Man Crushes: A Confession

A  particular highlight of my brief sojourn to France last September was the sight of Barcelona centre-back and all-round-hero Gerard Piqué’s sock-less adornment on the back of a Parisian bus. Upon voicing my view that he is fantastically skilled in nigh on every avenue of existence, I was promptly reprimanded for expressing my admiration of the man,  and have been a number of times in the past for similar such offences. I mean, World XI three years running, fathering a child with Shakira, that beard…I need not continue for fear of restraining orders. And yet I find myself not alone in this (entirely platonic may I add) hero-worship of another similarly heterosexual man.

Tom Hardy, Ryan Reynolds, Emile Heskey, Simon Cowell, this appeal needs not be purely based on looks. DJ Christian O’Connell admitted in 2008 to having had an intense man crush on Soccer Saturday presenter Jeff Stelling, to the extent that Stelling’s dulcet tones recounting the football scores left him “giggling like a teenage schoolgirl”. Stelling is an esteemed man and a national treasure, but upon his own admission he isn’t exactly Bradley Cooper. Similarly to more conventional crushes, of which there are a degree of more quirky ones, (Alan Rickman springs to mind) man crushes come in all shapes and sizes. Upon quizzing my housemate on any of his potentially idolised figures, the owl-like figure of David Mitchell appeared as an early contender. And what a man he is. The sexual orientation of the man-crush-interest is also totally irrelevant, and why should it matter anyway?

Urban Dictionary defines a man crush as “when a straight man has a ‘crush’ on another man, not sexual but kind of idolizing him”. These crushes vary from aspiring to emulate the man’s achievements, being in awe of his talent, to irrationally wanting him in any, and every possible, non-sexual way. Have you ever experienced this phenomenon? Have you ever craved the attentions and affections of another man, or developed a passion based on a man’s ability to play guitar, or their sweet right foot? Well, my fellow gentlemen, you are not alone.

 

The growth of the social acceptability of the man crush is a relatively recent breakthrough. The word ‘bromance’ was only first termed in the 1990s by skating magazine Big Brother’s editor Dave Carnie, in reference to the intimate homo-social bonds shared between skating buddies. Even more recently, the ‘bro-comedy’ genre, spearheaded by the Judd Apatow generation of films, has made it positively fashionable for bros to get their guy-love on. Films such as I Love You, Man and Anchorman have made it even more acceptable to embrace this love that previously dared not speak its name. Not that buddy comedy is anything new; comedic double acts such as Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, and even Fry and Laurie clearly show a long-standing pedigree, but this slightly obsessive dimension is new.

Heck, even my own father, upon recently watching Norwegian thriller film Headhunters admitted that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was an absurdly beautiful man, and he’d happily let the man take him out for dinner. That my own father, no less a man than any other, would openly and casually admit a pseudo-disturbing attraction to this Danish actor, goes to show quite how far the man crush has come. In his defence, Nikolaj is a handsome man, and a very good actor too.

 

 

Quite honestly, men want to be everything their man crushes are. They are our ambitions, our hopes and our dreams, incarnate. We can’t actually be them, we don’t actually want to be with them, but we still want them in our lives. In loving these men, we admit our inferiority to them, and yet we still don’t mind.