\n<\/p>\n
H<\/span>ow do you like your men? Yes, obviously<\/em>, we shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n So, returning to the question, my answer is \u201clike my coffee\u201d: small, strong, dark and highly over-stimulating, brewed by my sister\u2019s boyfriend in Scarborough \u2026 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\u2019s \u201cbeefy, placid and \u2026 politically ambiguous\u201d.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201csweetly naive, simple, almost oafish \u2026 unfazed by the byzantine requirements of modern masculinity, largely because he doesn\u2019t know or care that they exist\u201d. Grazia agrees, issuing an appreciation of what it is calling the \u201cWoke Jock\u201d: \u201cAs unremittingly blokey as he\u2019s gentle\u201d, the Woke Jock is comfortable with vulnerability and happy to be out-earned.<\/p>\n Speaking of out-earning, the original placid beefcake \u2013 and the reason, surely, the archetype has merited NYT appraisal \u2013 is Mr Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce. I refuse to recognise any under-50 male celebrities \u2013 my tiny blow against the patriarchy \u2013 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\u2019s XXL wardrobe aisle, seemingly light on ego despite excelling at whatever a \u201ctight end\u201d does in American football, and touchingly delighted when Swift uses polysyllabic words, Kelce seems comfortable in his own skin in a way that\u2019s very winning. Others include Channing Tatum (lauded for cheerfully telling a story about getting educated on director Akira <\/strong>Kurosawa by a video store employee) and evolved man-mountain Jason Momoa, who has declared: \u201cI embrace the feminine side and also feel like I am OK to be vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n This is something of a turnaround. You may recall 2024\u2019s \u201chot rat summer\u201d (I paraphrase) when slight, rodenty men became pin-ups; or our recent collective yearning for the rumpled, thoughtful rizz of \u201cdaddy\u201d Pedro Pascal. And we\u2019re 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 <\/strong>Foster Wallace-reading, hojicha-drinking, self-proclaimed feminist performative male is the anti-benign meathead. An over- rather than under-thinker, he\u2019s self-aware to a fault, fashioning himself into what he believes women want \u2013 purely, the theory goes, to get into their pants.<\/p>\n But apparently women want something quite different now. They\u2019re 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\u2019t threatened by a successful, independent woman. That not having strong opinions means a restful absence of mansplaining.<\/p>\n Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How do you like your men? Yes, obviously, we shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s a way to go before we reach reductive objectification<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[12118,12117,12116,1140,1330,6034,12115,1541],"class_list":{"0":"post-19730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-beddington","9":"tag-beefcake","10":"tag-confident","11":"tag-dream","12":"tag-dropped","13":"tag-emma","14":"tag-laidback","15":"tag-man"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}