But of course, no matter how hard you look at the picture, you can’t see her — she has already been whisked off to the hospital where she would die soon after from “internal injuries” (something we know she had been suffering from for many years, and they were not caused by any car accidents). Until this week, Diana’s expiring body is literally obscene — “off scene” — in a way that much of her life was not.

Standing in for the totaled body of Diana, the wrecked Merc — the ultimate rubbernecking image — has somehow become a symbol not of prurience but of discretion. We all knew that pictures of a dying Diana in the back of the car were snapped by the paparazzi pursuing her moments after the impact, and that these landed on the desks of newspapers the next day. Until the CBS documentary about her death this week, no English-speaking publication or TV station has dared to show us the pictures. The media always has to navigate between catering to public curiosity and voyeurism, and on the other hand avoiding provoking the disgust of their audience — with themselves. “What kind of lady do you take me for?” is ever the response of Dame Public when they feel they haven’t been romanced enough before being given “what they want.” The public could not get enough of Diana — but after her death, they turned out to be as bulimic as the shy, awkward, exhibitionistic, sophisticated girl they voraciously consumed.

Unsurprisingly, the British press has been fairly unanimous in its condemnation of CBS. The left-liberal Guardian denounced the way CBS had plumbed “new depths of prurience”; the Daily Mail thundered on about the “ultimate betrayal.” Much of the media here, though, had few qualms about showing images of, say, mutilated Americans in Fallujah. JFK’s head has, of course, exploded on U.K. prime time more often than fireworks on the Queen’s birthday.

Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi al-Fayed, Diana’s consort that evening who also died in the crash, ordered his lawyers to write to CBS before the broadcast to make a “personal plea” stating, “We cannot imagine that CBS News would want to be the first enterprise to breach the collected understanding of the media based upon good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy.” Good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy are qualities that Mr. al-Fayed, the Pharaonic proprietor of Harrods and chief retailer of Diana conspiracy theories, is well known as exemplifying.

What is really remarkable is not that CBS showed these images but that these images have not been shown before, that for seven years we have been satisfied with the “discretion” of the mangled Merc in the “tunnel of death,” as empty as her womb (according to the doctor who famously testified at the British inquest that she wasn’t pregnant). Part of the reason why there are so many conspiracy theories is because people don’t want to let go of Diana or her “secret life.”

Diana, queen of the English-gossiping world in the last two decades of the 20th century, the celebrity princess, was anything but discreet herself (CBS was responding to rival NBC’s recent airing of tapes recorded by the princess talking about her marriage and confrontation with Camilla Parker Bowles in the early ’90s). Her life was a series of revelations, ever more dramatic and orchestrated, which left the British monarchy looking rather like her last ride. But this was part of the disavowal of her death that was engaged back in 1997. It was the paparazzi, you see, rather than our own appetite for her — and her appetite for us — that turned Diana the huntress into the hunted, and that ultimately killed her. “They” wouldn’t leave her alone! “They” afforded her no privacy! “They” hounded her to her death! “They” have no decency!

I remember standing with the crowds outside Westminster Abbey in the September sunshine in 1997 as the funeral service for Diana was being conducted. In the passion and the heat a lady fainted. One of the many news teams there began filming the collapsed woman. A posh middle-aged lady shouted out “Have you no decency at all! She’s not well!” As one, we all bristled at the camera crew, who quickly fled. Satisfied, we all went back to the private business of crying in front of the myriad other TV cameras.

There was also much talk after her death about how “the boys” — William and Harry — would not be exposed to the same treatment. And out of “respect to Diana” or rather the public outcry/self-disgust following her death, the boys have been off-limits for much of their adolescence. However, the boys are growing up (William is 21; Harry, 19), and the death of Diana and the collective guilt associated with it is receding into the past. Photos of William having his feet massaged at rugby matches by girlfriends and sharing ski lifts have made their way into the press despite protests from the palace. Most recently the world was ogling pictures of Prince William, heir to the throne, in snug Speedos at a water polo match.

The pictures are eerily reminiscent of some of the most famous images of Diana before her death — snapped on al-Fayed’s yacht in her bathing costume (allegedly after tipping the tabs off herself). Those shoulders, those long limbs, those cheekbones, those flashing teeth, that foggy, English, aristocratic skin. William is being offered to us by the media in almost as sexualized a fashion as his mother, even when taking part in something as innocent and boyish as a water polo match. Much discussion followed about whether tight Speedos and their “anti-grab” material flattered William or not — and whether his wearing them would increase sales. The same Google search that listed these stories also provided a link to a posting on a gay Speedo fan Web site where, on the basis of the tiny picture, someone deduced with scientific precision that William is averagely endowed (“if not smaller — though that may be an effect of temperature”). Tawdry, slightly pervy speculation this may be about the “crown jewels,” but is it really so different from the more innuendo-based noises the respectable press had been full of?

Interestingly, CBS insisted that its pictures of dying Diana were “tasteful” and featured only her “head and shoulders.” The program also featured the French doctor seen attending to Diana in the pictures, assuring us: “I can tell you her face was still beautiful. She didn’t have any injuries on her face.” This is both reassuring and slightly disappointing. You don’t have to be J.G. Ballard to see that horror and glamour are closely intertwined. Celebrities tend to lead car-crash lives, and if they also happen to have car-crash deaths then who can blame us if we want to slow down and take a good look?

Since then the metrosexual has become even more ubiquitous. In this accelerated age he’s grown up in a matter of months and become something Very Big in marketing. Thousands of newspaper, magazine and TV items on metrosexuals have appeared around the globe. There are now more than 25,000 hits for “metrosexual” on Google. Books have been written about him. Several well-known men have “outed” themselves as metrosexual, including Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean (to prove metrosexuality has no political preference, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has also accepted the label). TV has also gone gaga for male narcissism: This summer’s biggest hit TV series was Bravo’s metrosexual makeover program, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Metrosexuality even appears to have conquered Middle America, at least on “South Park” — in a recent episode, all the town’s males turn metrosexual after watching an episode of “Queer Eye.”

Here Simpson answers some of the many questions he has been asked in the last year about what he has called his “Frankenstein monster with perfect skin, terrorizing and sashaying the globe.”

Why has your term, which you first used 10 years ago, caught on so widely now?

When I wrote about metrosexuality back in the dark days of 1994 most were in denial about this new social problem. Metrosexuals themselves didn’t want to confront who they really were. They were ashamed, not of their love for themselves, of course, but of what the world would think of it. They feared, probably correctly, that their partners and friends wouldn’t understand, didn’t want to understand. Although the media at that time was already full of metrosexual males, all of them were in the closet. There were no open, well-adjusted metrosexuals willing to be role models to young, isolated metros wrestling with their deep yearning for scruffing lotion and Lycra-rich underwear.

So when I returned to the subject on this Web site last year I decided it was time to be ruthless and name names: I outed several leading metrosexuals, including David Beckham, Brad Pitt and Spider-Man. After the initial shock and protests subsided it became apparent that my recklessness had shattered taboos and brought about, if I may say so myself, a seismic shift in social mores. Suddenly, decades of accumulated steam has been released. People now feel able to talk — endlessly — about a subject that couldn’t even be acknowledged before. A chain reaction ensued as hundreds of thousands of metrosexuals around the world who had been cowering in their walk-in closets felt empowered to out themselves — or at least their friends and partners felt empowered to do so on their behalf. In the place of the pathological, slightly pervy-sounding “male narcissist” of the inhibited 20th century, there stood the out-and-even-prouder metrosexual, urban and erotic and very 21st Century Boy. And everyone wanted him.

