Understanding the rise of ‘brocialism’ in the UK

Our collective obsession with the ‘softboy’: too cute to cancel

Despite their striking similarities, it’s important to make a distinction between the more insidiously intentioned “broscialist”, and the “softboy”, otherwise known as “Hollywood’s baby girls” who also populate our social media.

For one thing, it’s more difficult to be mad about scrolling endlessly through photos of celebrities who look like Eddie Redmayne, Andrew Garfield, and Paul Mescal – and no, it’s not just the gladiator skirt and the accent, although they certainly help.

While the differences at first glance may not seem stark, I think a significant factor is that the broscialist has undoubtedly risen out of – and contributed towards – the “pick-up” industry, which is centred around manipulating women and asserting masculine dominance.

That is to say, the broscialist most problematic when his “woke” politics are a direct result of his desire to make himself appeal to women.

By contrast, the softboy seems to mostly just benefit from pretty privilege. These men inarguably do hold certain privileges thanks to their position within a patriarchal system, and certainly a feminist label won’t harm their brand – or its appeal to women.

However, unlike the brocialist, the softboy isn’t inherently political. Funnily enough, that’s kind of the problem.

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For the “hollywood baby girl”, their political wokeness was never their point of appeal.

Rather it’s their softness, their harmlessness, an almost childlike resistance to political systems as a whole. This persona is carefully structured to render them ultimately blameless in line with the understanding that ignorance is a kind of bliss.

Take, for example, Redmayne’s role as a trans woman in The Danish Girl 2015. Redmayne has since admitted his mistake in partaking in “years of cisgender success on the back of trans stories”.

What’s more, he’s been incredibly vocal in his support of gender equality and the trans community. Nevertheless, he did receive a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his role.

Rather than dismiss issues of women’s oppression as less important identity politics like a broscialist might be likely to do, softboys are, as the name suggests, presented as ‘boys’.

This diminutive attempts to gaslight us into believing that it’s reasonable not to expect these men to have even thought to engage in brocialism in the first place.

Consequently, this is also the reason why, despite Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne’s ignorance of women’s vulnerability in certain situations demonstrated on national television, the two ‘Hollywood baby girls’ remain just too cute to cancel.

Types of masculinities

As video essayist and author Alice Cappelle tells us, taking inspiration from socialist Raewyn Connell’s book Masculinities, hollywood baby girls speak to a subordinate and complicit masculinity. This means they’re still heterosexually desirable and they don’t deliberately perpetrate misogynistic or sexist attitudes.

However, their complicity within the system is what allows them to benefit from the hierarchical structures which remain in place. Cappelle suggests that people like Paul Mescal have a lazy view of social justice which ignores their own agency in the patriarchal system.

Ironically, this is where we see how important identity politics are in fact in conjunction with social politics. While “men can be victims of patriarchy…they still hold a lot of power over women. Men still have agency, they’re not puppets of patriarchy.” The softboy then, is arguably less mal-intentioned than the broscialist, and therefore less harmful as a result.

But while the softboy may be comfortable wearing less “masculine” clothes and crying on camera, real change and progress will require them to learn how it feels to be uncomfortable and deeply disturbed by oppression of more than half of the population.

This isn’t to say that they’re not learning! However, the malleability of these soft boys makes them fundamental to the feminist movement.

If we’re serious about men’s need for better social education (for their benefit as well as women’s) – and alarmed enough by the male Gen Z uptake of Reform UK membership – then perhaps a more useful approach is to view the ignorance of the softboy as a willingness to learn. A susceptibility to progressive feminism.

Because it’s not enough to be a feminist by name, these men also need to demonstrate – by disrupting the patriarchal systems of privilege that they continue to benefit from – that they do actually care about women’s rights.

Even then, the Left must get to them before Reform UK does.