Goodbye skinny metrosexuals, the beefcake is back

By Tanya Gold for MailOnline
Updated: 02:46 EST, 13 April 2009

Metrosexual twigmen who admire your shoes are all very well in good times, but when the going gets tough, what you actually want is a REAL man, says Tanya Gold.

As I stick my head out of my window, I smell a change in the evening air. Everywhere I look big, dark, hairy, slightly fat men are staring at me  -  from advertising billboards, cinema screens and the pages of glossy magazines.

They growl, they glower, they exude menace and demonic sex appeal. I wonder, could it be  -  could it really be  -  that the beefcake is back?

Every credit crunch cloud has a silver lining. We are already saying goodbye to haute cuisine, ugly, overpriced handbags and £60 knickers. Why did we ever pay so much for a bit of ribbon and a label? What was wrong with us? Were we mad?

We are kissing hello to supermarket own brands, holidays in Cornwall, making do and mending, and knitting. Even Scrabble is making a comeback.

And, best of all things  -  better than Christmas every day, better than a pay rise, better than me  -  men who look as if they might actually be men are back.

Goodbye metrosexual twigman with your sad little manbag  -  you never did it for me  -  and hello beefcake beast. Where have you been? 

It should come as no surprise. Economic depressions have always walked hand in hand with the worship of raw machismo. That is just the way it goes.

Ask Hollywood, if you don't believe me.

Who was the No. 1 box office star of the troubled Thirties? Fred Astaire with his tiny feet and silly hats?

Not a chance. It was dark, dangerous Clark Gable (he of 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn') with rugged Spencer Tracy  -  a man who looked as if he'd kill anyone who wouldn't serve him a drink  -  right behind him.

The next big recession was the Seventies, when Hollywood gave us Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson, none of whom you'd want to throw a punch at.

The era also produced Burt Reynolds. He was so masculine he was just testosterone with a face stuck on.

And this time it's no different. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ed Norton  -  chinless drips the both of them  -  are ebbing away in the popular consciousness.

They have been replaced by Hugh Jackman, the massive Australian with the massive chest, and Clive Owen, the British Sin City star with the nasty growl. 

We also have Jon Hamm, the gorgeous one from TV show Mad Men, and even Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has seemingly risen from the dead to make another movie.

And this time he has bigger arms than ever. If Sylvester Stallone is part of the zeitgeist, then the beefcake must be back. In the fickle fashion industry, things are changing, too. In the affluent Nineties, the men on the billboards simply shrank.

They were tiny, childlike men with no body hair and spindly legs. They had concave faces, hollow cheekbones, jutting hips and the open, bewildered expressions of children.

They were the size zero men, men by genitals alone, and to me they were as sexy as toast. They looked ill. They looked dead.

By 2005 you could put the average male model in a matchbox and still have room for all his friends. The king of the twigmen, Russian model Stas Svetlichnyy, was 6ft and weighed 10st. Ten stone? That is disgusting.

Yet, back then, he was so popular that even fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld decided to lose a third of his body weight to get the 'Stas' size zero look.

In the Nineties we had Jarvis Cocker of Pulp. Now he just looks like a girl  -  and not a pretty girl either.

In fact, he looks like a girl on the run from an eating disorder unit. But how we drooled and screamed and tried to rip his manbag off his scrawny frame.

We also had to put up with James Blunt as the popular icon of manhood in the early Noughties. I met him a few years ago at a party and I towered over him. He only came up to my knee. 

And what about Michael Jackson? First, he decided he wanted a white face, then a woman's face and, finally, no face at all. And don't even get me started on David Beckham. A man in a skirt? What went wrong?

But that is all over. Fashion has spun, mutated and spat out beefcake. Yes, he is back. Back! I scream it with joy from the rooftops  -  back! Male icons will no longer weigh less than me.

In fashion, twigman has gone, to be replaced by David Gandy, the male model of now. I find it hard to pay attention to male models  -  I always forget a pretty face  -  but even I can see that Gandy, the Dolce & Gabbana model from Essex with the tiny white pants, looks like a Mexican bandit on steroids.

He looks as if he'd cut your throat for 10p and a packet of crisps and then give the entire female readership of the Daily Mail a fireman's lift into work.

I have always fancied men like him. Even when I was a tweenager, I yearned not for Rick Astley, but for Orson Welles as Mr Rochester in the Forties version of Jane Eyre.

Yes, he was fat  -  he apparently had to take a steam bath every night and wear a corset to squeeze him- self into his costume  -  but he stomped around Thornfield like a dog with toothache, his cloak flapping in the wind. 

I can't imagine Jarvis Cocker doing anything in the wind, except falling over and getting his mummy to bandage his head. But why has the beefcake returned? Why has Bruce Banner become Hulk again? What has brought him back?

It's simple. It's so simple even David Gandy could understand it. The 'rise of the drip' was clearly an expression of our collective affluence.

In the last boom, we had computers, call centres and automation  -  and money, so much money, to do everything for us.

We lived in a highly sophisticated, fantastical, touch-screen culture where beefcake man was surplus to requirements. (OK, you might occasionally see one in a garage, stuck under a car, wielding a spanner, but it was rare.)

Everyone seemed to want to be gay and middle class, even the men who were straight and working class. You couldn't squeeze into a bar without being slapped with an over-styled Paul Smith suit and a noxious cloud of girl cologne.

In this sexless world of money and style, beefcake was nowhere. Because you don't need a beefcake if you live in a penthouse with blinds that go up and down at the touch of a button.

Beefcake looks weird in such a setting. Beefcake looks sad. Beefcake has nothing to do. He doesn't belong and he knows it.

Better to have a girl-man who looks like Keira Knightley and can discuss all your consumerist junk with you.

'Look,' says the perfect Nineties man. 'Shoes!' Ugh. It was not a good time for dating.

But things have changed. Our economy is splintering, our seas are rising and house prices are falling. Look away from the page and look back. Yes, your house just lost another £50 in value. We are afraid, and we should be. So what do we do?

We should choose beefcake. Fashion has decreed it. In times of hardship and uncertainty, what sane woman wants to cuddle up to a man she knows she could beat in a fight?

Who needs a sensitive accountant when all the money is going? Who needs a man to talk shoes when all the shoes have gone? 

It is better to have a man who can mend things for you. And butcher sheep. And build houses and grow vegetables and make things out of bits of wood.

Won't you feel safer? Won't you feel better, knowing that there is a serious lump of muscle between you and the cold, cruel world outside?

Then there is sex. Shopping may be dead, but sex is one of the few commodities that is booming. All the supermarkets are reporting increased condom sales. Because sex is a cheap form of entertainment and it is also comforting.

I believe the boom and all the aspirational rubbish that went with it was essentially about denying who we were. Look, I have a handbag/ dress/car/tiara fit for a princess! Except I wasn't a princess, I was a journalist. And now I am a journalist in a lot of debt.

And now we can't afford to pretend to be other people, we can have better relationships. A real person with another real person? Who could believe it?

Hardship gives great love, if you let it.

Do you remember the Blitz? Everyone had great sex in the Blitz, even my Auntie Marie, who hated men.

And who do you have sex with? Big, brawny, hairy men, proper men, that's who.

When did we start thinking masculinity was threatening? Probably when Mummy said we had to marry a lawyer/accountant/doctor to buy us all the rubbish we now can't afford, and we don't need anyway

Now a sensible Mummy will say: 'Marry a man who is nifty with a drill, darling. A man who can dig a well. Because in the dark times coming, you won't need someone to do your VAT returns. There probably won't be any VAT.'