In the 18 months since that article appeared online, the word “metrosexual” has become almost as ubiquitous as the phenomenon it described. Maybe more so. Metrosexuality is now a textually as well as a visually transmitted disease.

Much of the responsibility for this global epidemic of metrosex-mania, however, lies not with my irresistibly contagious prose, or even Salon’s worldwide e-popularity, but the very canny trend-spotter for a giant global advertising company who picked up the concept and, with the help of some research that seemed to show that metrosexuals really did exist, made over the metrosexual into a marketing tool with which to seduce the world media. Snarky sociology, which is no good to anyone, was transmuted into highly profitable demography, which everyone wants a piece of.

How did you first come up with the term and what did you mean by it then?

When I first deployed the word in 1994 in the Independent, a British newspaper, I did so to describe a new, narcissistic, media-saturated, self-conscious kind of masculinity. This was the version of masculinity produced by Hollywood, advertising and glossy magazines to replace traditional, repressed, unreflexive, unmoisturized masculinity, which didn’t go shopping enough, and which thought — ha! — that it was enough to earn money for wives or girlfriends to spend. In the ’80s it had seemed as if this kind of man only really existed in ads. By the early ’90s, it was already alarmingly clear that life was imitating bad art. At least to someone like me, who had spent too much time thinking about such things.

The concept grew out of my 1994 book “Male Impersonators,” which analyzed the effect an increasingly aestheticized and inauthentic world was having on masculinity. I meant “metrosexual” as cheeky satire, but also as sober social observation. I think it’s unlikely that I was the first ever to utter the word, but it appears that I was the first in print and the first to elaborate a concept behind it. Something I will have to learn to live with.

How do you feel about some people using the term without crediting you?

Relieved, in many cases. In the U.S. I’ve almost been credited too much — at least after Warren St. John at the New York Times took the trouble to “contact trace” and finger me as the source: Patient MetroZero. In the U.K., however, it doesn’t appear as if a single journalist writing about metrosexuals — and there have been scores of them — has bothered to even Google the word. Most have lazily — and cravenly — attributed it to “New York admen.” Which does make you suddenly much more proprietary about your concepts, much less inclined to see ideas as homeless, delightfully fickle, promiscuous things. Maybe the dramatically different response on opposite sides of the pond has something to do with American journalistic professionalism and the fact your country was founded on a literally religious investment in original texts. Or maybe it’s just that it’s much easier to sue in the U.S.

Is there really such a thing as a metrosexual? Or is it just a convenient pigeonhole?

Well, “metrosexual” is a rather ludicrous category, but no more ludicrous perhaps than “heterosexual” or “homosexual.” I’d say he’s as real as either of those categories. Arguably more so. The metrosexual is a recognizable species; you can point to one. Pointing to a heterosexual or homosexual is generally not as easy, without following them home to check. Not least because of the proliferation of the metrosexual.

What do you think of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”?

Clearly it’s meant to be “Metrosexuality: The Reality TV Show.” In a makeover culture it’s the ultimate makeover show because what is being made over is masculinity itself. However, the basic premise is, it has to be said, a lie. I know this will come as a shock to millions, but gays are not necessarily more stylish than straight men. Exhibit A: the gay fashion “expert” on “Queer Eye” [Carson Kressley] who dispenses sartorial advice while dressed like the Children Snatcher in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

And Exhibit B? Well, me. The queer daddy of the metrosexual, ladies and gents, is more of a lesbosexual — though this is no doubt a terrible slight on the stylishness of lesbians. I hate shopping and make one trip a year to a huge out-of-town sportswear warehouse to buy my year’s supply of manmade-fiber clothing. Yes, I go to the gym, but mostly because it’s the only club that will let me in, in my lesbianwear. Urban, fashion-conscious gays accessorizing masculinity and desirability may have provided the prototype for metrosexuality, but they’re the discarded, beta version.

Ironically, part of the reason for the popularity of “Queer Eye” may be that it reassures the audience that the “queer eye” belongs to queers, rather than to the millions of nongay men at whom metrosexual advertising is aimed.

In your original definition, the sexual orientation of a metrosexual is immaterial. Yet in most of the coverage and the marketing literature he is described as straight. Why is this?

Partly, as I say, because all gays are assumed to be stylish and well-presented. This is what “gay” means, apparently. However, describing the metrosexual as being straight is slightly silly. But then, advertising always sells things as being the opposite of what they are. Yes, most metrosexuals go to bed with women, and will only ever go to bed with women, but there is nothing “straight” about metrosexuality. It “queers” all the codes of official masculinity of the last hundred years or so: It’s passive where it should always be active, desired where it should always be desiring, looked at where it should always be looking. That most metrosexuals aren’t gay or bisexual only makes things even queerer. A hetero metrosexual checks out 1) himself, 2) other metros — how else to know what’s “in” this season? — and 3) women that match his key colors. Not necessarily in that order, but then not unnecessarily in that order either.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about metrosexuality is that it represents the beginning of the end of “sexuality,” the 19th century pseudo-science of sexual preference that said that personality and identity are dictated by whether or not your partner’s genitals are the same shape as yours. In a hyperconsumerist post-industrial age like ours, identity and personality are not permitted to be inherent — it would put most ad agencies out of business — and are instead based on lifestyle choices, consumption patterns, brands, social circles. As a measure of this, there are even glossy lifestyle magazines for same-sex and cross-sex couples. Love — and also reproduction — is a lifestyle. The sexual orientation of metrosexuals is obviously important to them and their partners, but their identity is not based on it, and from a cultural-commercial point of view it is almost immaterial.

From a marketing perspective, though, it makes perfect sense to maintain officially that metrosexuals are all straight — after all, advertising is trying to persuade as many men as possible to relax their sphincter muscles, cooing in their ear that there’s nothing gay about being fucked by corporate consumerism. Which, ironically, is true.

Are hetero metrosexuals really latent homosexuals?

Certainly it would make life easier and less worrying for retrosexuals if this were true — and I notice that in certain slightly, shall we say, clenched circles, metrosexual has become another word for “homo” or “fag.” Unfortunately for these threatened types — and also for me — this is just wishful, over-tidy thinking, homophobic housework. Hetero metros are not “really” gay — they’re just really metrosexual. In point of fact, hetero metrosexuals are probably rather less “latent” than retrosexuals. They are, after all, rather blatant — in their flirtatiousness. Their identity is not based on a constant repudiation of homosexuality. What the retrosexual finds repugnant in the metrosexual is his invitation of the gaze — a gaze that is not and cannot be gendered or straightened out. They’re equal-opportunity narcissists.

Homoerotics, rather than homosexuality, is an inevitable and obvious part of male narcissism — just as it is for female narcissism, hence “lesbian chic.” Which is one of the reasons why it has been discouraged for so long. This isn’t to say that most metrosexuals want to go to bed with other men — not even so as to generously share their beauty with the half of the human race so far deprived of it — it’s just that they aren’t necessarily repulsed by the male body in the way that many retrosexuals like to assert, repeatedly, they are. By extension, their interest in women is not necessarily driven by self-loathing or a need to prove their virility; it’s a matter of taste and pleasure. Which I suspect many women find something of a relief, not to mention a turn-on. Though admittedly some women may feel that the metrosexual is too much like competition.

Who best personifies the metrosexual, besides David Beckham?

