My book, MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER, comes out in nine weeks. Nine weeks! Pre-orders mean everything for a book’s success. It tells booksellers that people want to read it and shows my publisher that this book is going somewhere. Will you take a second right now to pre-order my book? You’ll be an essential part of launching it into the world. The trouble with 'good men'A look at the phenomenon of celebrating internet boyfriends, ‘woke baes,’ and, sometimes, men who meet the very low bar of not seeming like predators.
A few weeks ago, I saw this viral Instagram video set to Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” that celebrated a slew of men in Hollywood. It was guys like Jack Black, Noah Wyle, Sterling K. Brown, Pedro Pascal, Keanu Reeves, and Kumail Nanjiani. Guys who appear to fall somewhere on the kinda-to-very-nice spectrum. The text on the video read: “Men we’d trust to watch our drink.” It was posted by Scary Mommy, a “parenting and lifestyle site for millennial moms,” and the video garnered over a quarter of a million likes. I was not one of those likes. There is so much wrong with that video. Most obviously, it suggests that these celebrities are safe to watch our drinks because… they seem affable, thoughtful, not overtly toxic, and like they’ve maybe ever said something that sounds vaguely progressive or feminist? And thus they won’t spike our drinks or let other men spike our drinks? This kind of thinking also relies on false myths about sexual assault (the reality is that over 75 percent of assaults are perpetrated by someone the victim knows). The video also conflates a man’s outward vibe with his actual character and sets a very low bar for kudos (i.e. a man not seeming like a sexual predator). Is that all it takes to be a good man? The other reason I’m thinking about this video weeks later is that I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of celebrating the presumed good ones, the safe ones, the men who are exceptions to what these days can feel like the rule. This particular video felt like a response to the Epstein file drops. At the same time that we’re facing the unrelenting drip of horrifying allegations about powerful men abusing girls and women—and bonding over it, as Kate Manne has pointed out—here comes a light and jaunty celebration of the hottie sweetie-pies who will defend our drinks. I get it. The other day I liked a TikTok of a woman saying, “You know who’s not in the Epstein files?” Cue: a montage of images of Law & Order: SVU’s Detective Stabler, played by Christopher Meloni, who is in his own right one of my all-time good-seeming celebrity guys. This impulse as an internet phenomenon isn’t new. We could start in the late-aughts with the rise of the concept of the internet boyfriend (à la Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who Esther Zuckerman writes in A Field Guide to Internet Boyfriends “will always be here for us” when “real men disappoint us.” Let’s not forget the “hey girl” Tumblr-era celebration of “feminist Ryan Gosling.” Around that time, I worked at Salon, where we put out a list to counter People’s annual sexiest men list; our picks were supposed to be men of character and principle, not just beauty. Soon, too, there was the emergence of listicles about “woke baes,” notably, against the backdrop of Gamergate and Donald “Grab ‘Em By The Pussy” Trump’s first presidency.
Fast-forwarding to 2019: In a post-MeToo period, right as seeming nice-guy Aziz Ansari was accused of sexual misconduct, Keanu Reeves went viral when people noticed that he doesn’t touch his women fans in photos. Instead, he consistently poses with his hand hovering a few inches off their bodies, as opposed to, say, sliding his hand around a waist or onto the small of a back. For this, some crowned him as “The Respectful King.”
In 2023, you have Pedro Pascal not only being declared the internet’s boyfriend, but also, basically, mankind’s last great hope. As I wrote before about Pascal-mania:
Again, the exception to the rule. The notion of “good men” relies on the existence, the apparent preponderance, of “bad” ones.
This is a variation of what we saw with Tim Walz being heralded as a symbol of “positive masculinity” because, as I wrote in 2024, he was seen as having “traditionally masculine traits that are associated with strength and toughness, along with feminine-coded traits of care and compassion.” But the folks heralding Walz’s “positive masculinity” were not also… lusting after it. Which I think is an important distinction in the taxonomy of “good” and “safe” men! The recent babygirl phenomenon isn’t just about a man being hot, but also vulnerable, brooding, and maybe a bit submissive. These “babygirls” offer a feeling of safety and drama. Often, they are actors who play characters with some degree of emotional turmoil, and even anger, but it’s not directed at women. Of course, Pedro is part of this, along with Paul Mescal, Jeremy Allen White, and Jacob Elordi. I think so often of the psychologist Michael J. Bader, who suggests that sexual fantasies are often designed to make people feel secure enough to experience arousal (and, counterintuitively, this is often true even with fantasies involving danger and aggression). Most recently, the Heated Rivalry discourse has also touched on the idea of safety being hot. Much has been said—including by me and my co-host Amanda Montei on our podcast—about how the series lets straight women project themselves into sexy scenes without the automatic imposition of heternormative gender roles (see also: our conversation about straight women co-opting queer culture and fetishizing gay men). The show also depicts characters asking—in the passion of the moment and in an ongoing way—things like, “Is this okay?” And then there’s the men of The Pitt—chiefly, doctors Michael Robinavitch and Jack Abbott, played by Noah Wiley and Shawn Hatosy—who have been fueling horny fan edits, all because they are attractive caretakers who get shit done and do no harm (imagine that). These celebrations across the internet decades have been filled with excitement and giddiness. Truly, I cannot underscore enough how much fun this phenomenon has been. But these so-called good men are also inevitably haunted by their opposite, the bad man, as well as the risk of overinflation and miscategorization. This is a familiar tension for women; our pleasure is twinned with danger. We curate internet boyfriends and “good men” lists for delight, a sense of safety, and as a way of imagining a better world, perhaps especially when the bar for better has sunk so very low.
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četvrtak, 5. ožujka 2026.
The trouble with 'good men'
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