The Gentle Man Has Taken Over Pop Culture. Will It Matter at the Ballot Box?

In We Live in Time, the romantic drama whose slow October rollout has swept up moviegoers in a tidal wave of tears, Andrew Garfield plays a divorced man who finds love in a hopeless place. Recovering in the hospital after a distracted stumble into traffic, Garfield’s Tobias meets the apologetic woman who struck him with her vehicle: Almut (Florence Pugh), a talented and fiercely ambitious chef. She becomes the star in their relationship, but he is its tender heart. Tasting her food makes him emotional; he frets about the future and cares for her when she’s gravely ill. When she gets pregnant, Tobias takes detailed notes to ensure they’re prepared for childbirth.

It’s a perfect role for Garfield, a 41-year-old actor who radiates gentleness—and who has spoken with great eloquence about grieving his mother, who died in 2019. That synergy has been reinforced by a giddily received press tour that has fused the actor’s personality with that of his character, as he offers earnest, sometimes tearful insights relevant to the movie's themes: love, death, the power of art to capture both elemental human experiences. He explained to Sesame Street’s Elmo how missing his mom kept her memory alive. While cuddling puppies in a BuzzFeed video, he riffed on the ephemeral nature of life. In a viral clip from the New York Times’ Modern Love podcast, he breaks down over a real-life love story. “This is why art is so important,” he manages to say. “Because it can get us to places that we can’t get to any other way.”

Garfield’s status as the internet’s boyfriend du jour was confirmed by the anticipation that preceded his Oct. 18 interview on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s YouTube series Chicken Shop Date. (The flirtatiously combative encounter lived up to the hype.) And it echoed the fanfare, just a few weeks earlier, that surrounded an actor who occupies a similar niche: Adam Brody, the star of Netflix’s hit rom-com series Nobody Wants This. Brody made his sensitive-guy bones two decades ago as the geek-chic teen Seth Cohen in The O.C. His latest character is a “hot rabbi” whose vocation imbues him with decency and depth. And if the gentle man is this fall’s most thirstily embraced leading-man archetype, he’s also popping up elsewhere throughout pop culture, from football’s Kelce brothers expressing their mutual love on their podcast to the senior singles getting vulnerable in The Golden Bachelorette.

It isn’t exactly surprising that these exemplars of emotional intelligence are resonating with the overwhelmingly female audience that consumes romance content; their appeal as fantasy fodder, alongside bad boys and men in uniform, is perennial. Yet their ubiquity comes at a significant political moment. As we approach an election that pits a self-possessed woman and her self-effacing male running mate against a ticket that gives voice to alpha-male misogyny, voters of all genders will make a choice between diametrically opposed visions of masculinity. A nation that has never elected a female President is about to find out whether the kind of gentleness so many of us find so attractive can prevail over vitriolic machismo when it counts.

Few topics in the cultural conversation are as fraught as masculinity. This has been the case since 20th century feminists started illuminating gendered injustices—but especially since the #MeToo movement exposed so many powerful men as predators, from America’s dad Bill Cosby to the urbane interviewer Charlie Rose. Years earlier, the term nice guy syndrome had emerged to describe men who self-identified as kind and expected women to reward them for it with love and sex. Meanwhile, increased visibility for queer, trans, and nonbinary identities has challenged gender essentialism writ large.

So clarity is important when we talk about the gentle man as an archetype. He need not be a gentleman in the courtly sense, holding doors for his date or throwing his jacket over puddles so her shoes don't get wet. But, as a character or celebrity marketed as a romantic hero to an audience of women who are attracted to men, he is canonically straight (although queer analogues include characters like Kit Connor’s considerate bisexual boyfriend, Nick Nelson, in Netflix’s Heartstopper). What he emphatically isn’t is a calculated nice guy, hoarding sensitivity points to cash in with women. Nor does he make a conspicuous performance of progressive masculinity, à la Ted Lasso or those dated Feminist Ryan Gosling memes. He may not think much at all about gender, as far as we can tell. (This air of naturalness doesn’t, of course, preclude gentleness from being a deliberately constructed persona. If #MeToo taught us anything, it’s how little we truly know about the objects of our parasocial adoration.)

