I'd just never noticed that John Wayne walked like that before...

After my work is done I'm going to start a blog about the power of trend analysis to take things about the world that hurt people and make them alright again. It'll follow the ebb and flow of the slow mechanations of the stodgy old journalists who eke out livings giving silly names to otherwise nonexistent teen sensations.

A couple years ago someone coined the term "metrosexual" as a playful term to describe an allegedly recent shift by men to adopt feminine dress codes. Of course, this shift is traced back in literature to the Elizabethan era, when moralists got their shifts in knots decrying that styles had grown so similar that tailors had to put buttons on different sides of men's and women's clothing just so that there was some clear mark of who an article was allegedly designed for.

But trendspotting is not a historical science. It's actually a trend in itself, a way to nationalize the behavior we find in every third grade classroom, where in order to show membership in a group people delineate clearly what behaviors do not fit within the confines of their group. This behavior, among children, has a much simpler name: namecalling.

A namecaller shows boundaries of normal and expected behavior in order to allay personal fears of abnormalcy, strangeness and social undesirability. We can only presume based on the similarity of action and effect that a trendspotter performs the same activity for the same causes. One could argue for the addition of economic rewards, but in my blog we'll take for granted that those are already included sufficiently in the above list.

So all across the country, at every major media outlet of our world-famous free press, professional name-callers picked on guys who dressed too much like the women whose attention they were trying to attract. The national name-calling campaign didn't entirely liminalize the behavior, though. Because the sartorial minority had (as it did in the days of Shakespeare's original drag queens) critical mass, the external identification fostered greater self-identification.

Whereas before a young man might wear his hair long and condition it every day because he wanted to be a rockstar, and then be totally surprised if a couple awkward kids asked whether it meant he was gay, in the era of metrosexuality he became a part of a movement. Or maybe movement is the wrong word. It wasn't specifically going anywhere, but everybody knew about it, so the sense of identity became a preoccupation. People embraced their label. The fashion industry caught on quickly and started making tight jeans for both genders to try to help us squeeze out our differences.

But in middle schools across America, kids understood the namecalling for what it was and imitated it perfectly. A national script of neo-para-homophobia was successfully established as the dominant discourse of our younger generation, even in an era when America is at war over a different set of fears and misunderstandings. Kids in most American schools (and yes, I do believe I have taught at a representative random sample, including integrated, segregated, rich and poor schools) still don't know what halal means, but they can pick on a metro or a homo, or simply apply the labels to pick on anyone or anything that catches their ire. To wear trendy clothes is to be labeled metro, and the label will be read aloud in every class.

This year (or maybe last--I'm not all that trendy) some geezer coined the term "retro-sexual" to symbolize a movement back to the same set of highly differentiated gender roles that, to counteract the information that they are not any older or more natural, are insecurely referred to as "traditional." Traditional gender roles can be any number of things. They can include male-to-female physical, sexual and emotional abuse. They can include codependent relationships like those portrayed in Romeo and Juliet. They can include solicitation.

They can also be positve forces, when applied gently. Someone can be told to man up and treat a woman right. Someone can decide to be a man face his fears. But women are better at facing fears than men. Women walk in a world every day where they are terrified of "traditional" male behavior. Women are afraid to take stairs or elevators alone. Women face fears men do not even dream of and have a scientifically tested higher tolerance for pain. An all powerful, all knowing God couldn't have meant women to be weak and made them tougher than men just by accident, could She?

So, as you can see, my blog won't be in favor of all trends, but it will assess the power of trend identification. For instance, throughout the aughts, to be trendy in any way became synonymous with being metrosexual which, as noted above was, on a scale of liminality, synonymous with homosexuality.

Now the namecallers have started trying to popularize a trend of retrosexuality in order to sell retro fashion--i.e., royalty-free designs that don't require creativity can be reproduced to help a new generation of trendy young things dress up and make believe that they invented the world and all its pleasures, and that they are its rightful kings because they alone, unlike their older sisters and brothers, are properly acting out the essence of their own being, by dressing according to how they pee.

It won't be long, though, before some middle school name-callers start noticing how trendy these retrosexuals are; how much their fashion-enslaved behavior mimics the behavior of magazine obsessed little popularity queens. It won't be long before retro joins metro and homo as a new insult among the brightest minds of tomorrow. At the same time, it won't be long before yesterday's trendy metrosexuals become tomorrow's trendy retrosexuals. In short, it won't be long before every guy that goes out of his way to display his heterosexuality inadvertently ends up with the opposite label.

And when all our kids tease each other relentlessly for being gay, the word should hopefully lose any remaining negative connotation. When that day comes, my trendy blog about trendspotting will cover it. And I'll be so cool. So, so cool. And not at all metro.