Tom Cruise. He’s in his 40s now, but he uses all the technology of beauty and fashion to remain a desirable, smooth-skinned, buffed boy with a tarty grin. He’s still Maverick from the definitive ’80s movie “Top Gun.” Actually, he’s still the adolescent with no pants jumping up and down on the sofa in “Risky Business.” Hence the “Missy Impossible” movies are really all about his impossible quest to remain eternally youthful and desirable — and the sex object of his own movies. This is the narrative that all metrosexuals are destined to act out, though most with rather less help from Hollywood makeup artists, filters and CGI. Metrosexuality is just a ticking clock away from mutton-dressed-as-lamb-ness. I understand that in his latest film Tom’s finally grown a beard, but I’ll bet you ready money that it’s full of hair products. Like the metrosexual, there is no “mystery” about his sexual preference — his stunningly successful film career is a testament to his passionate love affair with … Tom.

Is the metrosexual a product of Gen X? That is, having no heroes, does a man then turn inward and start adoring himself?

It’s more a case of having no father. Metrosexuals are all “bastards” inasmuch as they want to be their own special creation, though they perhaps end up being the offspring of corporate culture. They do have heroes, but usually only aesthetic ones. Men who are famous for their looks and style, rather than, say, their political or military achievements. They do admire sporting heroes, but generally only the ones with the best (media) profile and product endorsement deals.

Is Howard Dean, who briefly outed himself as a metrosexual, really metro?

Well, he’s a modern politician. So of course he desires to be desired, particularly by the media. And as we know, the metrosexual is the favorite love object of the media these days. Perhaps Dean also had heard from the marketers about how “female-friendly” the metrosexual supposedly is. I notice, however, that he ran back in the metro closet shortly after outing himself.

Arguably, though, all politicians operating in Western democracies have to be at least a little bit metro these days, to attract flattering media attention as well as female and male X’s. They’re all a little bit Mel Gibson in “What Women Want”: admen trying on women’s underwear and beauty products in the bathroom to “get inside” women’s … minds. Some are less openly metro than others. When Air National Guard absentee George W. Bush dressed up in Cruise’s “Top Gun” costume and used the USS Abraham Lincoln as a giant, nuclear-powered strap-on, that was as brazen an exhibition of cross-dressing as there’s ever been. But it was represented by Bush’s P.R. machine as evidence of his “real,” “down-home,” “all-guy” masculinity.

What about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been called metrosexual?

Yes, definitely, but not, as has been suggested, because he wears Prada shoes. As a multimillionaire film star, what else is he supposed to wear? Flip-flops? Rather, Arnie is an example of (early) metrosexuality, proto-metro if you will, because, after watching too many Steve Reeves movies as a boy, he became devoted to his physique, turning himself into a spectacle, a sign, a commodity, one that was eventually noticed and bought by Hollywood — and used to seduce hundreds of millions of other boys around the world into turning themselves into commodities. This is the new American Dream: Don’t live it, become it. Arnie was a new kind of working-class hero, one who works on himself, laboring for aesthetics. As we now know, beefcake can become the most powerful man in the wealthiest — and most metrosexual — state in the U.S. Arnie may have been accused of groping women in real life, but it was mostly men’s bodies that he assaulted and aroused at the movies, which, because these were early days for metrosexuality, had to be “action” movies which frantically disavowed the passivity — and redundancy — of his aestheticized body.

How different is a metrosexual from a yuppie?

A metrosexual would never wear padded shoulders. He’d be wearing a sleeveless shirt to show off his deliciously developed deltoids and designer tattoos. Yuppies, anyway, are now a defunct and meaningless category because since the ’80s everyone in the Western world has become one, or wants to be one. Give or take a few anti-capitalist protesters in balaclavas.

What’s the relationship between metrosexuals and bourgeois bohemians, known as bobos?

A bobo would rather go to a gallery opening than the gym. A metrosexual would probably rather read the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, or Wallpaper, than David Brooks’ “Bobos in Paradise.”

So, really, what’s the difference between a metrosexual and a homosexual?

Metrosexuals are better dressed. Homosexuals are so last season.

What role will the homosexual play in the future?

Gooseberry.

Do metrosexuals have to be wealthy or middle class?

This is a common fallacy, partly based on the idea that working-class equals authentic and middle-class equals inauthentic. It’s actually a matter of spending priorities. Most metrosexuals in Britain, for example, are probably working class. David Beckham, like most of his male fans, is from a working-class family; he may have rather more money than most and get his togs for free, but this just means that he’s been able to continue his metrosexuality longer and on a larger, more frightening scale than most working-class men. Who, until recently, have had to give up these tendencies when they take on a family.

Partly as a legacy of the now-expired British aesthetic youth movements of teddy boys, mods and glam rockers, working-class men in the U.K. spend more per head on clothes and cosmetics than any other group in Europe. They tend to live with their dear old mums longer than middle-class boys, so much of their income is disposable; and because of their status they tend to be more keen to advertise. They also tend to have a more direct — and historical — relationship to the male body than middle-class boys. Though now they go to the gym instead of doon tha pit, if I can go all D.H. Lawrence on you for a second.

Are metrosexuals really such a modern phenomenon? What about dandies?

A metrosexual wouldn’t be caught dead in a powdered wig — though he might be tempted by the stockings and buckled shoes. Sorry to be pedantic, but dandies were an 18th century phenomenon. Metrosexuals belong to the 21st century. Dandyism was the pursuit of an elite, mostly aristocratic, or wannabe aristo group of men and was largely a way of advertising their wealth, idleness and refined taste. Metrosexuality is a mainstream, mass-consumer phenomenon involving the complete commodification of the male body. It takes Hollywood, ads, sports and glossy magazines as its inspirational gallery, rather than high classicism. The metrosexual desires to be desired. The dandy aimed to be admired. Or at least bitched about.

That said, there are continuities. Oscar Wilde, probably the most famous and most populist dandy of the last century, would have understood metrosexuality and might even have approved of it — he did once declare: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” Even if he could never have lived up to its exacting, athletic standards himself. It was Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency” at the end of the 19th century that popularized the Homosexual: The word was coined in 1860 — and, like “metrosexual,” is a forbidden and unfortunate conjugation of Greek with Latin. It also symbolized the triumph of the Industrial Age notion that male sensuality, aestheticism and narcissism were pathological, perverted and criminal. At least when you did them right. It was the decidedly middle-class concept of “sexuality” that killed the dandy. Now, fittingly enough, the metrosexual is killing sexuality.

Would the metrosexual still exist if the media didn’t pay attention to him?

No, but then he’s a product of the media, so it’s a trick question. You can’t have metrosexuals without the media; you can’t have a global media without metrosexuals. Metrosexuality is one of the most flagrant symptoms of a media-tized world: The male body was the last frontier and it’s now being thoroughly explored and mapped. Though admittedly, the media’s gangbang of the metrosexual, their own love child, is slightly incestuous, or at least nepotistic.

Have glossy women’s magazines helped create metrosexuality? Do the magazines influence the woman, so that the woman influences the man?

Possibly, though again I think men’s relationship to consumerism and temptation is more direct and not something that we can blame on Eve’s shamelessness. Metrosexual men are the way they are because they like what they see in the mirror. Women’s glossy magazines have had an influence on men mostly via men’s magazines, which have become, like women’s magazines, gender manuals, maps and bibles.

Is metrosexuality related to transvestism or transsexuality?

I suspect the rise of metrosexuality may actually lead to a decline in male transvestism. Or, at least, it will no longer be noticed. Beckham, after all, likes to wear sarongs and his wife’s knickers but is not seriously accused of being a transvestite. In a metrosexual world it will no longer be necessary for men to change sex surgically or sartorially in order to indulge their narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies. Which is progress of a kind, I suppose.