Instead of striving to be singled out as a good guy, in an explicitly gendered sense, the gentle man behaves like a sincere, compassionate, introspective person. He talks about his feelings but also knows how to listen. He has likely been to therapy but doesn’t drone on self-indulgently about it. Part of the appeal of Brody’s Nobody Wants This character is his fascination with questions of philosophy and faith, and the pleasure he takes in sharing them with his new girlfriend (Kristen Bell), a prickly agnostic. The sexagenarian men of The Golden Bachelorette, like original Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner before them, are secure enough to cry on camera. Many are widowers. One fan favorite, Charles Ling, finds that the friendships he forges with male castmates help him move forward, years after the death of his wife.

Unlike his posturing nice-guy and male-chauvinist counterparts, the gentle man has experienced enough hardship to understand that there are more important things in life than being perceived as heroic or tough. Which explains why he’s not intimidated to stand beside a powerful woman. Travis Kelce, for all his candor on New Heights, the podcast he co-hosts with brother Jason, has never come off as insecure about being known as the football-player boyfriend of Taylor Swift. On the contrary, he enthuses about “seeing her in her element, killing it up there on stage.” In the climactic scene of We Live in Time, Garfield’s Tobias literally cheers from the sidelines as his ailing yet resolute wife competes in a prestigious culinary competition.

It’s possible to overestimate the connection between representation and reality, the way certain archetypes are portrayed in pop culture and how those portrayals impact society. (Lean In and Beyoncé didn’t stop us from electing Trump in 2016, with the ultimate result of the Supreme Court
overturning Roe v. Wade.) But we certainly take cues from the things we watch and listen to and scroll past on our phones about how to be in the world.

In that regard, evidence suggests that men are suffering from a dearth of useful information. A new National Research Group report on "the role of the entertainment industry in tackling America's masculinity crisis" found that of the top 20 fictional male role models identified by males ages 13 to 30, not one lives in our reality. Instead, respondents cited Spider-Man, Harry Potter, SpongeBob. (Women like superheroes too, but also look up to the likes of Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy and Olivia Benson from Law& Order: SVU.) The study warned that, as they come of age, boys are “trapped between competing visions of masculinity”—unsure of whether to reject machismo or embrace the cartoonish hypermasculinity of proudly toxic influencers like Andrew Tate—and that such uncertainty can lead to underachievement, drug abuse, and ultimately deaths of despair. While participants differed in their attitudes towards masculinity, researchers found that “one specific area where there’s broad agreement among boys and young men is the need for more stories that center on men who are emotionally vulnerable and honest about their feelings.”

The irony is that the male characters they crave already exist; they’re just being marketed to women. In this pivotal election year, however, no demographic can escape the war between conflicting visions of masculinity in the political arena. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance prescribe and inhabit antiquated gender roles; their side wants men in the Oval Office, women (with limited reproductive rights) at home raising kids, “childless cat ladies” ostracized. Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, represents an alternative that closely resembles the gentle guys who’ve taken over our screens. (To be clear: we’re talking about persona. Whether any politician angling to be in line for Commander in Chief can fairly be called gentle is a separate question.) He finds men who fixate on controlling women’s bodies “weird.” Like Travis Kelce, he’s comfortable supporting a woman whose prominence eclipses his own. The Bachelorette dad who reminisces about hosting Thanksgiving for his lesbian daughter’s friends echoes the story of how Walz served as faculty adviser to a gay-straight alliance at the high school where he taught and coached football.

What remains to be seen is whether this gentle form of masculinity and the more assertive sort of femininity with which it coexists can win an election that is also a referendum on gender in America. Barack Obama confirmed as much when he lamented, at a campaign rally, that “some men . . . think Trump’s behavior—of bullying people or putting them down—is somehow macho, a sign of strength. I’m telling you, that’s not what real strength is . . . Real strength is about helping those who have less or need some help, standing up for those who can’t always stand up for themselves.” If the entertainment that speaks to us—the characters and personalities some of us swoon over and others clamor to see more of—is any indication, we know this. But if we lose sight of what we really want somewhere between the couch and the polls, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.