keeping the office AC way too cold<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cBro\u201d became a knowing insult, and the language of feminist theory spilled from Tumblr and gender-studies seminars into mainstream culture \u2014 the campus-to-Cond\u00e9 Nast pipeline. In the liberal professional world, especially, the ideal man was portrayed as sensitive, meek, and seeking apologies or consent for nearly everything he did. The soft-boi was less a man than a customer-service version of one.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese days, the king of Performative Males is performing a different species of man.\u201d<\/p>\n
The drastic vibe shift of the mid-2020s has been well-documented. With the decline of #MeToo and \u201cpeak woke,\u201d the soft-boi began to be derided as the \u201cperformative male\u201d: the man whose sensitivity was seen as a self-righteous personal-branding exercise rather than what, in liberal Millennial culture, was deemed allyship. Starting in 2024, the backlash culminated in Performative Male contests, in cities and college campuses where men dressed in oversized cardigans and sipped matcha while making land acknowledgments or talking about how they loved \u201cqueer spaces.\u201d Gen-Z men\u2019s backlash to their ultra-woke elders began to be reflected in lifestyle choices, especially in the emergence of two distinct types: churchgoing trads who want children; and resentful caricatures of the old versions of manhood: Andrew Tate and Barstool-brained wing of crypto gambling, lookmaxxing, podcast swagger, and overt misogyny worn almost proudly. Think of it as holy versus unholy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chalamet, however, has drifted into a third lane. No longer a boy wonder at age 30, he\u2019s looking less like a Parisian art-film star. He has been photographed in streetwear and baseball caps, guest-starring in rap videos and confidently appearing on ESPN football broadcasts. And he\u2019s dating Kylie Jenner, a figure overtly, even aggressively feminine enough to demand a properly masculine counterpart \u2014 her exes are mostly rappers. He is now laden with swag, as the kids used to say. It\u2019s unclear whether he sensed the seismic shift in the culture wars and made a market correction or simply evolved or matured with age. But the upshot is that these days, the king of Performative Males is performing a different species of man.<\/p>\n
This new persona is interesting because he\u2019s neither Tate nor Matt Walsh; neither a cartoon reactionary, a chest-thumping podcast bro, nor a trad husband looking for a wife with whom to attend a Latin Mass. He isn\u2019t particularly religious or political. He became something unexpected and, in its own way, more old-fashioned: an unapologetic striver. At the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards, accepting the best-actor award for the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Chalamet openly declared that he was \u201cin pursuit of greatness\u201d and wanted to be \u201cone of the greats.\u201d It was one of those rare celebrity lines that sounded both faintly absurd and refreshingly honest, something you\u2019d hear from professional athletes, not artists. Some bristled at the fact that he\u2019d violated the current code of prestige modesty, in which everyone is supposed to present success as an accidental side effect of sincerity.<\/p>\n
This attitudinal shift has been reflected in his recent work. In A Complete Unknown, his Dylan is a difficult young man shaped by ego, self-invention, opportunism, and a refusal to remain defined by the people who loved him first. His mid-1960s Dylan goes electric, over and against the objections of his fanbase, essentially telling the folk world that their ownership of him was not his problem. And then came Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet plays a swaggering, self-mythologizing table-tennis prodigy \u2014 a film explicitly about the American drive for greatness, for dominance, for being the best at something even when the something in question is defiantly small, like ping-pong.<\/p>\n
The film isn\u2019t uncritical of this drive. That\u2019s the point. Marty director Josh Safdie uses Chalamet\u2019s character to examine the specifically American pathology of wanting to be legendary and how ambition curdles into ego, how ego can hurt the people around you, and how the pursuit of mastery isolates those whom it elevates. It is a complicated film about a complicated type. Both movies ask whether you can separate the art from the artist, and whether greatness can be pursued without vanity and collateral damage. The critics now writing their concern pieces about Chalamet are, without realizing it, providing a one-note answer to those questions: no, and they\u2019d prefer you stop asking.<\/p>\n
Ironically, this controversy is a bizarre mirror image of the time when actresses were tut-tutted by male critics for being messy, outspoken, and lacking a demure personality. That dynamic had a name \u2014 the difficult woman \u2014 and we got reasonably good at recognizing it. We are less practiced at recognizing its male obverse. This time, it has to do with the specific cultural discomfort that arises when a man who was useful as a symbol of sensitive, non-threatening masculinity starts suggesting that he is no longer interested in being a symbol of softness and passivity at all. That he wants to be what history once called a man.<\/p>\n
What comes next is uncertain. Chalamet may or may not win the Oscar on Sunday. The ballet controversy broke too late to affect the vote, and his awards momentum had already dwindled before any of this. But regardless, in today\u2019s American culture \u2014 one that endlessly sermonizes about art, authenticity, and excellence but is unnerved when a straight male star hungers for it \u2014 here\u2019s hoping that the new Chalamet-ism endures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The culture war has come for Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet. Days before the Academy Awards, a clip went viral of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[47001,96,25419,2839,168993,26319,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-473452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-andrew-tate","tag-entertainment","tag-kylie-jenner","tag-movies","tag-soft-boi","tag-timothee-chalamet","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}