Is metrosexuality a sign of male confidence or a sign of weakness?

Very good question. I’m rather conflicted on this one. But then, so is the metrosexual. The answer is: both. Metrosexuality depends on a certain kind of anxiety about identity — as a creation of advertising, the metrosexual couldn’t be anything else. Metrosexuality also represents a switch in the power relations between the sexes and, in traditional terms, an “emasculation” of the male. On the other hand, metrosexuality is a sign of a certain kind of sexual confidence or “liberation” on the part of men — they can express “unmanly” desires they have always harbored but have had to repress for generations. It can also be a way of asserting a new, aesthetic power in an aestheticized world. A wealthy, successful male like Beckham can enhance his success and wealth via a “submissive” metrosexuality, and even be perceived as a better athlete as a result. Someone who looks like a male masseur at a Palm Springs spa can become governor of California.

Did you know that “metrosexual” means “motherfucker” in Greek?

No, but thank you for pointing it out. It does make a certain kind of sense. Metrosexuality is the sensibility of the New Matriarchy. It’s post-Oedipal. Dad is largely out of the picture, replaced by Nike and Playstation. The metrosexual family romance, the cradle of male narcissism, is just Junior and an adoring Mom. It’s why, from a certain perspective, Italians have been metrosexuals for years.

Is a metrosexual a straight man in touch with his feminine side?

This common definition is a more polite version of the “straight men who act gay” line. Implicit in it is the laughably mistaken notion that gay men are by definition in touch with their feminine sides. Actually, male homosexuality could be characterized as less an attraction to men and more of lifelong flight from the feminine — a terror of the womb-tomb and suffocating domesticity. Arguably a straight man is the one who really gets in touch with his “feminine side” — when he gets married. Admittedly, though, gay men — all of them, without exception, even lesbosexuals like me — are no stranger to the phenomenon of male narcissism. And narcissism has been seen as the feminine quality par excellence — even though Narcissus was in fact a bloke.

Again, it was the hallmark of the sublimating 19th century and its division of labor that all desire, beauty, sensuality and “weakness” had to be projected onto the female. It’s why the female nude replaced the male nude in art (the male nude had been dominant since ancient times) and why women became so pathologized. It is the hallmark of a metrosexual world, where the male nude sometimes seems to have replaced the female, that what is masculine and what is feminine are no longer quite so self-evident — perhaps because they never were.

Is the metrosexual a good or a bad thing? You have made fun of him quite a bit.

I have to confess I’ve been something of a deadbeat dad. I’ve been very hard on the metrosexual. I’ve taken some cheap shots, pointed and laughed at him and then abandoned him to the marketing people and the media. I’d like to think I was just trying to toughen him up, but probably it was reverse-Oedipal: I’m just jealous of his complexion and all the attention he gets. He isn’t without some redeeming and naturally attractive features, which I’ve tended to overlook. But as for whether the metrosexual is, in the long run, all things considered, taken as a (w)hole, a good or bad thing, I can’t say. It might be said that metrosexuality represents a certain kind of liberation of the male, but I suspect it’s another kind of enslavement, albeit a better-dressed variety.

The only thing that’s certain about the metrosexual is that he’s the kind of man that the modern world deserves.

You can’t understand anything about the British psyche until you’ve seen a “Carry On” movie. No less than 30 of these cheap but insistently cheerful films, which made a dirty joke out of every human vanity (and need), were made between 1958 and 1978, with such saucy, sodomy-fixated titles as “Carry On Cruising” (1962), “Carry On up the Khyber” (1968), “Carry On Camping” (1969), “Carry On at Your Convenience” (1971) and “Carry On Behind” (1975). These hymns to the single entendre — for the British there is only one hole, and it’s the wrong one — and orgies of cross-dressing are still played in constant rotation on TV (the cult 1970s BBC TV series “Are You Being Served?” is one example of an unofficial spinoff, and Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” is another, more lucrative one). Every now and again there is a disastrous attempt to resurrect the series — the latest, “Carry On London,” is due to start filming soon. The British are intimately attached to their sexual repression, especially now that they are officially liberated. Like a famously constipated Kenneth Williams — whose favored catchphrases included “‘Ere! Stop messin’ abaht!,” “Ooh! Matron!” and “Trouble with the bum, you know” — they can’t quite let it go.

Of course, a new “Carry On” movie has already been made. By the British media. And it has been a smash hit. “Carry On up the Valet,” starring Prince Charles, is a sodomy-saturated royal sex farce to end all sodomy-saturated sex farces. Front-page newspaper innuendo lines have talked excitedly about “smears” and “gags” imposed by a royal valet with the name of Fawcett and a judge with the name of Tugendhat. Fnarr! Fnarr! There’s even a “now you see it, now you don’t” guest appearance by the late Princess Diana and her “crown jewels” (kept, of course, in her locked “box”). The plot, as most of the world now knows, revolves around a “shocking sexual act” between Charles and his valet, allegedly witnessed by a nosey “under-valet.” The popular press gleefully publishes pictures that are pure “Carry On” publicity posters: Charles with an apparently limp wrist, or trusty Fawcett standing close behind while Charles discharges his shotgun. Blimey!

Due to various injunctions, we in the United Kingdom still don’t know the precise nature of the alleged “shocking act.” But we are told by the fourth estate, with a heavy-handed archness that even Kenneth Williams would have found difficult to execute, how Charles’ valet, Mr. Fawcett, used to “squeeze out Charles’ toothpaste for him.” In the original “Carry On” films this kind of line would have been followed by a trombone wah-wah-wah noise.

But please, don’t feel sorry for our enforced ignorance or rush to tell us what the precise details of this incident were. Thing is, we Brits don’t really want to know. We don’t want our feverish speculation and titillation spoiled by prosaic facts. We’re perfectly well aware there is this thing called the Internet, that it is peculiarly disrespectful of English injunctions or the royalty, and that probably somewhere by now there is a Web site offering a hardcore 3-D computer-generated simulation of the act, but we’d rather not log on. We’d rather leave it to our overactive imaginations and wagging tongues, thank you very much. British libel laws, much stricter than those in the United States, are not so much the cause of our love of tittle-tattle and innuendo as the function of it. Free speech is all very well, but it isn’t a patch on the pleasure of gossiping over your garden fence, or reading tabloid newspapers.

Besides, we’d hate it if we discovered that the allegation turned out to merely involve polite heavy petting rather than full-on rear-entry conjugation. We Brits love our buggery jokes and won’t let anyone take them away from us. There’s nothing for the British quite so satisfying as talking, gossiping and sniggering about buggery. Except possibly buggery itself. No, actually, thinking about it, even buggery itself has to “come behind” buggery jokes. Buggery jokes are as British as Marmite, Bovril, Bisto … and “Carry On” movies.

Of course, buggery jokes that manage to involve royalty are the nearest thing to sexual satisfaction the British can experience. The British attitude toward sex is much the same as their attitude toward class: So long as you are seen to suffer for it, and consider it some kind of duty, then you’ll be left unmolested. But woe betide you if you get caught actually enjoying yourself. Enjoying yourself is vulgar enough, but enjoying sodomy is as vulgar as you can go. Hence erstwhile pop royalty George Michael’s Beverly Hills arrest for cottaging (as we Brits like, in our “Carry On” way, to call cruising public lavatories) was the last time the British press had so much fun carrying on behind — it was literally the perfect “outing.”

