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Cruise around TikTok these days and you're bound to stumble on one: A young woman, standing next to a presumed beau, pointing out their “feminine, vintage-Levi’s-wearing, tote-bag-carrying, mustached little boyfriend.” If you haven't seen one of those, maybe it's the person saying “if my friends think you're a little bit fruity” then you're their type. Keep scrolling and you'll see commenters saying they're “manifesting my little gay boyfriend.” Earlier this month, a piece in Dazed explained the trend thus: “Fruity boys” are “the new soft boys.”
The slang term, the latest in a long line of similar monikers going back to “metrosexual,” aims to identify a new archetype: a man who is usually straight who possesses a set of nebulously feminine or queerish qualities, or a “zesty aura.” In that Dazed piece, writer Halima Jibril reported that these guys are suddenly catnip on the meat market, enumerating the social and political reasons why women are drawn to them. Namely, they are thought to be softer and safer than their macho counterparts.
Hot on the heels of the summer’s “rodent men” trend (think: Challengers’ Josh O’Connor, The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White), the concept feels like an attempt at rejecting gender norms while also reinforcing them—while also using a term often seen as pejorative. But all of this celebration of men who are yearning to have a Brat Summer or experiment with outré pant widths, though, exposes something deeper in the gender discourse: the troubling ways dating apps have reduced everyone involved to archetypes.
Dating apps like Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder reduce and sort people into boxes to check. They then train users to value a set of important but superficial qualities—mostly physical features, certain interests, and jobs. An algorithm then repeatedly serves users matches that align with those qualities. In that way, apps resemble “consumer platforms where people are the products that you’re shopping for,” says Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor at Arizona State University who studies dating and technology. “It’s like shopping for purses. Are you more Chanel? Are you more Marc Jacobs?” This process, she says, reifies archetypes by packaging people as brands.
Brands are coherent; people are not. And the logic of marketing dictates that dating apps commodify people into legible archetypes for an easy sale. Per Sharabi, they “reduce a complex person to just a 2D profile with a couple of specific qualities that together might not give you a true sense of who they actually are and who you're going to be meeting.”
So when someone goes on a dating app swiping until they find a match akin to the boyfriends being paraded on TikTok, they often end up disappointed because that person’s offline personality doesn’t perfectly match their online archetype. Sharabi says people who feel alienated by these mainstream dating apps—especially those of marginalized gender and sexual identities—tend to switch niche apps like Her, Butterly, and Feeld. As Jason Parham wrote in WIRED last year, Gen Z is fleeing apps as dating has become “flattened through machined exchanges.” Seeking someone who just happens to align with a trending topic or meme only flattens them further.
Apps “create this expectation that you check these boxes and have a certain type of person sort of delivered to you,” says Sharabi, citing the viral “Man in Finance” TikTok as an example. Applying dating-app heuristics to people in this way can also be objectifying, not to mention potentially offensive to both the so-called “fruity” men and the people they’re being likened to.
Sharabi suspects that prospective daters are seeking out kind, decent men over misogynistic jerks who aren’t held accountable for their bad behavior. But she’s wary of classifying these qualities as “fruity,” noting that some queer people find the term offensive. She also recognizes that “this specific archetype is incredibly complex.”
In addition to the passive homophobia of ostensibly straight women seeking out “fruity” or “gay” boyfriends, on queer dating apps like Grindr, for example, internalized homophobia and the rejection of male femininity mean softer men face overt discrimination. So even if this trend is ultimately about finding feminine traits desirable in ways they weren’t previously, the effect is still a reinforcing of stereotypes and gender norms.
In a recent essay for The Point, Derek Guy writes about how the persistent fear of being perceived as gay or effeminate still spooks straight men from openly expressing their interest in fashion. “The prevailing attitude,” writes Guy, “is that ‘real men’ are too grounded, serious, and rational to concern themselves with such trivialities.” He quotes the book Cultures of Masculinity by the sociologist Tim Edwards, who wrote that fashionable men “are perceived not only as potentially gay or sexually ambiguous but as somehow not fitting in.”
That’s why the “fruity boy” discourse is chiefly preoccupied with recoding aesthetic signifiers instead of challenging the persistent, ancient bias against feminine men: It’s a branding exercise used to legitimize a once-deviant set of traits as acceptably masculine, so the next time you tap open Tinder and see a guy in a dangly earring, he will now be a legible archetype.
As queer culture leaps closer to the mainstream, the distinctions between gay men’s and straight men’s “auras” and style are blurry. The internet has anointed stars like Josh O’Connor, Harry Styles, and Timothée Chalamet as prototypes of this latest trend for having played queer characters and for wearing shirts with embroidered flowers. They represent the paragon of evolved masculinity that prizes emotional acuity over stoic bravado and rejects the cartoonish manliness embodied by far-right personalities like Bronze Age Pervert.
Today, straight guys donning dangly pearl earrings, painted nails, and skirts embody “the new masculinity” and are perceived to be more sensitive and even ethical than those ripped and rugged men wearing a henley. So why are Levi’s now being coded as “fruity”? Arbitrarily recoding gender-neutral styles as such reflects the discursive ouroboros that at once aims to expand visions of modern masculinity that include “feminine” or queer-coded traits, while paradoxically penalizing men who exhibit them in the wrong way. This ultimately works to reinforce the norm through gender essentialism that upholds a social hierarchy that brands effeminate or ambiguous men as second class citizens.
This latest trend aims to bridge the disorienting chasm between a dyspeptic online discourse and offline dating experience, magnified by dating apps that compress people into archetypes. It provides a framework that superficially elevates feminine men’s social status without confronting the ways they’re subtly othered in the dating market, like championing body positivity while ignoring the Ozempic surge. The concept of a “fruity boy” is a projection—not a person. It allows people to square their progressive politics while swiping left on guys with auras too zesty, to mask ick with feigned desire.
As far as TikTok is concerned, he’s just a Bode boy with a pearl earring.
