Question: Is it really embarrassing to have a boyfriend?
But what about the Boy-Girlfriend and the Girl-Boyfriend?
According to Vogue, having a boyfriend is now embarrassing. Over the past few weeks since this revelation, users on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have swarmed to support, challenge and argue this idea. Men are calling it ‘feminist propaganda’ and women are calling it ‘a liberation from expectation.’ However, there is a question that another emerging social trend asks: What about the Girl-Boyfriend or the Boy-Girlfriend?
A pair of confusing but provocative titles, the Girl-Boyfriend and the Boy-Girlfriend covers a subversion in traditional relationship gender roles in both straight and queer relationships. To understand these terms, and to relate them to Vogue’s statement it is important to understand the defining differences between them.
The Boy-Girlfriend refers primarily to female identifying partners who take on traditionally male roles in a relationship and may exhibit more masculine traits in their overall personal sense of style and expression. An example of this would be the rapper 070 Shake who has been labelled a ‘lesbian boyfriend’ by her girlfriend Lily Rose Depp. Such a label doesn’t just remove the traditional view of what a partner can be called, but its contradiction in terms of its name allows for a fluid orientation and gender expression of said partner. A notable precursor for this in history can be seen with lesbian women masquerading as men to have their relationships with other women deemed acceptable in the public eye with figures such as Anne Lister and in the book The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.
Equally, this isn’t absent from straight relationships with recent media portraying characters like MJ in the recent Spiderman movies as someone who could potentially fit under the Girl-Boyfriend umbrella and the 2000s fashion and self-expression of the ‘Tomboy.’ Just as the Boy-Girlfriend introduces the traditional masculine in the woman, the Girl-Boyfriend brings the typically feminine traits to the masculine. Given the growing view that some boyfriends don’t show affection, attention and commitment as much as would be desired, the concept of a Girl-Boyfriend offers the idea of a man who is a lot more in tune with his emotions, more open and gentler in his approach.
It is no secret that male content creators such as Edd Banu (@edd_banu on Instagram) are quite popular with women due to their use of makeup to enhance their features and heighten their attractiveness. Men subverting gender roles in makeup and fashion is nothing new, with roots firmly in the seventies and eighties, however it is finding a resurgence and potentially acted as a precursor to the Girl-Boyfriend. Whilst it still lingered in the background it was not as prominent as the peak of hyper and toxic masculinity promoting negative behaviour in recent years. This started to rise in late 2019 and early 2020 with the word simp used as a derogatory term to shame men for any positive or helpful actions towards the opposite sex and a shared belief by many women that straight men ‘don’t even like women.’ This could be a contributing factor to the male loneliness epidemic.
However, despite the positives of this deconstruction of typical relationship roles, there are some critics who pose the counterargument of whether these terms reinforce gender stereotypes by simply flipping them instead of dismantling them, taking away a woman’s right to be feminine or a man’s right to be masculine. There is a worry it reinforces a negative notion that men cannot be men and women cannot be women so that they can be seen as progressive.
Perhaps Vogue’s suggestion that having a boyfriend is embarrassing is not inherently about rejecting men, but instead about rejecting the outdated concept of a boyfriend and what a boyfriend has grown to represent. There is no end to the number of songs, storylines in media and social media posts based on the theme of men causing hurt and heartbreak. Look at Sabrina Carpenter’s music for example or Taylor Swift’s previous albums. In a world where Boy-Girlfriends and Girl-Boyfriends are redefining intimacy, the ‘traditional’ image of a boyfriend being dominant, or performatively masculine suddenly just feels archaic.
For Gen Z, declaring that having a boyfriend is embarrassing isn’t anti-romance, it’s anti-complacency. It’s a rejection of the asymmetrical, gendered dynamics that have long defined straight relationships and ostracised same sex ones. The Boy-Girlfriend and the Girl-Boyfriend emerges as a counter-narrative. It is proof that partnership can exist without hierarchy, without performance, and without embarrassment and there is an argument to say that these are preferred.
It takes away rules, imbalanced dynamics and allows for less judgement, less anxiety and a lot more experimentation. It is a way to hold space for those who are tender and those who are strong. Ultimately, the Boy-Girlfriend and Girl-Boyfriend aren’t opposites, they are complementary examples of how love, care, and power circulate in modern relationships. They reflect a generation’s desire to ‘de-gender intimacy while still using the playful language of gender to explore identity and connection.
So yes, perhaps in a world of post-irony humour and a well needed change in what defines a real relationship, the play on words protest of the Boy-Girlfriend and the Girl-Boyfriend is a much-needed cultural stepping stone to both equality and authenticity in human connection.