Kenneth Williams was someone whose comic persona depended on his ability to lurch between high and low, posh and common, refined and sodomitical in one gossipy breath — though we always knew he was “really” a poof. Obvious gays who so clearly know their place — or should that be their “position” — have always been very popular in the U.K. Ironically, because they know their place they get ahead: They are all over TV — Graham Norton, a sweaty, reanimated, more explicit but much less funny Irish version of the sadly long-deceased Williams, is probably the most popular TV presenter in the country (and is apparently headed to the United States).

But why do the British love buggery jokes so much? Partly because in their Rabelaisian, excremental way they bring the high low and make a joke of all human sexuality. After all, sodomy is a great prank to play on the body, this alien, rather ridiculous veil of rebellious flesh we all inhabit — and which the British have always, rightly, been rather suspicious of (“Trouble with the bum, you know”). And partly because we’ve never been entirely comfortable with female sexuality — Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy (a running gag on “Are You Being Served?”) is as terrifying a prospect as it is amusing. But mostly, and this is something that seems to have been forgotten, because the English are a martial race. The original Angles/Anglos were rough foreign mercenaries who were hired cash-in-hand to scare off the beastly Vikings but who then decided they quite liked fog, roast beef and “Eastenders” and stayed after their working visas expired. The Normans who arrived later were even more warlike, and fond of their young male pages. Masculine warrior homosexuality, as exemplified by Richard the Lion-Hearted and Gordon of Khartoum, is even more a part of our history than camp followers like Williams and Norton.

It’s only a slight, tasteless exaggeration to say that the British empire itself was built on buggery. Buggery, or at least the ticklish thought of it, permeates barracks, messes and boarding schools, the latter of which were self-consciously modeled on the warrior homosexuality of ancient Sparta. Waterloo was won not just on the playing fields of England but also in her dormitories. In the 18th and 19th centuries, “effeminacy” in England — the “fop,” for example — was a function of being too interested in the ladies. Or just of being French. Winston Churchill, a former First Sea Lord (so he should know), famously described the Royal Navy’s traditions as being nothing more than “rum, sodomy and the lash”; the first leading of course to the second and thence to the third tradition. One of the largest Imperial possessions, the continent of Australia, was literally founded on sodomy: It began life as a “penal” colony, and as late as 1821 men outnumbered women 15 to 1 in New South Wales. The records are full of lashings handed out to men caught carrying on behind, a futile attempt to discourage the unnatural vice. Australia, you see, really was the arsehole of the world.

The transportation of convicts to Australia was eventually ended in large part because of the loud and bitter complaints from clerics and respectable Australians — there were some, apparently — about how widespread the sin of sodomy was among prisoners and how this was lowering the tone of the continent. Perhaps because of an Australian guilty conscience, or ancestral sore arse, today it is a well-known Australian-born media magnate who is most keen to use the “Carry On up the Valet” scandal to ridicule the British in general and bring down the monarchy in particular by lashing them in his newspapers around the world. The New York Post recently ran the puerile headline “PRINCESS CHARLES.” I’d like to see him tell those Outback sheep shearers there’s something essentially effeminate about a spot of situational sodomy.

Of course, being British we don’t need Australians to whip us — we like to punish ourselves for our favorite pleasures. Not only with lashes; the occasional hanging was also handed out for carrying on behind. Oscar Wilde, of course, was famously given two years’ hard labor for “gross indecency” with a member of the lower orders (though arguably his real crime was giving sodomy a good, well-mannered, literate name). When male homosexuality in England and Wales was finally decriminalized by Parliament in 1967 — against the loud protests in the House of Lords of Field Marshal Montgomery, the famous empire homo of El Alamein — the armed forces and merchant navy were exempted. In other words, much of the sodomy going on in the United Kingdom remained completely illegal and therefore still rather enjoyable.

These days Britain no longer has an empire. Its army and navy have shriveled, and in recent years it has become more civilianized and coed. Consequently, in place of the noble lash we now mix our pleasure in buggery jokes with hypocrisy, phony moralism and faux-seriousness. Hence this recent carry-on at the palace has been widely depicted, by liberal and conservative, republican and monarchist, tabloid and broadsheet newspapers alike, as “the worst crisis since the death of Diana” and one that seriously “threatens to bring down the House of Windsor.” So the uncorroborated allegation, by an alcoholic ex-servant with a documented penchant for uncorroborated sightings of homosexual acts — rather like the British media and public, in other words — that he saw Charles being intimate with a male valet is going to end hundreds of years of British monarchy? As Kenneth Williams would put it: “‘Ere! Stop messin’ abaht!”

Regardless of the truth or falsehood of the allegations (which no one has gone on record as saying they believe) the truly shocking thing would be if a member of the royal family, former public schoolboy, and former serving officer in the British Army had never had sexual encounters of any kind with other males. What kind of bloody pansy would that be? A life of pristine heterosexuality might be suitable for the delicate sons of the suburban middle classes — and contemporary Australians — but hardly for a future king of England.

But the press in England today, even the popular press, is irredeemably suburban and middle-class, or owned by Australians, and the alleged act, which even if it did happen would be utterly inconsequential, consensual and legal, has been widely described as “ghastly” and “shocking.” Even the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, a professionally politically correct figure, saw fit to talk about this “revolting and sordid gossip,” although if the gossip revolved around an allegation of royal naughtiness with, say, a willing black female servant instead of a white male one, he would be admonishing himself for his own rash choice of words.

Some have prissily suggested that if there is any truth to the rumor it means that a) Charles is gay or at least bisexual and b) this will cause major constitutional problems for the heir to the throne, as the English monarch is also the head of the Church of England.

As you may have heard, the Church of England has been pulling its hair out lately — and scratching its eyes out — over the issue of homosexuality and the consecration of the openly gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire. Until Charles helped us out, most of our buggery jokes lately have revolved around the “split,” “rupture” and “schism” that the “big issue” of homosexuality is threatening to cause in the Anglican “base.”

Leaving aside the issue that a spot of male-male sodomy does not necessarily make you “gay” or even particularly “bisexual,” but perhaps nothing more than slightly hung-over and embarrassed the next morning, the Anglican Church should get down on its knees and thank the Lord for buggery, since without it half the church would have nothing to do on Saturday night — and nothing churchy would ever get on TV or in the newspapers. In the largely secular United Kingdom, hardly anyone gives a toss of holy water anymore what the Anglican Church thinks about anything — except homosexuality. Divorce, abortion, adultery, drugs, underage sex — forget it. Who cares what the god-bothers’ opinion is? But buggery? Oh, yes, let’s get the dean of Big Bottomly Cathedral in the studio now, quoting from Leviticus.

This isn’t because we’re impressed by their theological arguments or their serious, pallid faces, but rather because, as you know, we find men in frocks on telly talking about sodomy a real hoot. As the blessed Mr. K. Williams, archbishop of Carrying On Behind, would put it: “Ooh! Matron! Take them away!”

In the era of soccer that will come to be known as B.B. — Before Beckham — the sport was a team game. What mattered was the club, the team and the player in that order. Then in the mid-1990s, David Beckham — or “Becks” as he is known in that familiar, affectionately foreshortened form with which the British like to address their working class heroes — came along, flicked his (then) Diana-style blond fringe and changed the face of soccer. It wasn’t his legendary right foot that altered the game, but his photogenic face — and the fact that he used it to become one of the most recognizable, richest and valuable athletes in the world, receiving a salary of $8 million per year, earning at least $17 million more in endorsements and commanding a record transfer fee for his move to Real Madrid of $41.6 million.

