The inescapable appeal of the messy man: a v unserious investigation
You know the type: pallid skin, sunken eyes, raspy voice. They almost exclusively wear tatty hoodies over their pasty bodies and have a rolled-up cigarette dangling from their hand at all times like a sixth digit. They’re liable to invite you to come over and ‘chill’ — that is, smoke a joint in their musty-smelling bedroom before they serenade you with a maudlin Elliot Smith guitar cover (but you’ll overlook the red flags for now). You’ve probably dated one in the past — or perhaps you’re dating one now.
Much to the bafflement of many straight men, women love this kind of scruffy, scrawny man. Just look at the Kardashians: Kourtney is married to Travis Barker, the lanky, tattoo-covered Blink-182 drummer. Kim famously dated Pete Davidson, arguably the ultimate example of this male archetype, whose impressive dating history has perplexed straight men everywhere. Kylie, meanwhile, is dating Timothée Chalamet, a man who turned up to the Berlin Film Festival head-to-toe in a pink tracksuit, while his girlfriend was in full glam (the tracksuit was, admittedly, custom Chrome Hearts).
But back to Davidson: swathes of us were heartbroken when Davidson debuted his new tattoo-free, buff body for a Reformation Valentine’s Day campaign. “When he was a beanpole who looked like he hadn’t slept in two weeks covered in awful stick and poke tattoos I was FROTHING at the mouth and now I feel nothing,” writer and influencer Amelia Perrin wrote on X. “Something I should probably address internally.”
Speaking on the Today Show in January, the comedian revealed that he made the decision to radically change his appearance after getting sober. “I got sober and I saw myself in the mirror and I was like, ‘Nah. Who that?’ I was like, ‘I got to change it up a little bit’,” he said
So while many of us may be mourning the loss of Pete’s tattoos and scrawny era aesthetic, we have to commend him for his commitment to adopting a healthier lifestyle and choosing to rebrand his image to, as he put it on the Today Show, start over with a “clean slate”.
when he was a beanpole who looked like he hadn’t slept in two weeks covered in awful stick and poke tattoos i was FROTHING at the mouth and now i feel nothing. something i should probably address internally https://t.co/2NRbEZ8UC0
— Cardi BTEC (@amelia_perrin) February 12, 2025
While Pete is embracing a ‘cleaner’ way of life (and we wish him all the best!), the thirst for scruffy-looking white dudes lives on. From the mania surrounding Timothée Chalamet (the first celebrity to inspire the ‘lookalike contest’ trend late last year), to the TikTok fancams made of Ivan (played by Mark Eydelshteyn), Ani’s weed-smoking, Xbox-playing love interest in Anora — whose centrefold shoot and interview for our sister title Cosmopolitan US went live today.
Factor in the overwhelming popularity of porn star Owen Gray and it’s clear that a lot of women have a thing for men who look a little disheveled and deviate from the typically-jacked masculine ideal.
This comes hot on the heels of the ‘hot rodent boyfriend’ trend that caught fire last summer, hailing the popularity of svelte, slightly ratty-looking men. So, what is it about this unkempt look that drives so many women wild?
The making of a moment
The recent history of this archetype can be tracked back to the emergence of grunge. The subculture and music genre, which was forged during the mid-1980s in the US, got its name from an American slang term meaning ‘repugnant’. Grunge aesthetics embraced unkemptness, with male grunge musicians like Kurt Cobain famously wearing their hair long and unwashed.
The look stood in stark contrast to the flashier, more pristine aesthetics that dominated culture in the 80s. It also radically dissembled gender binaries. In 2014, Chioma Nnadi — now head of the title’s UK edition — wrote in Vogue: “Cobain pulled liberally from both ends of a woman's and a man’s wardrobe [...] In dishevelled jeans and floral frocks, he softened the tough exterior of the archetypal rebel from the inside out, and set the ball in motion for a radical, millennial idea of androgyny.”
Cobain’s style “was the antithesis of the macho American man” — think: Don Draper — and forged a new, less ‘aggressive’ type of masculinity in the process.
And this remodelling of masculinity, at least as I see it, is key to the appeal for the 2025 iteration. There’s something about a slightly effeminate man which women seem to love (see also: the ‘I love when beautiful girls have a little gay boyfriend’ TikTok trend, where women show off their ‘effeminate, Levi’s-wearing, tote bag-carrying’ partners, and the discourse it subsequently spawned about how ‘fruity boyfriends’ are en vogue).
