How do you like your men? Yes, obviously, we shouldn’t be dismissively taxonomising a whole gender like boxed Barbies. But in the era of tradwives and nu-gen gold diggers, in which the manosphere remains alive and kick(box)ing, telling teenage boys lies about women, I reckon there’s a way to go before we reach reductive objectification parity. Does that make it OK? No. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, a bit.
So, returning to the question, my answer is “like my coffee”: small, strong, dark and highly over-stimulating, brewed by my sister’s boyfriend in Scarborough … No, hang on, this is falling apart. Regardless, my ideal man is wildly at odds with the zeitgeist and my husband needs to punch up his protein intake and stop having opinions, because the New York Times claims a new dream man has dropped and he’s “beefy, placid and … politically ambiguous”.
What do we know about the nouveau-neutral hunk? Well, apart from the essential 1:1 neck-to-head ratio and thighs like sequoias, he’s “sweetly naive, simple, almost oafish … unfazed by the byzantine requirements of modern masculinity, largely because he doesn’t know or care that they exist”. Grazia agrees, issuing an appreciation of what it is calling the “Woke Jock”: “As unremittingly blokey as he’s gentle”, the Woke Jock is comfortable with vulnerability and happy to be out-earned.
Speaking of out-earning, the original placid beefcake – and the reason, surely, the archetype has merited NYT appraisal – is Mr Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce. I refuse to recognise any under-50 male celebrities – my tiny blow against the patriarchy – so I had to cram the various Chrises, Kelces and Hemsworths to understand this phenomenon, but having done the (bro-appropriate) heavy lifting, I like what I see with Kelce. Built like Oak Furnitureland’s XXL wardrobe aisle, seemingly light on ego despite excelling at whatever a “tight end” does in American football, and touchingly delighted when Swift uses polysyllabic words, Kelce seems comfortable in his own skin in a way that’s very winning. Others include Channing Tatum (lauded for cheerfully telling a story about getting educated on director Akira Kurosawa by a video store employee) and evolved man-mountain Jason Momoa, who has declared: “I embrace the feminine side and also feel like I am OK to be vulnerable.”
This is something of a turnaround. You may recall 2024’s “hot rat summer” (I paraphrase) when slight, rodenty men became pin-ups; or our recent collective yearning for the rumpled, thoughtful rizz of “daddy” Pedro Pascal. And we’re still laughing at an entirely different 2025 archetype: the performative male. If you were living under a rock all summer (enviable), let me explain: the much-satirised, tote bag-toting, ostentatiously David Foster Wallace-reading, hojicha-drinking, self-proclaimed feminist performative male is the anti-benign meathead. An over- rather than under-thinker, he’s self-aware to a fault, fashioning himself into what he believes women want – purely, the theory goes, to get into their pants.
But apparently women want something quite different now. They’re concluding that Swift is right, as she is about many things: that cartoonish muscles and the ability to bench-press a grizzly bear can make for a partner who wears his masculinity lightly, with an identity that isn’t threatened by a successful, independent woman. That not having strong opinions means a restful absence of mansplaining.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