Beckham’s greatest value is his crossover appeal — he interests not only those who have no interest in the club for which he plays, but those who have no interest in soccer. He is the most recognized sportsman in Asia, where soccer is still relatively new. Possibly only Buddha himself is better known — though Beckham is catching up there too: In Thailand someone has already fashioned a golden “Becks” Buddha. He’s even managed to interest Americans, for God’s sakes. The 27-year-old, tongue-tied, surprisingly shy working-class boy from London’s East End has succeeded in turning the mass, global sport of soccer into a mass, global promotional vehicle for himself, reproducing his image in countless countries. He has turned himself into a soccer virus, one that has infected the media, replicating him everywhere, all over the world, endlessly, making him one of the most famous men that has ever lived.

David Beckham, in other words, is a superbrand.

In recognition of this, Becks was the first footballer ever to receive “image rights” — payment for the earning potential his image provided his club — and got them, to the tune of $33,300 a week. In fact, image rights were the main issue at stake in the record-busting six weeks of contract renegotiations he had with Manchester United last year; his worth as a player was agreed at $116,500 a week almost immediately. Then there’s that $17 million a year for endorsing such brands as Castrol, Brylcreem, Coca Cola, Vodafone, Marks & Spencer and Adidas. And Becks just keeps getting bigger. His trusty lawyers have already registered his name for products as various as perfumes, deodorants, jewelry, purses, dolls and, oh yes, soccer jerseys. Such is the power of the Beckham brand that it’s hoped it can rescue the fortunes of Marks & Spencer’s clothing (a high-end British chain that has become a byword for “dowdy”). But alas, the brand couldn’t save murdered Suffolk girls Holly and Jessica, poignantly pictured last year in police posters in matching replicas of his No. 7 red shirt. When it was still hoped that they might be runaways, the man himself made a broadcast appeal for their return. There was the Becks, eerily right at the heart of the nation’s hopes and fears again.

Beckham has even managed to brand a numeral — 7 — the number on his soccer jersey. A clause in his Manchester United contract guaranteed him No. 7, he has 7 tattooed in Roman numerals on his right forearm, his black Ferrari’s registration plate is “D7 DVB,” and his Marks and Spencer’s clothing line is branded “DB07.” He even queues at No. 7 checkout when he goes shopping. This is often interpreted as a sign of his superstitiousness, but is more an indication of his very rational grasp of the magic of branding. (He may, however, have to settle for the number 77 when he moves to Real Madrid, as the coveted 7 is already taken by Spanish superstar Raul.)

But somehow, Beckham has not yet become a victim of his own success and has managed to remain officially “cool.” Europe’s largest survey into “cool” recently found that Beckham was the “coolest” male, according to both young women and men. Beckham’s status can be attributed to his diva-esque versatility and his superbrand power: “Like Madonna he is very versatile and able to radically change his image but not alienate his audience,” says professor Carl Rohde, head of the Dutch “cool hunting” firm Signs of the Time. “He remains authentic.” Each time he goes to the hairdresser’s and has a restyle — which is alarmingly often — he ends up on the cover of every tabloid in Britain. In other words, whatever Becks does, however he wears his hair or his clothes — or, crucially, whatever product he endorses — he is saying, as Rohde puts it, “this is just another aspect of me, David Beckham. Please love me.” And, of course, buy me. And millions do.

Becks’ greatest sales success, however, was actually on the football field — though less with the ball than with the camera. He’s the most famous footballer in the world, and considered by millions to be one of the greatest footballers of all time, but arguably he’s not even a world-class player. A very fine one, to be sure, but not nearly the footballer we are supposed to think he is — not nearly the footballer we want to think he is. Sport, you might imagine, is the one area of contemporary life where hype can’t win, where results, at the end of the day, are everything. But Beckham has disproved that, has vanquished that, and represents the triumph of P.R. over … well, everything. His contribution to Manchester United was debatable. On footballing skills alone, he is arguably not worthy of playing for the English national team, let alone being its captain. However, in the last decade soccer has become part of show business and advertising. Beckham is a hybrid of pop music and football, the Spice Girl of soccer — hence his marriage to one. He is — indisputably — the captain of a new generation of photogenic, pop-tastic young footballing laddies that added boy-band value to the merchandising and media profile of soccer clubs in the 1990s.

Beckham’s footballing forte is free kicks. This is entirely appropriate, since these are, after all, among the most individualistic — and aesthetic — moments in soccer. Unlike a goal, with a free kick there’s no one passing to you, no one to share the glory with. Instead there’s practically a spotlight and a drum roll. And how he kicks! “Goldenballs” (as his wife, Victoria, aka Posh Spice, reportedly likes to call him) has impressive accuracy and his range is breathtaking — along with his famous “bending” trajectory, his kicks also have style and grace. Long arms outstretched à la Fred Astaire, wrists bent delicately upward, forward leg angled, and then — contact — and a powerful, precise, elegant thwump! and follow-through. An Englishman shouldn’t kick a ball like this. This is the way that Latins kick the ball. Beckham doesn’t just represent the aestheticization of soccer that has occurred in a media-tised world — he is the aestheticization of it. Like his silly hairdos, like his “arty” tattoos, like the extraordinarily elaborate post-goal celebrations he practices with the crowd, almost everything he does on the field is designed to remind you that No. 7 is anything but a number.

Off the soccer field Becks is able to use clothes and accessories to draw attention to himself. And does he. The Versace suits, the sarong, and the sequined track suit that opened the Commonwealth Games dazzled TV audiences and confused some foreign viewers who still thought the queen of England was a middle-aged woman. Essentially, Beckham’s visual style is “glam” — more Suede than Oasis (with a bit of contemporary R&B pop promo thrown in). And like glam rock, which was a British working-class style running riot in the decade of his birth, the 1970s, Beckham, the son of Leytonstone proletarians, has a clear image of himself as working-class royalty, the new People’s Princess (though his “superbrand” power has as yet been unable to sell us his wife, who, post-Spice Girls, remains unpopular and unsuccessful). Hence his wedding took place in a castle; at the reception afterward Posh and Becks were ensconced in matching His ‘n’ Hers thrones, and their Hertfordshire home was dubbed “Beckingham Palace” by the tabloids. Soccer, like pop music, is one of the few ways the British are permitted any success — it is, after all, something both manual and aristocratic at the same time. Becks the football pop star represents and advertises a materialistic aspirationalism that doesn’t appear bourgeois.

Beckham’s tattoos — a literal form of branding — seem to epitomize this. What were once badges of male working-class identity are now ways of advertising the unique Becks brand. “Although it hurts to have them done, they’re there forever and so are the feelings behind them,” Becks has explained. But these are not the kind of “Mum & Dad Always” tattoos his plumber dad and his mates might have had. The huge, shaven-headed, open-armed, “guardian angel” with an alarmingly well-packed loincloth on his back looks more than a little like himself with a Jesus complex. Beneath, in gothic lettering, is his son’s name: Brooklyn. Once his uniform comes off at the end of a match — as it usually does, and before anyone else’s — the tattoos help him to stand out instantly, and mean that he is never naked: He’s always wearing something designer.

Becks clearly enjoys getting his tits out for the lads and lasses — and oiling them up for the cover of Esquire and other laddie mags. While he may look strangely undernourished and fragile in a soccer uniform, as if his ghoulishly skinny wife has been taking away his fries, and all those injuries suggest he’s somewhat brittle, stripped down he looks as lithe and strong as a panther. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do drugs. His body is a temple — to his own self-image — which he never ceases worshipping.

