Doodle to Dr. Richard Shuckburgh, a British army surgeon, wit, and musician who is said to have written it while at Fort Crailo, to mock the ragtag New England militia serving alongside the redcoats.

No matter; the essence is that it is a song of insult. For our current investigation we need look no further back than 1775, when after the battle of Bunker Hill, the Continental army, under General Washington’s command, was encamped in the vicinity of Boston. The Tories were then singing to the old tune of Lucy Locket these lines:

Yankee Doodle came to town

For to buy a firelock;

We will tar and feather him,

And so we will John Hancock.

Thomas Ditson, of Billerica, Massachusetts, was the one tarred and feathered for attempting to buy a musket in Boston in March 1775. The Battle of Bunker Hill in June turned the tables, as Yankee Doodle came to be sung by the patriots. The complete Americanization of the song followed as Harvard student Edward Bangs penned the following during George Washington’s presence at the Provincial Camp in Cambridge in 1775.

Father and I went down to camp,

Along with Captain Gooding,

And there we seed the men and boys

As thick as hasty pudding.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up,

Yankee Doodle Dandy;

Mind the music and the step,

And with the girls be handy.

etc.

Following General Burgoyne’s surrender of British troops to the Continental Army on October 17, 1777, British officer Thomas Anburey wrote:

…the name [of Yankee] has been more prevalent since the commencement of hostilities…The soldiers at Boston used it as a term of reproach, but after the affair at Bunker’s Hill, the Americans gloried in it. Yankee Doodle is now their paean, a favorite of favorites, played in their army, esteemed as warlike as the Genadier’s March — it is the lover’s spell, the nurse’s lullaby…it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune, when their army marched down to our surrender.


Although musicologists have not found an 18th-century version of Yankee Doodle with the immortal line “He stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni,” the jibe may well have originated about the time of the Macaroni Club, established in London in the 1760s for men of polymorphous sexuality. By 1772 the macaroni was a national infatuation, even spawning a magazine not unlike the current Esquire. According to contemporary Thomas Wright, “the macaronis were distinguished especially by an immense knot of artificial hair behind, by a very small cock-hat, by an enormous walking-stick, with long tassels, and by jacket, waistcoat, and breeches of very close cut.... Macaronis were the most attractive objects in the ball, or at the theatre. Macaronis abounded everywhere. There were macaroni songs; the most popular of these latter was the following: —

“Ye belles and beaux of London town,

Come listen to my ditty;

The muse, in prancing up and down,

Has found out something pretty;

With little hat, and hair dressed high,

And whip to ride a pony,

If you but take a right survey,

Denotes a macaroni.”

Named for the vermicelli-based pasta enjoyed by cultivated young Englishmen on their 1760s tours of Italy (thought by the English to be a particular den of perversion, even more so than France or Spain), the macaroni came to embody the consumption of continental fare in intellectual and moral spheres as well. Old-fashioned Englishmen came to identify macaroni culture with all that was effeminate and outlandish. As The Macaroni; A New Song put it in 1772:

His taper waist, so strait and long,
His spindle shanks, like pitchfork prong,
To what sex does the thing belong?
‘Tis call’d a Macaroni.

Between yesterday’s macaroni and today’s metrosexual there may not be much to choose. In a 1994 article in The Independent titled “Here Come the Mirror Men,” Mark Simpson coined the term.

Metrosexual man: the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levis jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping.

In Salon eight years later he added:


For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn’t shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image – that’s to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that’s the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser’s walking wet dream.

Call me retrosexual.

--John Thorn