On November 12, 1993, I and about four other guys descended in to the poorly lit, wood-paneled basement of one of my best buddies. He had ordered a pay-per-view special called the Ultimate Fighting Championship, billed as a no-holds-barred fighting event, pitting the best fighters from various martial disciplines against one another for supremacy in the ring.
A skeptic even at 17, I half-expected it to be nothing more than a glorified wrestling show. I also had to shell out some of the cash to pay for the thing so I was out of pocket, too. I dived in to the Cool Ranch Doritos and prepared to make it a lackluster night.
That is, until the sumo wrestler appeared in what would ultimately be the shortest match of the evening.
Teila Tuli took a vicious kick to the face, dropping the 400 lbs Samoan to the ground as if he'd been shot. Tuli's opponent, Gerard Gordeau, then proceeded to pummel the living daylights out of the near comatose giant. It was over in 30 seconds.
I laughed, in the way teenage boys laugh when cartoonish violence assaults their senses and fills them with glee. That's just how I saw it, too, the fighting almost Bugs Bunny-like in its absurdity but immensely entertaining.
As the night progressed and the matches wore on, all of us were hootin' and hollerin', spilling Coke into the shag and Doritos crumbs on to the couch. We were just guys being guys watching other guys beat the hell out of each other.
It was fun.
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Somewhere along the way, men forgot what it’s like to be a man.
I'm not sure when the we lost sight of who we are but I'm going to guesstimate it started, perhaps ironically, not long after UFC1 first aired.
In the mid 90's, there was a trend among advertisers, television writers and others to portray men as bumbling idiots unable to find their way out of a wet paper bag. We were clumsy, ignorant slobs, incapable of independent thought.
We were spoon-fed a diet of our own ineptitude: you don't know how to dress; you don't know how to keep a clean home; you don't know how to communicate intelligently. Those that bought in to it that ideology and changed their ways became known as metrosexuals, a term coined back in 1994 in an article written by Mark Simpson in the British paper The Independent:
"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."
And shop they did, buying up designer labels by day, daintily nibbling on sushi and tipping back Zima's at night.
The metrosexual male had nice clothes and kept a clean, IKEA-furnished condo. His rise gave rise to Oprah and Dr. Phil, who taught him how to cry, how to communicate and how to form a symbiotic relationship with his feminine side.
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