There is however a submissive photophilia to Becks. A certain passivity or even masochism about his displays for the camera, which seem to say “I’m here for you.” Hence perhaps the fondness for those Christ-like/James Dean-like poses with arms outstretched (the cover of Esquire had him “crucified” on the Cross of St. George). Even those free kicks seem to have the loping iconography of “Giant” or Calvary about them. Of course, really Becks is there for him, but it’s a nice thought nonetheless.

To some, of course, he is already a god — literally. In addition to the Thai Becks Buddha, a pair of Indian artists have painted him as Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. In the Far East, androgyny is seen as a feature of godhead — and so it has here in the West as well since the Rolling Stones. As Becks tells us himself: “I’m not scared of my feminine side and I think quite a lot of the things I do come from that side of my character. People have pointed that out as if it’s a criticism, but it doesn’t bother me.” It’s as if when he was a teenager he looked at those grainy black-and-white ’80s girlish bedroom shrine posters of smooth-skinned doe-ish male models holding babies and thought: I’d like to be like that when I grow up. Becks is the poster boy of what I have termed elsewhere metrosexuality. His hero/role-model status combined with his out-of-the-closet narcissism and love of shopping and fashion and apparent indifference to being thought of as “faggoty” means that for corporations he is a pricelessly potent vector for persuading millions, if not billions, of young men around the world to express themselves “fearlessly,” to be “individuals” — by wearing exactly what he wears. Beckham is the über-metrosexual, not just because he rams metrosexuality down the throats of those men churlish enough to remain retrosexual and refuse to pluck their eyebrows, but also because he is a sportsman, a man of substance — a “real” man — who wishes to disappear into surfaceness in order to become ubiquitous — to become media. Becks is The One, and better looking than Keanu — but, be warned, he’s working for the Matrix.

Ultimately, though, it is his desire that makes him the superbrand that he is. Beckham has succeeded where previous British soccer heroes you’ve never heard of, such as George Best, Alan Shearer and Eric Cantona — a Frenchman who played for Manchester United and is John the Baptist to Beck’s Christ — have failed, and has become a truly global star. Partly because the world has changed but mostly because they didn’t want it as much as he did. Becks is transparently so much more needy — more needy than almost any of us is. The public, quite rightly, only lets itself love completely those who clearly depend on that love, because they don’t want to be rejected. Beckham’s neediness is literally bottomless. Like his image, it grows with what it feeds on. He’ll never reject our gaze.

It’s there in his hungry face. He isn’t actually that attractive. Blasphemy! No really, his face doesn’t have a proper symmetry. His mouth is froglike and bashfully off-center. But what is attractive, or at least hypnotizing in a democratic kinda way, which is to say mediagenic, is his neurotic-but-ordinary desire to be beautiful, and to use all the technology and voodoo of consumer culture and fame to achieve this. His apparent lack of an inner life, his submissive, high-pitched 14-year-old-boy voice that no one listens to, his beguiling blankness, only emphasize his success, his powerfulness in a world of superficiality. That oddly flat-but-friendly gaze that peers out from billboards and behind Police sunglasses looks to millions like the nearest thing to godliness in a godless world. People fall in love not with him — who knows what Beckham is really like, or cares — but with his multimedia neediness, his transmitted “viral” desire, which seems to spread and replicate itself everywhere, endorsing multiple products. Becks’ desire, via the giant shared toilet handle of advertising, infects us, inhabits us and becomes our own.

The British for their part, even those calling tabloid papers in tears to declare their lives ruined now that Beckham is moving to Real Madrid, will survive sharing him with the Spanish for a few years. After all, they’re already proudly sharing him with most of the rest of the world — and basking in his reflected, if somewhat synthetic glory. No one buys our pop music anymore; our “Britpop” prime minister, Tony Blair, post-Iraq, is widely regarded abroad as a scoundrel; our royals, post Diana, are a dreary bunch of sods (even her sainted son William is beginning to lose some of his Spencer spark and glow to the tired, horsey blood of his “German” dad and grandmama); and our national soccer squad has difficulty beating countries with a population smaller than Southampton. But “our Becks” on the other, perfectly manicured hand, is something British the world seems to actually want, badly.

Probably the biggest wanker in Britain today is cheeky chappie popster Robbie Williams, or simply “Robbie,” as we like to call him here in that affectionate, familiar way we handle tossers (another word for wanker; we have as many as the Inuits have for snow — and “Robbie” is fast becoming another). Robbie is the biggest onanist in Britain, mostly because he’s one of the biggest success stories. Since going solo in 1996 after leaving Brit boy-band Take That, Robbie, who was expected at best to become a kids’ TV presenter, has had 15 solo U.K. top-10 singles, 13 Brit Awards — more than anyone else in the award’s history — and has sold 15 million albums worldwide. Robbie is British pop today. He is also the bragging, self-publicizing, self-flagellating, self-loathing symbol of the lifestyle every young person in Britain is supposed to aspire to and despise at the same time. As he puts it with characteristic modesty on his new album, he’s “the one who put the Brit in celebrity.”

Unfortunately for the British pop industry as a whole, Robbie is also a symbol of its pathetic failure, in the post-Spice Girls era, to export much more than Kylie’s bottom and Coldplay’s runny noses across the Atlantic. EMI, the ailing British record giant famously swindled by the Sex Pistols (and probably looking back fondly now to those halcyon days), recently paid a sweaty-palmed sum reported to be as high as $120 million for Williams’ next six albums — at approximately the same time as the company was laying off 1,200 employees. A sum that could only be earned out by Yank-side success. Oh dear. Best string out those final installments on that advance: Robbie’s new album, “Escapology,” debuted in mid-April at number 43 on the Billboard charts, selling an anemic 21,000 copies in its first week. (By the end of the month, Amazon was already selling the album at a “Super Saver” price of $9.98.). For a record industry wallowing in deep water after its worst year in memory, this was nothing short of a Titanic disaster. Robbie could be the cheeky iceberg that finally sinks the British record business. Now that’s quite a wanker.

One reason why Robbie is such a popular wanker over here is that he was born chuckly and lovely and pink-skinned in Stoke-on-Trent, an ugly post-industrial nowhere place in the Midlands, a part of the country that everyone in the north and south of Britain can safely look down on, a place that might be described as the arse-end of the U.K. except that this would suggest (a) that there was a point or at least some kind of function to Stoke and (b) that you might if you were that way inclined, or just very drunk and confused, have some fun there.

Then there’s the fact that in Take That Robbie used to wear leather chaps and slap his arse end while singing covers of disco hits such as “Relight My Fire” for the amusement of early teenage girls, 40-year-old gay men and Lulu. There are no more humble origins than that.

As for his performance style today, I could say that he thinks he’s David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust but just ends up being Norman Wisdom (a 1950s British equivalent of Jerry Lewis, though more pathetic). Or, if I wanted to be crueler, I could say that his stage performance and chatter are like Tourette’s syndrome with pantomime movements. Or simply that he’s a selfish, self-pitying, self-seeking fool who has no opinions on anything other than himself — and they’re all terrible. But if I did, I’d merely be repeating what Robbie has already said about himself on national TV, beating me, the British tabloids, and Man in Pub to the punch. Robbie has told us many times that he’s “bored” with Robbie Williams and wants to “kill him off.” But Robbie’s eagerness to beat himself up for his public, although it is appreciated, is just another reason why he’s a — you guessed it — wanker.

