Although the term metrosexual has been around since 1994, it took until August 2003 for ABC News.com to post a quiz asking men to "Weigh Your Style Quotient to See If You're a Metrosexual." 
  The suggestion: "If you're a man who enjoys shoe shopping, pedicures and perfecting your recipe for crème brûlèe, you may be a metrosexual kind of guy."
   That may not be as mainstream a death knell as Wal-Mart selling knockoffs of your favorite fashions, but it's close enough. Metrosexuality is finally out of the closet far enough (or is it IN the closet?) to start the slow death-by-hyperbole process.
   Author Mark Simpson, coiner of the term, defines a metrosexual as a self-involved product of feminism, repression and uncertain sexual orientation. 
   The metrosexual is, Simpson writes, "decidedly single, definitely urban, dreadfully uncertain of his identity (hence the emphasis on pride and the susceptibility to the latest label) and socially emasculated, and much more interested in his image. A man, in other words, who is an advertiser's walking wet dream." 
   In pursuit of this wet dream, men's magazines have increased their coverage of fashion and are being rewarded with more ads. (FHM says its fashion and grooming advertising has increased 35 percent over the past three years.) "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" has become the phenomenon-du-jour, its gay stylists in demand for all sorts of downstream promotional tie-ins. 
   But it is only a matter of time before the media beats metrosexuals to death and we get back to life as we once knew it.
   In the meanwhile we have to endure this fiction that metrosexuals are an important new marketing niche squeezed, tweezed and teased somewhere between gay men, who Simpson says, provided the early prototype for metrosexuality and the "hysterical heterosexuality of tits, beer, sports, cars, and fart-lighting."
   I appreciate that by its very definition metrosexuals are supposed to be an urban phenomena, but get 20 miles out of New York, Miami or San Francisco and you'd have a real hard time scrapping up enough metrosexuals to field a basketball team.
   A metrosexual is nothing more than a guy who finally figured out he'd get laid a lot more with a haircut, clean fingernails, his shirttail tucked in, and thus empowered, able to entrap dates in his apartment by cooking them meals. 
  Certainly, cultivating a rebellious look has its rewards. There will always be a place at the nooky table for bad boys. Women learn pretty early on that they are called bad for a reason.
   Granted, there are guys in big cities who make serious money and think nothing of spending $3,000 for a suit or $800 for a sweater or $75 on a bottle of hooch, but the vast majority of young men in this country are perfectly happy with their jeans, beer and fleece jackets, often with a football team logo on the back. 
   Certainly we all have that aspirational gene that is tweaked by the layouts in GQ or Details or Esquire, but when it comes time to put your money where your mouth is, guys still don't shop.
   Shopping for most men is an annual event when worn-out jockeys are replaced and we finally give up our favorite frayed-collar white dress shirt, often under duress. We take no pleasure in petting stacks of designer cashmere anything or test-walking $1,000 pairs of shoes.  
   Unlike women, whose lives are often caught in cyclical indecision while considering every possible option before making a choice, men are utterly linear in the buying process. See it. My size? Not a bad color. A third off? In the bag.
   Done.
   We are simply not at the dawn of a new age in which men, suddenly in touch with their feminine sides, redefine what it means sartorially to be men. 
   Rather we are caught in a trendy dust devil spawned by the gaseous hope of Madison Avenue that men will become voracious consumers of all sorts of upscale crap they don't need or particularly want.
   At the end of the day it is asking too much of men to give up tits, beer, sports, cars and fart-lighting.