Rejecting manosphere aesthetics
It’s impossible to dissect modern masculinities — including our desires or derision for certain ‘types’ — without acknowledging the rise of right-wing ideologies and misogyny.
There’s evidence everywhere that misogyny is becoming an increasingly urgent issue among young men. Research published last year by The Big Issue found that a quarter of young men think feminism is harming society, while a third took a favourable view of misogynistic influencer (and alleged rapist and human trafficker) Andrew Tate.
Relatedly, other 2024 research found that boys and young men have more conservative views on gender than their baby boomer counterparts, while at the last general election 12% of men aged between 18 to 24 voted for Reform — with the party, terrifying, leading in a YouGov voter intention poll earlier this month.
I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to draw a line between the rise in stock of more effeminate-looking men and the ubiquity of the hypermasculine aesthetic ideal popularised by those in the red-pilled manosphere.
The look — broad, V-shaped build; dense, red meat-fed musculature; jaw defined by ‘mewing’, AKA flattening your tongue against the roof of your mouth to sharpen the jawline (which, by the way, doesn’t really work) — is billed as the one way to look to attract (or, more accurately, control) women by manosphere figureheads.
That’s despite it being common knowledge that most straight women are turned off by uber-masculine dating profiles which feature gym selfies — and consequently, men who present as more effeminate are often assumed to be ‘safer’. One University of St Andrews study even found that women see macho-looking men as less faithful, less warm, and potentially poorer fathers, while judging men with more feminine features as more suitable for long-term relationships.
Plus, as more and more women have entered the workplace and achieved greater autonomy — with recent research from the University of Cambridge finding that UK girls are now outperforming boys at all levels of education, from early years right through to university — the idea that a man’s role in a heterosexual relationship is simply to be a ‘provider’ or ‘breadwinner’ no longer fits.
As a result, women today are increasingly looking for partners who can meet their emotional needs as opposed to their material needs: according to research from dating app Bumble, a majority (59%) of women are prioritising looking for a partner who is ‘emotionally consistent’ in 2025.
With this in mind, it’s little wonder that so many of us are drawn to men who don’t fit the ‘macho’ mould, aesthetically. Especially when (rightly or wrongly) we often connect this sort of presentation to men being able to be sensitive, emotionally intelligent, and confident enough to express their identity however they see fit.
Checking ourselves
Obviously, men don’t need tattoos or negligible muscle mass to be self-aware, as Pete Davidson’s admirable decision to embrace sobriety makes evident. The comedian’s prioritisation of his health and wellbeing is a real, tangible example of emotional intelligence in action — it remains to be seen whether any of the other ‘messy men’ we idolise are truly as self-aware as we assume them to be.
It’s also worth underscoring that a scrawny-looking man with stick and poke tattoos — or one secure enough experimenting with an androgynous aesthetic that he’ll happily borrow your clothes — is by no means less likely to be an arsehole than a protein shake-toting gym rat. (We’ve all seen the nightmarish screenshots shared on the @beam_me_up_softboi Instagram page.)
It’s worth acknowledging, too, that the thirst for grungy, messy men clearly demonstrates the way society cuts men far more slack than women. (Well, wealthy white men, at least. As ever, there are significant class and race-based caveats to this story.) While we celebrate their unkempt looks, we rarely see men idolising similarly ‘messy’ women.
Yes, while Charli XCX and her world-dominating brand of hedonism has no doubt been doing some heavy lifting where this cause is concerned, she is — of course — astoundingly conventionally hot.
The more I thought about why messy men are the moment, the more I thought about how beauty standards for women remain far more constrained and narrowly defined than beauty standards for men.
While men are afforded the space to be ‘unconventionally attractive’, it’s difficult to imagine men lusting after women who deviate from conventional beauty or norms en masse. There’s yet to be any discourse about ‘hot rodent girlfriends’ or a TikTok trend where straight, cis guys celebrate their butch girlfriends.
We can hope that one day unconventionally hot women will be lauded in the same way that their male counterparts are. But in the meantime, it’s likely that ratty, lanky, beanpole-y, tattooed males will continue to dominate culture for the foreseeable future.
At this point in time, when misogynistic influencers are busy peddling the idea that there’s only one rigid way to ‘be a man’ — and, per the alarming stats shared above, winning — I’m inclined to see the mass-market appeal of messy, more effeminate guys as a good thing. Long may they reign.
You Might Also Like
