By GREG DIXON
I have a prediction. Some time in the future, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, the world will be divided not along religious, race or gender lines, but into those who are obsessed with their looks and those who aren't.
In this future, those of us who care about who
someone is - rather than how they look or where they bought their clothes - will vote the bimbos, himbos and the body fascists off the planet.
They will be shipped to another galaxy. There will be beaches there, somewhere where they can pump iron, eat low fat, have fake tans applied, have their pubes waxed and prattle on to each other about how beautiful they all look. The sky will be one large mirror.
In the meantime, however, we have to put up with these sad narcissists, the kind of people who populate tonight's Reel Life documentary, Vain Men (TV One, 8.30).
It has become an increasingly tedious trend to say that there is a trend towards men becoming more feminine.
Apparently the use of moisturiser is a key test. Those who have flaky skin are old men, those who don't are a la mode and now have a silly, faddish appellation: metro-sexuals.
But the mostly British blokes in this Channel Four documentary have gone way beyond moisturiser.
These sad narcissists are more like Extreme Vain Men. One is Phil, a working-class bloke from some council estate. He devotes around two hours a day to washing, shaving his entire body and trimming his eyebrows. He goes to the gym most days.
"I like to look nice. I don't think I'm obsessed," he says, indicating next-to-no self-knowledge.
As the documentary opens, he is obsessed, in particular, about looking nice when he weds his fiancee.
Which is nice, too, for his mum and dad because they thought he might be gay.
One of the programme's last scenes sees fancy Phil standing at the altar in a particularly shiny mauve suit. Looking bad, Phil, looking bad ...
Another, not particular informative, threaded story is the hunt for the first British cover boy for the British edition of the male sad narcissists' bible, Men's Health. Apparently the Brit edition of the mag has never had a Brit boy on its cover and it has been publishing for seven years or more. And so, a Popstars-like search for some average bloke who looks good running along a beach with his shirt off.
The most extreme body-obsessive featured is an American called Antonio. He has flown from Pittsburgh to Miami to have $60,000 of extreme cosmetic surgery. This includes silicon "muscle" implants to his chest, arms and calves, liposuction all over, but no brain transplant.
An apparently melancholy vain man at base, he offers that his current body, well, "it's not me". Poor thing. Somebody must have swapped it at birth.
The truly horrific scenes - and take this as a warning - are saved for halfway through Vain Men. At a waxing clinic, we are forced to watch as some hairy-bummed fellow has his buttocks and his testicles waxed. Sweet fancy Moses, the very thought.
It is hard to tell the point of Vain Men, other than to trot across our screen on a Tuesday night a bunch of sad narcissists and vile wax jobs.
But it will have you praying for the day we ship these pathetic examples of humanity to a galaxy far, far away.
By GREG DIXON
I have a prediction. Some time in the future, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, the world will be divided not along religious, race or gender lines, but into those who are obsessed with their looks and those who aren't.
In this future, those of us who care about who
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