Boyhood Is Trending
Wet dream skincare, gun-shaped evening bags, and boyfriend blush.
Girlhood has been sufficiently praised and pilloried over the past two years. It’s boyhood’s turn to take over the culture.
In the viral TikTok series Boy Room, comedian Rachel Coster explores the dirty, disorganized, and otherwise adolescent bedrooms of adult men in New York City. Author Ruth Whippman recently released BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, about the values society instills in young boys. Safy-Hallan Farah of
just introduced an essay series covering male-coded interests (starting with aliens) and Polyester magazine announced a spin-off publication, Non-Threatening Boys, a “home for discussion of all things masculine.”But visually, boyhood isn’t manifesting in the manner of girlhood.
2023 — “the year of the girl,” as named by NPR — saw women adopt Barbie-core clothing and décor, girlish hair bows, and doll-inspired beauty products. As boyhood enters the zeitgeist, though, it isn’t men who’re retreading the developmental terrain of their youth (I have yet to see a Hot Wheels bed in a grown man’s Boy Room, for example). It’s women. Traditional “boyhood” is being synthesized through traditional “girlhood”; the core characteristic of which, as the girlhood discourse insisted, is aesthetic performance.
In the hands of an It Girl, the toy gun — a staple of boyhood playtime — becomes the accessorized gun. Singer Lana Del Rey and artist Bella Newman both posed with firearms in recent selfies, while Angela Simmons carried a bedazzled gun-shaped evening bag to the BET Awards this month.
Women’s fashion brands have taken the pubescent boy’s graduation from tighty-whities to boxer shorts and turned it into a style statement. Both Miu Miu and Bally sent boxers down the runway for Spring-Summer 2023, no pants required; a year later, the look has reached the masses. Amazon confirms women’s boxers are “Trending Now” and Free People’s July 2024 collection is chock-full of cotton boxer shorts, either worn alone or under baggy jeans.
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For beauty, the boyhood trend takes the form of what I’ll call “wet dream skincare” — a renewed interest in semen and sperm as cosmetic ingredients. On June 24, Agent Nateur launched a beauty supplement that includes spermidine, a synthesized amino acid found in semen, known for its supposed anti-aging properties. “Kim Kardashian Is Putting Salmon Sperm All Over and Inside of Her Skin,” Allure reported days ago, referencing the reality star’s polynucleotide injection treatment, a procedure that uses DNA derived from salmon sperm. A July 5 headline from the New York Post reads, “I used my man’s sperm for facials — it gave me a goopy glow.” (Insert “penis envy” joke here.)
Then, of course, there’s “boyfriend blush,” a newly-popular application technique that “replicates the outdoorsy effect of ruddy cheeks after a game of rugby or polo,” according to Glamour UK — an upsetting if accurate analogy for the difference between conditioned boyhood and conditioned girlhood. Boys get to be and girls get to appear to be.
Cheeks have been a focal point of the beauty industry for a while now, although some predict blush is on the way out due to worries over “blush blindness,” or the inability to tell you’ve applied too much product (as evidenced by the overly-rosy results of many a #GetReadyWithMe video). Maybe full, rounded cheek fillers à la boyhood icon Thomas the Tank Engine will be next? Hey, it happened with Barbie.
The glaring omission here is the rise in men’s steroid use, mewing, jawline fillers, and “looksmaxing” — a general Marvelization of male beauty standards, which predates the current burst of boyhood media. But this too could be seen as boyhood synthesized through girlhood; not the unlearning of gender roles, but the uncritical expansion of them. (Personally, I don’t find “the pressure to meet an impossible physical ideal for boys” any more encouraging than “guns for girls.”)
The gun as a 'girl accessory' is sooooo grim. Maybe I'm off on this but...beyond the fact that 'gun as aesthetic' is just gross at its essence, I feel like the only reason it plays as !cute! and a !statement! is by emphasizing that a weapon in a woman's hands poses no threat. Once again we enforce gender roles under the guise of eroding them.
"For beauty, the boyhood trend takes the form of what I’ll call “wet dream skincare” — a renewed interest in semen and sperm as cosmetic ingredients." This feels so adjacent to other porn inspired beauty trends, i.e., a replication of the "money shot" but in the skincare space.