it's a loser boy summer

born to yearn, forced to earn

Something is brewing in the murky waters of our crumbling society. Everyone is battling loneliness and existential dread. We’re all physically or spiritually chaste, but somehow still trying to be hedonistic brats in the club. Sex and the City is being studied on social media like a fossilized relic of a bygone dating era. Romantic morale is dissolving like saltine crackers under the wet, baking sun. Everywhere, every hour, someone is at a bar or up on Twitter, talking about yearning.

“i HATE dating apps where are the LOVERS,” one user on Twitter asked. “the hottest thing a man can do is be a weird little nerd,” said another.

Last year, I wrote about the medium ugly boyfriend and his meteoric ascent as romance’s hottest status piece. The appeal was clear—in the external trappings of your relationship, the medium ugly boyfriend ensured that you would always be perceived as the glamorous and altruistic heroine. He seems to know that you’re out of his league and will, to any passerby in a Uniqlo, always make you look good. But now, a new phenomenon has expounded upon the fertile soil of the boyfriend status symbol: the nonchalant cool man is out, and the loser boy is in. Medium ugly boyfriends of last year have opened the floodgates to a new dawn, and it is unequivocally the era of loser boys. Men who proclaim to “only date models” are as dead in the water as the Shein microtrends of 2020. In the relentless heat of August, we are too tired to deal with texts that say “I mean, you can come if you want,” and we are now searching for the person that will get down on both knees, put their hands together in prayer, and beg for a woman to look their way.

“need me a loser ass boyfriend that gets ZERO bitches,” one wrote.

The loser lover cast in IT.

To be clear, I mean “loser” in a very laudatory way. There are a million other names for him: he’s a yearner. He’s a worshipper. He’s a real eater. He’ll cherish you and love you even if you were a worm. “Loser” is simply the ironic digest of these personality traits that have historically been considered undesirable by traditional masculinity. The loser boy is sweet. He’s open about his feelings. He isn’t interested in speaking with several women at a time or feigning disinterest in anything. He eats vegetables—even a Nerds Gummy Cluster or two—and wouldn’t care if he was seen in public eating either. He prefers reading, drawing, and cooking (care-based) to day trading, weightlifting, filming a podcast (acquisition-based). He’s a cat person and has never tasted pre-workout in his life.

Within the context of patriarchal oppression, loser boys are the very antithesis to the red-pilled manosphere that seems to grow bigger each year. Loser boys are really lover boys—the ones who are conscious enough to identify a hegemonic dog whistle and act accordingly. It’s why Drake doesn’t deserve the moniker of being a “certified lover boy.” Real lover boys aren’t fighting pedophilia evidence and creepily pining over their exes, but tending to their garden and letting women share their feelings without butting in.

The statues celebrating loser boys seem to be everywhere this year. There’s The Idea of You, where Nicholas Galitzine as bootleg Harry Styles pines for not-like-the-other-girls Anne Hathway; Challengers, a movie about how tennis is actually sex and more importantly, how two men are so into Zendaya they have homoerotic arguments about her for years on end; any of the Bridgerton brothers, who are so down bad for their romantic interests that they would disrupt societal events and ruin their families’ lives because they’re just so in love. I do think it is tied somehow to my suspicions of the white boy stock value being at an all-time high. What’s more antithetical to traditional masculinity than a white man displaying traits that are considered, by boring Western standard, effeminate? Glen Powell, Jonathan Bailey, Josh O’Connor. All finding standoms with their persona of being lover boys. Mark Zuckerberg made a literal statue of his wife and installed it in their yard—and while no one likes him still, many had to give that one to him.

Image via Twitter.

It makes sense why this has happened. Over the years, the Joe Rogan–Andrew Huberman–Sneako enclave of digital masculinity has peddled the ideologies of homophobic, racist chauvinism to millions of men. Young women are skewing more progressive as young men skew more conservative, and a huge factor has to do with the content they are fed on their feeds. And of course, there are interpersonal impacts. I hear stories from women who more frequently encounter direct forms of such alpha male ideology on dating apps or during IRL dates—men swiping up just to tell them that they’re ugly, men directly telling women during first dates what they perceive to be wrong with their looks, men actively putting down women for their interests, professions, and beliefs. For having sex with them, for not having sex with them.

It’s disrespectful, yes, but also incredibly boring. It’s so boring to get disrespected again and again by the same genre of man who has shit to say about your looks while he’s nursing a hairline that’s got two years left before it takes permanent PTO. The loser boy phenomenon is indicative of women wanting more—they want someone who, at a very baseline level, understands that they deserve to be treated above a level of degradation and dehumanization.

“need a guy that will blush and kick his feet when i respond,” a Twitter user posted.

It’s not to say there is a static division between who is a loser boy and who is not. But no more whining is allowed. Loser boys are bred, not born. Pick up a book and get a hobby that doesn’t involve some kind of physical or financial “self-improvement.” Figure out where the clitoris is. The volume of people looking for a soft-spoken loser is more prominent than ever—so if you’re complaining about why women seem to hate you, it’s because you’re just getting romantically curb-stomped by a guy wearing a floppy sweater and reading The Bell Jar. Summer has ushered forth the era of the loser boy. Act accordingly.

More from Steffi:

• Delia Cai and I answered the question in our newest edition of Posting Playbook, Am I a heartless ghoul if I post a photo of my viral croissant in times of global warfare? Now out on Fast Company.

• I wrote an essay for Mother Jones about our national fear of cringe and how it’s seeped deep into American politics.

• For CNN, I spoke with one beauty influencer and her experience with Seoul’s booming non-invasive beauty procedure industry.