Who Is The New Man?

Joshua Muyiwa searches for the 'new man' reflected through a young father, a mother to teens and an artist

What is the 'New Man'? This isn't the first time someone has attempted to answer this question. In a 1994 essay for The Independent, the gay writer Mark Simpson coined the term 'metrosexual' on visiting Britain's first men's style exhibition. It was a silly-but-striking portmanteau of 'metropolitan' and 'sexual', used to describe men who groom and shop. Since then, there's been 'lumbersexual', 'retrosexual", "übersexual', 'spornosexual", and more. While these words have decorated and directed our collective ideas of men at different points, the category itself wasn't modified until recently. In October 2022, the Cambridge Dictionary updated its definition of man to read: ‘a man can also be an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been a different sex at birth.’

Growing up as multi-ethnic, queer, femme child in the India of the nineties, I was constantly reminded through teasing, threats and a good, sound thrashing to ‘act like a man’. In my teens in the 2000s, I suddenly found that other boys around me, whose shower routines included a generous dousing in aftershave and body spray, and who might iron the occasional shirt, were being called metrosexuals. I had never heard the word before. Clearly, it was a dig, but it didn’t have the same sting as other heavier words flung at me. These metrosexuals weren’t shunned from straight social circles, rather, room was made for them. For me, the word still sticks out because it was the first time I had heard another adjective used to describe men besides ‘manly’.