When Glen Powell went viral for sharing a “cannibal dating” story on a podcast last year — a tale about his sister’s friend narrowly escaping a man who used lotion to tenderize her skin — the internet first swooned over his storytelling charm. Only later did fans point out the obvious. Powell had been eagerly retelling a scene from the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs for years, never pausing to verify its truth. “I’m questioning my whole life now,” he confessed sheepishly on social media after realizing he’d been duped.
Here was Hollywood’s newest golden boy. Perfectly sculpted and about as deep as a puddle. Instead of cringing at his gullibility, audiences applauded. His beauty, his blunders, his blissful lack of neurons all became part of the appeal. In today’s culture, that isn’t a flaw. It’s a defining feature. (RELATED: Jon Hamm and the Death of TV Masculinity)
There was a time when men and women understood what actually made each other desirable. Men knew that strength paired with intelligence earned respect. Women knew that competence, when combined with character, created lasting attraction. Both sexes knew that charm might open the door, but it couldn’t keep you inside. What lasted was built on depth, decency, and the strength to weather life’s storms with steadiness.
Today, that wisdom has been discarded. In its place stands the celebration of the male bimbo, the so-called “himbo.” A muscular yet clueless archetype that media and platforms now parade as the pinnacle of male desirability. Outlets gush over men who stumble through cultural references, praising their “sweet naivety” and “oafish charm.” What looks playful on the surface is, in truth, the systematic infantilization of men.
The himbo is the embodiment of deliberate stupidity marketed as virtue.
The himbo is the embodiment of deliberate stupidity marketed as virtue. Without wishing to sound like pearl-clutching traditionalists, the rise of the himbo reflects something darker than campy entertainment. It signals a cultural lowering of the bar and a collective delusion about what truly sustains attraction. (RELATED: Real Men Not Welcome at the Book Store)
The broader culture has been primed for his arrival. Feminist dogma insisted that women “don’t need men,” yet popular media still sells the fantasy of male physiques as accessories to female validation. The result is a watered-down man, useful as eye candy but useless as a partner. Add to this the constant cultural messaging that ambition in men is oppressive, decisiveness domineering, and authority abusive, and the result is the ornamental male. A docile head of dough who listens but never leads.(RELATED: Feminism’s Secret Weapon: Weak Men)
What makes the himbo dangerous is not his foolishness but the fact that his foolishness is held up as aspirational. Women are encouraged to find his ignorance endearing rather than pathetic, while men are conditioned to believe that passivity is genuine. It’s a cultural sleight of hand that trades strength for softness and calls the exchange progress. (RELATED: How Contemporary Feminism Endangers Women)
The deeper danger lies in the platforms that amplify it. Social media manufactures tastes, bending perception until illusion feels like instinct. Algorithms churn out viral edits, memes, and influencer clips until a curated fantasy masquerades as natural desire. With enough repetition, frailty becomes fashionable and cowardice becomes chic. Evolution never pushed women en masse toward men who were brain-dead. Such choices would have been suicidal in any serious society. Virality does what biology never would, reshaping desires through sheer saturation. The result is a mass hallucination. (RELATED: ’90s Heroin Chic Is Back … For Boys)
At least when old Hollywood sold Paul Newman or Sean Connery, the product came with real charisma and unmistakable cool. These men weren’t just handsome faces. They looked the part, could hold a conversation, and seemed just as capable of changing a tire as delivering a cutting line on screen. They didn’t have to be explained or rebranded into relevance. The cultural machinery of the mid-20th century might have been manipulative, but it still understood that women gravitated toward confidence, decisiveness, and presence. And it rewarded men who embodied those traits.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the archetype lived on in figures like Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, and Harrison Ford. Even into the 1990s and early 2000s, mainstream culture was still shaped by leading men like Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, and Mel Gibson. Like the leading men of previous decades, their appeal rested on competence and command, not on irony or carefully staged softness. Now, the same machinery manufactures idols who might look nice but have the substance of a cardboard cutout and the neural firepower of a Roomba. (RELATED: Disney’s Lost Boys)
This inversion of natural attraction cheats everyone. Women who buy into it trade the chance of a lasting partnership for shallow amusement. They settle for men who can’t challenge them, guide them, or grow with them. They inherit big biceps but zero backbone. Men who embrace the archetype abandon responsibility and linger in adolescence, propped up by good lighting. They build bodies but not minds. The result is a generation performing masculinity rather than living it, sculpted for display but little more. (RELATED: Supermen Not Wanted in Leftist Bizarro World)
The algorithm accelerates the damage. Social platforms reward indulgent selfies over insight. Men quickly learn that a gym photo earns more approval than an articulate thought, so they adapt. An entire generation drifts into darkness, confusing attention for affection. Women lose strong, competent men who can build and protect. Men lose the chance to grow into their full potential. And society loses the stability that comes from marriages and families anchored in depth and genuine desire. The himbo is modern feminism’s safe fantasy: a man strong enough to carry groceries, but weak enough to never take charge. That may satisfy an ideology, but it doesn’t satisfy human longing.
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