You can probably understand, then, why our Robbie is so keen to make it in America. Why, in fact, he already spends most of his time and his European royalties in America, relaxing American-style in his big American house in L.A., sunbathing by his big American pool pulling fuck-off/come-to-bed faces at the British tabloid helicopters ceaselessly hovering over him. Why the U.S. and L.A. are mentioned — nay, incanted — often in a charming faux-American drawl, on several tracks on his new, American-targeted album, and several times in one song in the case of “Hot Fudge”: “I’m moving to L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.!” — a place where success really can save you and where no one is ever Found Out, just overdosed and found badly decomposed at the bottom of their pool.

All this might also help you understand why his album is called “Escapology,” why the artwork for the album features disturbing-absurd pictures of our Robbie trapped at the bottom of giant tubes of water or suspended upside down hundreds of feet in the air, and why the lyrics talk rather a lot about self-loathing, especially when they’re bragging and crowing about his fame.

While Robbie clearly needs the U.S., it’s by no means clear why the U.S. needs Robbie. In the U.K. Robbie is a the king of karaoke pop, on a chart full of karaoke pop acts, but in his adopted home of L.A. every schmuck waiting their turn in a karaoke bar on a Tuesday evening is a better singer. In Britain his lack of great talent is seen as democratic and reassuring; in America it’s probably just uninspiring. It’s a shame, because as Robbie tells us on the AOR power-ballad “Feel,” probably the best track on this album, “There’s a hole in my soul/ You can see it in my face/ It’s a real big place.” Well, we know America’s a real big place, and since Britain is apparently no longer touching the sides, maybe the Big Country will oblige and fill Robbie’s aching hole?

The problem for us Brits is that as Anglican lapsed Catholics we still believe we’re all Fallen, but we no longer believe that we can be redeemed. Oh yes, now we have to pay lip service to the American religion of success — thanks very much for that, by the way — but we don’t really believe in it. We may, like much of the rest of the world, be crap-Americans now, but we’re agnostic crap-Americans; we still have hundreds of years of feudalism to negotiate. It’s why our tabloids, which exist solely to torment our celebrities, frequently with flattery, sell millions every day. It’s why our boy Robbie is so “ironic,” why he goes on and on and on about His Fame Hell.

For all his transatlantic suckface on this album, I suspect that tabloid-fodder Robbie, who is very crap-American (and also Catholic: “I’ve slept with girls on the game/ I’ve got my Catholic shame”), doesn’t really believe America can redeem him, either. He’s paying lip service, too, though it’s not the kind of lip service you might enjoy. (Note: “On the game” is British slang for being a prostitute.)

One of the reasons “Feel” is the best track here is that Robbie doesn’t deliberately sabotage the professional songwriting of his (now former) musical collaborator Guy Chambers as he does in practically all the other tracks, penning glib, flip lyrics which would be inoffensive and meaningless in a pop-Muzak kind of way except that they are also teeth-gnashingly, eye-gougingly crass. Robbie’s lyrics are hyperactive doggerel that won’t lie down, doing anything and everything to draw attention to themselves, including licking their balls and chewing off their own head. “Come Undone,” a big James-ish anthemic number, is utterly undone by the vain, self-obsessing lyrics full of mirrors and razor blades: “Such a saint but such a whore/ So self aware, so full of shit / Do another interview/ Sing a bunch of lies/ Tell about celebrities that I despise / I am scum.”

This perverted narcissism would be almost admirable in such a crowd-pleasing entertainer if it weren’t for the fact that Robbie is apparently singing to his drugs and rape counselor mom (yes, really) again: “Pray that when I’m coming down you’ll be asleep / I am scum/ Love, your son.” In fact, Robbie gives matriarchy a bad name. Another track, “Nan’s Song,” is dedicated to his deceased grandmother. This is the first song he’s penned entirely himself and he has said, “It’s only appropriate that my first song should be about someone I love.” In fact, the song is all about how much his Nan loved him.

Once again, the problem with selling this shtick in the U.S. is that few people apart from some aging gay men in San Francisco have heard of Robbie Williams. So how are Americans expected to relate to his problems with his “massive” fame, which is all his songs are about these days? Robbie is Eminem without the hip-hop, without the wit, and without, finally, the (global) success. Robbie tried and failed to crack the American market a few years ago with a compilation album called “The Ego Has Landed” — which once again appears to be putting the apologetic cart before the career horse, “wittily” referencing a mediocre 1960s British film, “The Eagle Has Landed,” that his target teen audience has never heard of. As one American critic’s daughter said when Robbie Williams’ face popped up on MTV: “Daddy, why is that guy being so goofy?”

In truth, “Escapology” is a kind of 21st century Brit Band Aid album, a “Do They Know It’s Christmas in Stoke-on-Trent?” where the needy continent is Robbie’s self-esteem (and EMI’s bank balance), but where Robbie is impersonating almost every Brit artist who has made it to drive-time radio in the U.S. In “Something Beautiful” he’s Marty Pellow of Wet, Wet, Wet, pre-heroin; in “Monsoon” he’s post-mustache, pre-AIDS Freddie Mercury (even the tune owes more than a little to “Radio Ga Ga”); “Love Somebody” is pre-wig Elton; “Revolution” is post-Wham, pre-men’s-room George Michael (Robbie’s first solo single was a cover version of “Freedom”). “Sexed Up” could be Oasis, post-talent. There’s some Rod Stewart in here as well, but I can’t be bothered to find out where. For good measure, and to show how versatile and deserving of a green card he is, Robbie also throws in some Steve Tyler, some retro-soul and some college radio rawk.

No, I lied. “Escapology” isn’t Band Aid. It’s an entire season of “American Idol,” where Robbie is the only contestant and also plays the part of Simon Cowell. Somehow, though, he manages not to win.

Robbie may be a wanker, and he may be doomed, but he’s not an original sinner. Not only is he a karaoke pop performer (his last album, “Swing When You’re Winning,” was a bunch of covers of Frank Sinatra songs), he’s a karaoke human being. After leaving Take That he thought he was Oliver Reed for a while. Then he thought he was Liam Gallagher. Dressed as Frank Sinatra on the cover of “Swing When You’re Winning” (which includes a duet with Nicole Kidman on “Somethin’ Stupid”), or as James Bond in the video for “Millennium,” he looks like an unconvincing if alarmingly hirsute drag king. By the same token, persistent rumors that secretly he’s “really gay” miss the point that Robbie isn’t really anything.

Where Sinatra was radio, Robbie is a radio. Robbie’s voice, although versatile, is strangely constricted, nasal and distant — as if he has a cheap transistor radio stuck somewhere up his nose. Frankie had a voice that, if radio didn’t exist, would have willed it into existence. Robbie has a voice that is merely an echo of broadcasts that dissipated into the ether long before he was born.

On “Escapology,” Robbie desperately wants us to believe that he has problems. Perhaps because he thinks this will make him likable. Or interesting. Or human. And perhaps because it will make people forgive or forget the fact that he’s a wanker. Actually, Robbie’s problem is actually much more serious than his wankerdom, more serious even than being British. Robbie’s problem is that he’s a ghost. A ghost that has no story of his own, no life to commemorate or haunt, and no point — other than drawing attention to himself and the pantomime of life that he has become. We’re supposed to listen to the clanking chains because they’re “really professionally put together” and harken to the moaning because it’s “so ironic.” Mind you, Robbie’s insubstantiality may be the most modern, most sympathetic thing about him. As he sings on “Feel”:

Come hold my hand
I wanna contact the living
Not sure I understand
The role I’ve been given.

Is there an exorcist in the house?