A new dream man has dropped – the laid-back, confident beefcake | Emma Beddington
How do you like your men? Yes, obviously, we shouldn’t be dismissively taxonomising a whole gender like boxed Barbies,But in the era of tradwives and nu-gen gold diggers, in which the manosphere remains alive and kick(box)ing, telling teenage boys lies about women, I reckon there’s a way to go before we reach reductive objectification parity,Does that make it OK? No,Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, a bit,So, returning to the question, my answer is “like my coffee”: small, strong, dark and highly over-stimulating, brewed by my sister’s boyfriend in Scarborough … No, hang on, this is falling apart.
Regardless, my ideal man is wildly at odds with the zeitgeist and my husband needs to punch up his protein intake and stop having opinions, because the New York Times claims a new dream man has dropped and he’s “beefy, placid and … politically ambiguous”.What do we know about the nouveau-neutral hunk? Well, apart from the essential 1:1 neck-to-head ratio and thighs like sequoias, he’s “sweetly naive, simple, almost oafish … unfazed by the byzantine requirements of modern masculinity, largely because he doesn’t know or care that they exist”.Grazia agrees, issuing an appreciation of what it is calling the “Woke Jock”: “As unremittingly blokey as he’s gentle”, the Woke Jock is comfortable with vulnerability and happy to be out-earned.Speaking of out-earning, the original placid beefcake – and the reason, surely, the archetype has merited NYT appraisal – is Mr Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce.I refuse to recognise any under-50 male celebrities – my tiny blow against the patriarchy – so I had to cram the various Chrises, Kelces and Hemsworths to understand this phenomenon, but having done the (bro-appropriate) heavy lifting, I like what I see with Kelce.
Built like Oak Furnitureland’s XXL wardrobe aisle, seemingly light on ego despite excelling at whatever a “tight end” does in American football, and touchingly delighted when Swift uses polysyllabic words, Kelce seems comfortable in his own skin in a way that’s very winning.Others include Channing Tatum (lauded for cheerfully telling a story about getting educated on director Akira Kurosawa by a video store employee) and evolved man-mountain Jason Momoa, who has declared: “I embrace the feminine side and also feel like I am OK to be vulnerable.”This is something of a turnaround.You may recall 2024’s “hot rat summer” (I paraphrase) when slight, rodenty men became pin-ups; or our recent collective yearning for the rumpled, thoughtful rizz of “daddy” Pedro Pascal.And we’re still laughing at an entirely different 2025 archetype: the performative male.
If you were living under a rock all summer (enviable), let me explain: the much-satirised, tote bag-toting, ostentatiously David Foster Wallace-reading, hojicha-drinking, self-proclaimed feminist performative male is the anti-benign meathead.An over- rather than under-thinker, he’s self-aware to a fault, fashioning himself into what he believes women want – purely, the theory goes, to get into their pants.But apparently women want something quite different now.They’re concluding that Swift is right, as she is about many things: that cartoonish muscles and the ability to bench-press a grizzly bear can make for a partner who wears his masculinity lightly, with an identity that isn’t threatened by a successful, independent woman.That not having strong opinions means a restful absence of mansplaining.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
From Vietnam to Costa Rica, putting ice in beer is nothing new | Letters
In the tropics, ice in your beer is normal (Ice cubes in beer: is this popular pub order atrocious – or ingenious?, Pass notes, 2 September). In Vietnamese restaurants, servers wander around taking partially melted ice blocks out of your glass and replacing them with new ones. Of course, this is fine with low-cost options such as 333, Bia Saigon and even Tiger. The beer stays cold, and in any case it is drunk rather quickly with little chance of any meaningful dilution. Would I put ice in a pint of Pasteur Street Jasmine IPA or Heart of Darkness Dream Alone pale ale? I would not
Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for chocolate and malted buttercream cake | The sweet spot
Being a twin, I’ve always shared a birthday cake. Each year, I ask my sister what I should bake and the answer is almost never chocolate, despite it being one of my favourite cake flavours. However, this year, I’ll be changing that and making this lovely, fudgy two-layer chocolate cake filled and topped with a luscious, malty buttercream that I could eat by the spoonful. If you want to make it extra celebratory, swap the chocolate shavings for sprinkles.Prep 10 min Cook 1 hr Serves 12315g plain flour 150g caster sugar 120g light brown sugar 50g cocoa powder 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda ¼ tsp fine sea salt 3 large eggs 60ml neutral oil 225g plain yoghurt 115g unsalted butter, melted170ml hot brewed coffeeFor the malted buttercream250g unsalted butter 1 tsp vanilla bean paste 40ml whole milk 50g malted milk powder (eg, Horlicks)175g icing sugar¼ tsp fine sea salt Milk chocolate, shaved, to finishHeat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4 and grease and line two 20cm loose-bottomed cake tins
Losing the taste for vegan restaurants | Letters
Isobel Lewis’s article on vegan restaurants suggests two reasons that they may be closing: general problems in the hospitality industry and a shift in cultural values (The plant-based problem: why vegan restaurants are closing – or adding meat to the menu, 2 September). Surely, it’s missing the real reason? I am vegetarian, but I rarely eat in vegetarian or vegan restaurants because I rarely dine out alone.People usually want to dine with their partner, or their friends. Quite a few people are vegan, but far fewer couples are likely to both be vegan. Even fewer friend groups are all vegan
‘You can host with just a sandwich’: Hetty Lui McKinnon on becoming an imperfect host
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Want wines with attitude? Look to the Jura
If you’ve heard of savagnin (nope, not sauvignon), you may well be one of those in-the-know wine drinkers who have been ushered in the direction of the Jura, this grape’s iconic region, after being priced out of your favourite burgundy. And while there are some similarities between the two regions, a focus on chardonnay and pinot noir being the most obvious, there are plenty of other varieties for discerning wine nerds, and savagnin is definitely one of them.It’s a grape variety that’s been grown in France for 900 years, with high acidity and a late-ripening in the vineyard, and it’s known for the complex, age-worthy styles of wine it can create. It’s also grown just over the border in Switzerland, where it’s known as heida, as well as in Australia, where it was once mistaken for albariño. In the Jura, however, this high-acid grape produces nuanced still wines, and wines made in the vin jaune style, for which the wine is matured under yeast to give it a nutty, complex character akin to that of a biologically aged sherry such as fino
Back to school, work, reality: what to eat now summer is over
The shift from August to September can be brutal, so we’ve compiled the best dishes to avoid the dread of the work canteenSeptember arrives and, with it, the sudden, brutal gear shift from slow, lazy August, the mad rush to catch up on all the work you’ve been neglecting, to reconnect with the friends who’ve been away during summer. It’s back to the commute, back to work, back to school …We are also back at school – every Thursday for the past few years we’ve been taking pottery classes at college. From 10 in the morning until five in the evening we are covered in clay; our muddy fingers cannot check the phone every five minutes, and everyone at work knows not to contact us unless it’s an emergency – and even then, only if there’s something we can actually do about it.This also means that, for the first time since high school, we don’t have an obvious lunch solution. Our working life may lack many things, but as chefs our access to fresh, delicious food isn’t one of them
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Metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised | Letters