Style: Straight Camp

Camp, in its original conception, has nothing intrinsically to do with effeminacy or show tunes or doting on one’s mother or having really great hair. It’s not strictly about sexuality, homo- or otherwise. Camp, according to Susan Sontag’s famous and still definitive Notes on the subject, of 1964, is a sensibility concerned with artifice. It prizes style over content. It sees everything in quotation marks. Camp is about performance, pretence — “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” is how Sontag 

It’s Sontag’s definition of camp that the Canadian writer Stephen Marche used recently to describe a new male phenomenon, the one that encompasses Clarkson, Ramsay, Putin and the rest. Writing in American Esquire earlier this year, he named this new masculine subcategory “straight camp”. By straight camp, he means fake manliness. Men who are not so much manly as “manly”, to borrow Sontag’s quotation marks again. Straight camp indicates an adopted, achieved masculinity, a masculinity worn much like a suit, or, more likely in this case, a pair of rugged outdoor boots, a chunky all-weather coat and a bushy beard, even though the wearer of all those manly accoutrements rarely leaves the comfort and safety of the city. Straight camp is the pose of unreconstructed masculinity struck by men who have been made timid and uncertain by a changing economic, social and sexual topography. But it is just that: a pose.

Hello Sailor, Alex Bilmes, Sunday Times Style.

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Similar points have been made before, but this dude makes them rather well.