Healthy Masculinity Through the Female Lens

Last year having a boyfriend was embarrassing. This year everyone seems to be coupled up - and earnestly posting about. Are women with boyfriends driving a new movement of masculinity, or pushing other “incels” further into the depths of the manosphere? 

Scrolling through my instagram, women whom I’ve followed for years, whose content has always been quite distinctly feminist and independently whimsical, even in some cases arguably anti-men in a satirical kind of way, all suddenly seem to have started posting their boyfriends. 

Though new, these men are still incorporated into the usual aesthetic of their content. Lucy, a German content creator whose aesthetic revolved around moving to Paris has, obviously, fallen in love with a French man. Fitness influencer Ana has started dating and posting an athletic champion pond skimmer, and Emily, whose content was specifically about the dire dating pool, also seems to have found love at last. 

Of course, the fact that I’m in my mid 20s and lots of people are beginning to think about settling down, or my own relatively newish relationship with one of them, is going to be affecting the couple-orientated algorithm. But, it feels like there’s more to it than that. 

These aren’t, for the most part, manosphere men, those practising one-sided monogamy, choosing the red pill over the fulfilling romantic relationship, and struggling to comprehend why they’re part of the problem when it comes to the male loneliness epidemic. Or if they are, their girlfriends seem to do a pretty good job of hiding it. 

Rather, the men presented through the lenses of the women I follow espouse a kind of healthy, soft masculinity, the kind that became popular during the Irishman and the Hollywood’s baby girls fascination - highlighted by Elle Pilcher and Alice Cappelle respectively. 

The skeptic in me is seeing this as a wave, like 18th or 21st birthdays. Right now we’re in June and the relationship of these relationships to the digital world are still in their relatively early stages. That is to say, they’re only just now being posted about. As we exit Cuffing Season and welcome Hot Girl Summer, are all these relationships fated to end as Spring does? 

Yet, as the nights appear to be lengthening (at least in the global West), and lots of women are committing to their partners through pixelated immortalisation in the only way that counts in the digital age, I can’t help but think that none of them seem embarrassed by these men they’ve let into their lives — and onto their Instagram pages. 

In the first place, the word embarrassing in Chanté Joseph’s viral article, ‘Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?’ seemed misplaced, at least in as far as it was being used in relation to datable men. If people were really embarrassed by their boyfriends, they either wouldn’t post them at all, or they simply wouldn’t have them. Hence the “male loneliness epidemic”. Women could quit them like that hobby we had when you were little but stopped doing in our teens, afraid that it might show our pubescent bodies, be considered cringe, or lead to social ostracisation. 

Perhaps what was embarrassing, if anything, was the earnestness of digital vulnerability in general. But within these remits, almost any kind of online earnestness would be embarrassing. 

The engagement shot or anniversary posts where you write your true(?) feelings in a confessional paragraph in the caption of an Instagram square just feels like yet another incongruity within the culture of shit posting and reels that has grown out of the same internet era. 

From proud mum posts on facebook to surprise visit montages from friends in Australia, ought there not be something a little embarrassing about cultivating your emotional experiences for an online audience rather than through a more private form of communication? 

This embarrassment is good. It is what stops us from living completely online and abandoning real life altogether. 

But now that the Vogue commotion has died down, embarrassment is one of the last words I’d use to describe women’s boyfriend-posting. Instead, I’m seeing women gushing over their emotionally available, often effeminate (and comfortable in being so) boyfriends. In some cases women are even writing about how lovely it is to have finally met a “nice man”.  

My Explore Page is filled with this kind of thing, not coincidentally along with posts lamenting the days when men were demonstrably devoted to their female partners, rather than romanticising maltreatment and double-standards. 

So what’s going on? Was Chanté Joseph’s article some kind of reverse psychology to trick women into recoupling up? (joking). Or, are these female cultivated displays of healthy masculinity a response to the shifting relationship dynamics between men and women and an increasingly gender equal (in theory, although not always in practice) society? 

As Dalia Gebrial has pointed out, now that women don’t need men as much (in terms of fiscal assets for example) men are facing a loneliness epidemic thanks to patriarchal society’s failure to socialise men to be wanted instead of expecting to be “needed”. 

Clearly, however, this doesn’t go for all men. While traditional views towards women are becoming increasingly popular, espoused by the likes of far-right figures, perhaps the rise of feminist women talking and writing about their healthy relationships with non-toxic men will promote a healthier model of masculinity for other men to follow. 

Masculinity, whether obviously or not, has always been constructed in relation to an antithetical inferiorisation and effemination of femininity. Perhaps filtering a more positive form of masculinity directly through the female lens, then, is exactly what society needs.