Why are men giving us the collective ick?

There is a long and fruitful tradition of women expressing disdain for men, but the discourse has reached a new frontier: men are, on an inherent level, just incredibly cringe.

- CLAUDIA COCKERELL

The past few weeks alone have dealt some pretty devastating blows to mankind's PR.

The viral Vogue article, "Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?" has become the water cooler chat du jour. The piece argues that having a boyfriend at all is mainstream and bad for street cred - posting pictures of them is even worse. Boyfriends have joined Labubus and Dubai chocolate on the trash heap of content with which we have been oversaturated, and so it stands to reason that boyfriend-obsessed women come across as "quite culturally loser-ish".

This must be a glass of cold water to the face for the boyfriend class, who were getting used to being described as "golden retrievers". And the discourse is having real-world impact: the author of the piece, Chanté Joseph, shared a message from someone who said she had dumped her boyfriend after reading the article.

Unsurprisingly, she has also received a torrent of vitriol from men with bruised egos.

Why are men giving us the collective ick? Part of the problem is the influence of the manosphere, which encourages misogyny and violence and has some deeply cringe figureheads. Polling has also found that young men in the UK are more Right-wing than young women, leading to a political chasm between the sexes, while pornography continues to give men a warped view of sex.