Last year, the actress Zoë Kravitz and her fiancé at the time, Channing Tatum, made a trip to the Criterion Closet, the miniature film library where cinephiles are interviewed about their esoteric favorites. Tatum, the star of such films as “Step Up” and “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” was shot straight on, his musclebound bulk exaggerating the room’s narrowness, and looked slightly stunned, like a bear who had just been blow-darted and brought to a zoo. Kravitz held up a DVD of the drag-ball documentary “Paris is Burning”; Tatum described the cinematography as unmatched. He then held up a copy of the coal-miner-strike documentary “Harlan County U.S.A.,” calling it “super punk rock.”
Viewers swooned. Comments piled in lauding the couple’s cuteness and envying their dynamic: the it-girl actress and her hulking, placid partner, who talks without a whiff of self-consciousness about standing in the Kurosawa section of a video store and telling an employee, “I don’t know who that is.” People responded with a GIF of Tatum writhing as a stripper in the “Magic Mike” movies, or by saying things like, “Give me a straight man I can watch ‘Paris is Burning’ with.”
Lately there has been a return of this type: the hunk with a heart of gold. For years, he was left in the dustbin of retrograde male figures, sidelined in favor of something more sophisticated: the self-aware outsider, the flustered nerd, the romantic misfit. Now there is a clear craving for the fantasy man who seems sweetly naïve, simple, almost oafish — concerned mostly, by the looks of it, with working out and the pleasure of a protein shake. If he seems unfazed by the byzantine requirements of modern masculinity, it is largely because he doesn’t know or care that they exist.
The desire for this figure is most explicit on social media, where he is a recurrent element in jokes, memes and daydreams. In the “Buff Guys Typing on Laptops” meme, bodybuilders are pictured not as roid-raging brawlers but as eager providers of good-natured, if clumsy, life advice. Images of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a joyful sybarite in “Pumping Iron” circulate online as aspirational images, perfect fodder for a newly coined motto: “Live, laugh, lobotomy.” And ubiquitous memes about the “Chad” and his miserably pedantic male counterparts (Virgin vs. Chad, Soyjak vs. Chad) reveal precisely what the new dream man is meant to correct. On one side, allegedly, you have the “average” liberal male: a feckless try-hard, overly intellectual, self-centered and neurotic. On the other side, you have a figure so unbothered by such things that he seems like a human version of Ferdinand the Bull.
The himbo simply is, in the way that a Chia Pet simply is.
This model of masculinity has also gained political salience. Democrats, who hemorrhaged roughly 6 percent of their male voters from 2020 to 2024, are having trouble connecting with young men in particular. Calls have proliferated for a left-wing parallel to Joe Rogan, or the political equivalent of those advice-giving bodybuilders in the memes — someone able to speak to increasingly “red-pilled” men on their own terms and coax them toward what Democrats would consider more pro-social beliefs.
Consider, for instance, Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the New York City mayoral primary, which came with the strong support of the young male vote. A key part of Mamdani’s strategy was finding vessels for an uncomplicated message about affordability, including a few men who could be described, and who might describe themselves, as “himbos.” The candidate was endorsed by Hasan Piker, the leftist pinup, marathon livestreamer and co-founder of a clothing line called Himbo Fitness. Joshua Citarella, a bodybuilding enthusiast and the host of the left-wing show “Doomscroll,” facilitated a fund-raising panel. The comedian Stavros Halkias, a heterodox Bernie Bro who could be called a “himbo” of a more freewheeling, bacchanalian variety, filmed an Instagram endorsement. There were times when Mamdani’s praetorian guard of male influencers looked like an Ultimate Fighting Championship undercard or at least the set of “The Man Show.”
The straightforward appeal and charisma of these guys overlap with the simplicity of their messaging. Their success as political surrogates comes from yoking their charm and louche authenticity to kitchen-sink issues like the cost of living. They can discuss the astronomical cost of health care right alongside the inflated price of creatine supplements. Just guileless dudes making guileless points.
In pop culture, beloved male celebrities are increasingly of this mold. Many present “good politics,” with a soft exterior that seems to match them. Jason Momoa, in promoting “Chief of War,” his new anticolonial period piece on the unification of Hawaii, recently identified as a “sensitive alpha male,” wearing a pink scrunchie as if it were a coded sign of that sensitivity. He does not feel the need to be verbose; in a cover story for Esquire, he confessed that he’s “not ‘very smart,’” using air quotes, to explain his lack of articulateness in acting. His position in the public imagination, and his description of his own persona, is like that of a romance-novel cover model: a smoldering, intuitively empathetic stud who is only somewhat concerned with the plot unfolding around him.
The same opacity has aided celebrities like Bad Bunny and Travis Kelce, who recently shared a scene in “Happy Gilmore 2.” Ever since he started dating Taylor Swift, Kelce has existed for those who don’t follow football mostly as an appendix to her, ceding the floor for her Democratic endorsements and filming a Covid-and-flu-vaccination commercial. Bad Bunny, by some metrics “the world’s biggest pop star,” is known for shrewdly balancing a shredded bod with flamboyant style and painted fingernails. If he has courted accusations of queerbaiting, he has just as skillfully shrugged them off: “I don’t know if in 20 years I will like a man,” he once said. “One never knows in life.” As bulky, unknowable cyphers, these men become mannequins draped in whatever opinions a given observer desires, never quite confirming or denying their own positions.
As an alternative to the thinking man, the Renaissance man or the family man, today’s himbo offers just “man” — a blurry image, a blunt political instrument or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face. The “himbo” is, in many senses, unreal — a wish-fulfillment fantasy. His true self is concealed behind a set of doe-like eyes, the content of his interiority forever unconfirmed.
In its strategic blankness, however, the himbo is the one archetype that is able to cut through the Gordian knot of complex and contradictory claims about how men should be and act today. Articles in recent months have explored conflicting versions of the ideal man: that they should read more novels but avoid the pointy-headed or European; want to show off their partners as arm candy but in a nonobjectifying fashion; get along with their partners’ friends while cultivating “passionate” friendships themselves; and be stoic but tear-jerked, companionable but rigid, liquid but gas. But the himbo simply is, in the way that a Chia Pet simply is. He does not spiral out on conceptual double-binds; he is grounded in his body and admired for it, exempting himself from throwing stones in culture wars. The internet and its endless internecine debates exist within Plato’s Cave. The himbo, meanwhile, is meandering peacefully outside, soaking up the rays.
Casey Michael Henry is a writer based in New York City. His last project was the novel “Not Recommended.” He also publishes the cultural newsletter Slim Jim.
Source photographs for illustration above: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Justin Goff Photos/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; Gabe Ginsberg/WireImage/Getty Images.
The post The
New Dream Guy Is Beefy, Placid and … Politically Ambiguous appeared first on New York Times.
