Consider the Babygirl Man

not like other guys 👉👈 is a monthly musing on masculinity in the media and on the internet.

---

He’s six-foot-five. And menacing. A sinister black side part and a razor-sharp jawline: the scariest high school junior to exist. A face if looks could kill. He could hold a revolver to your head and joke, “There’s no bullets in this gun.” Elsewhere, he’s a fifty-year-old man, bald and broad-shouldered, sporting serial killer Heisenberg glasses. “I’m not in danger—I am the danger,” he declares, a meth-stained goatee froths around his chin. In another world, he’s clad in a black suit. He speaks in pistols and punches more often than in words. “He’s not the boogeyman,” they say. “He was the one you sent to kill the fucking Boogeyman.” What is he?

He’s babygirl, apparently.

There is a new, peculiar internet man in town—call him Babygirl Man. A new trend on social media is calling male actors popular male actors like Jacob Elordi, Bryan Cranston, and Keanu Reeves ‘babygirl.’ But how can these men be likened to a girl, no less a baby one, when they play some of the most ruthless characters on film and television? (These being Euphoria’s Nate Jacobs, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, John Wick’s John Wick).

Babygirl Man is, as the Rolling Stones put it, “a man who is very cutesy in a slightly submissive way.” Indeed, while these actors on-screen roles exude a menacing flair of hypermasculinity, their real-life personas are often much different. Jacob Elordi, for one, loves handbags and listening to Kylie Minogue. Keanu Reeves wears hair clips. Bryan Cranston celebrates his Sweet Sixty in a flamboyant furry lion suit.

By his name alone, the Babygirl Man’s origins are obvious. He is the masculine successor to the girl—the online female archetype who made ‘girl dinner,’ did ‘girl math,’ and led other ‘girl' microtrends in 2023. And much like the girl, the Babygirl Man performs gender in a soft, campy way. But the girl was more than just a year-defining internet trend, Isabel Criso argues in The Cut. She rejected politics and resisted adult womanhood’s most uninviting aspects. Does the Babygirl Man do the same for men?

Safe to say that restrictive fashion standards and not having a sweet sixteen are some of masculinity’s less appealing aspects. The Babygirl Man, in his insistence against gender norms, is resistive in some form. But personally, I’m not about adding handbags or hair clips to my wardrobe any time soon. Neither am I planning to have a sweet sixty just because boys don’t do sweet sixteens. What I, as a man, do care about is this: is the Babygirl Man saving us from internet masculinity’s most tiring and insufferable tropes?

In its most prevalent form, internet masculinity sucks. While mainstream RedPill creators such as Andrew Tate, Sneako, and Fresh & Fit have been long de-platformed, their misogyny is still coded deeply into online life. Rather than a handful of centralized manosphere voices, there is instead a greater rise in manosphere podcasters, thirst trappers, street interviewers, and the like, who all swear by grotesquely primal forms of masculinity and gender relations. Collectively, they promote a new, hegemonic idea of what a man should be: a wealthy, six-pax-wielding (and often prejudiced) ‘high-value’ alpha male who escapes ‘The Matrix’ through polygamy and scammy online businesses.

The internet’s vast nexus of male archetypes is, nonetheless, diverse: incel Reddit mods, self-obsessed looksmaxxers, rightist edgelords, Roman Empire-loving white dudes, and the overly stoic grind-don’t-stop fitness gurus who populate my Instagram explore page. RedPill doesn’t capture this nuance, yes. But many of these archetypes share with RedPill an indulgent insistence on an imagined ‘high-value’ man. At its best? A male-coded model for self-improvement. At its much more common worst? An overserious performance of masculinity—men who describe themselves as ‘sigma’, men screaming shirtless before a waterfall instead of healthily expressing emotion, and men who think "being skinny fat is the worst possible situation to be in.”

The Babygirl Man, and his campy handbags, goofy fursuits, and cute little hair clips feels refreshing—necessary, even—in an internet amok with RedPill-ers and stoics obsessed with becoming ‘high-value.’ And rather subversively, Babygirl Man is often silly, with little care for gender stereotypes while also ticking much of the ‘high-value’ man’s criteria (many are high-earning heartthrobs). To no surprise, many have heralded the Babygirl Man’s rise as Music To Our Ears—he shatters patriarchy and “[takes] down toxic masculinity,” as one writer for PinkNews suggests.

So that’s it. The Babygirl Man challenges internet masculinity’s most tiring tropes—was it that easy?

But few things are as uncomplicated as this. Who exactly is afforded status as the Babygirl Man? In Elordi, Cranston, and Reeves’ case, it is men portraying ruthless and emotionally complicated characters. Take a look at the extended list of men considered ‘babygirl’ and it’s the same—Andrew Scott, another Babygirl Man, is best known for his gaslight-y antagonism as Moriarty in Sherlock. This paradox is best put by one TikTok user, who believes a ‘babygirl’ should have two of three things: “eyes, cries, and war crimes. They have beautiful eyes, they’ve cried onscreen, and they’ve committed atrocities.”

It feels a little insincere to call actors who play cold, mean, and morally questionable men ‘babygirl.’ Maybe the Babygirl Man is “taking down toxic masculinity,” but why does this have to come from men known for playing toxic-ly masculine characters?

This infantilization feels a lot like “I can change him” syndrome, where instincts are misguidedly placed to look for good behavior mainly from bad people. In the same way, when the Babygirl Man challenges gender norms, part of the reason it is desirable is because he adheres to them already. He deviates from gender stereotypes, but he does so in the safety of his tall, broad, menacing frame.

So, does the internet actually want a challenge to traditional masculinity? Not too much, perhaps, Babygirl Man considered. But no single microtrend was destined to revolutionize gender. Babygirl Man is camp, he is fun and silly and super not serious. He might not take gender roles seriously, but neither is he serious about overthrowing them. And behind all the handbags and hairclips and hairy fursuits, maybe he does like traditional masculinity more than we might think.