By sTACY LEE KONG

Like just about every millennial woman I know, I’ve been watching—and loving—Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romantic comedy series starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. The premise is intriguing: the agnostic host of a sex and relationships podcast (Bell) and a rabbi who just broke up with his long-time girlfriend (Brody) meet at an L.A. dinner party, where flirting naturally ensues. But despite really, really liking one another, their future is uncertain, what with him being a religious leader and her being, uh, the wrong religion. It’s very funny, the conflict is relatively low-stakes (will they end up together? Obviously) and the actors’ chemistry is also off-the-charts good, as is their comedic timing. But if you were to ask me the one thing that pushed this thing to the top of Netflix’s viewing stats (according to Variety, it occupied the number two spot on the Netflix Top 10 English language TV chart within days of dropping on the platform with 10.3 million views, and hit number one with 15.9 million views after just a week), I’d have to give credit to Brody. Or rather, to Brody’s character, Noah, who fulfills a very specific fantasy: the hot, emotionally intelligent/available man who doesn’t just tolerate, but actually likes, a woman who is objectively ‘a lot.’

Or, I guess to series creator Erin Foster, who wrote him that way.

Foster’s Noah is the (straight, cis) woman’s counterpoint to the more stereotypical examples of straight men writing women, which it would be safe to classify as uh… breast forward. When women write men, on the other hand, their physical attributes are often second to the way they make their love interests feel: seen, heard, appreciated, cared for. That’s not to say their appearance doesn’t matter at all; mainstream leading men still adhere to the constraints of conventional masculine attractiveness, so they’re usually tall, symmetrical and white. And it’s not like sex doesn’t sell for straight women, otherwise the R-rated Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell vehicle Anyone But You wouldn’t have become a box-office hit, with global ticket sales surpassing $100 million earlier this year. But there is absolutely a huge subset of romance storytelling that essentially equates male desirability with psychological safety, which I think is fascinating. 

And I’m about to make a logical leap, but stay with me: it was particularly interesting to see all of the discourse centred on Noah’s appeal on the very same timeline that I’ve been seeing people—most of them racialized, and specifically Black, women—talk about feeling disappointed and let down by U.K. podcasters James Duncan and Fuhad Dawodu of ShxtsnGigs and (to a lesser extent) Yung Filly of The Chunkz and Filly Show. Clearly, there’s a connection between the type of masculinity we want to see and have in our lives, and our other pop culture consumption habits, including who we become fans of. (Or at least, who we’ll allow to keep their mics when we finally dismantle the podcast bro industrial complex.)

In Nobody Wants This, Noah’s desirability is tied to a modern understanding of masculinity

Not all romance treats psychological safety as a desirable trait, of course. BookTok sometimes gives excellent recommendations (Anything by Talia Hibbert? Yes.) and sometimes introduces you to deeply problematic books that make you wonder about people’s reading comprehension/politics. (I’ll pass on the Orientalist sheikh fantasies and stories that romanticize coercion and intimate partner violence, thanks.) But many of the most popular romcoms and romance novels do centre around stories of independent women with strong personalities whose ideal partners don’t want to change them, and in fact, like them more for being quirky, or difficult, or bossy, or insert-the-‘negative’-trait-of-your-choice-here. That is certainly the case for Nobody Wants This. First of all, these people are in their 30s, with established careers and ways they have become set in, which already feels like a bit of fan service for a millennial audience. But more to the point, Bell’s Joanne is hilariously, relatable-y, sometimes annoyingly, imperfect; she’s loud, and has a kind of weird job, and overshares, and gets jealous, and is sometimes awkward.  

There’s a scene from the show that I’ve seen shared over and over that exemplifies this. The context: Noah has been trying to get Joanne to tell him something real about herself, because he doesn’t want their relationship to just be fun—he wants to forge a genuine connection. So, he asks her what her biggest fear is. Initially, she brushes him off, joking that the thing she’s most scared of is a bad face-lift. But eventually, she tells him the truth: “My mom is really emotional and it always pushed my dad away, and I’m not saying that’s what made him gay but it certainly didn’t keep him straight. And I always tried really hard not to be like that. And yes, sometimes I do weird shit and I can be impulsive and obsessive and I did Google your ex-girlfriend and I’m really sorry that you had to see that,” she says, rambling through her discomfort. “My biggest fear is a bad face-lift, but I think I’m realizing an even bigger fear is this: that I will become emotionally dependent on a guy who will one day realize that I’m too much and break my heart.”

Noah’s response—he hugs her, and when she asks if that was the most unattractive thing he’s ever seen, replies, “No, the most attractive. I want this. I want all of this”—is so compelling for the show’s mostly female audience not just because it’s kind or romantic, but because our patriarchal social system has told us for centuries that we are always running the risk of being too loud, too demanding, too vulnerable, too dramatic, too something. Worse, while this may be off-putting to other women, it’s positioned as intolerable to men, which means for many women, it’s very easy to internalize the idea that being imperfect and, you know, human jeopardizes our chances of finding romantic partnership. As Helen Coffey explained in The Independent last week, “For all that we’ve made great strides in ‘leaning in,’ ‘finding our voice,’ ‘stepping into our sovereignty’ and all of that, women’s internal suspicion that we are simply ‘too much’ for anyone to cope with—that, really, we need to rein in every part of ourselves to be deemed palatable and loveable—is deeply ingrained… [Which is why] Noah’s response to Joanne’s revelation is the Platonic ideal of what a man should do when a woman divulges a usually kept back part of herself in all its rawness.”

It is the opposite of toxic masculinity; instead of trying to exert control, or dictate how she should behave to be the most palatable, Noah has a deep well of patience, care, admiration and yes, desire for her, just as she is. Furthermore, as a character, he never exhibits hostility, sexual entitlement or discomfort talking about her feelings, or his own. This would be compelling at any time, I think, but it’s really landing in this specific social, cultural and political moment. After all, we are seeing in great detail how women are uniquely (and sometimes disproportionately) impacted in times of conflict. And specifically in the west, the right to bodily autonomy is steadily being eroded, MRAs and other anti-feminist ideologies are flourishing online and in our own homes, and the internet is full of stories about men who are dishonest, selfish and downright cruel. Of course a man who’s genuinely kind is the fantasy.

(Of course, this is not to say the movie is perfect; its portrayal of Jewish women definitely leans on problematic stereotypes that Foster, who converted to Judaism herself, doesn’t apply to Jewish men, which has brought up some interesting conversations about religion, conversion and belonging.)

These podcasters (seemed to) exhibit a similar type of masculinity

Obviously, the ShxtsnGigs guys and Filly are actual humans and not rom-com characters, so it’s not like anyone was expecting Noah’s level of evolved behaviour from them. Still, to their largely female audience, their (seemingly) softer version of masculinity has obviously been part of their appeal. As with all podcast bros, my primary interaction with their content has happened via short clips shared on TikTok, and I can even tell you exactly which one made me follow Duncan and Dawodu: a super viral snippet of an episode where Duncan feels jealous that Dawodu has been hanging out with one of their colleagues more than him. The clip is hilarious mostly because of their banter, and Duncan’s dramatics—“Do you miss me when I’m not around?????” still makes me laugh—but there was also something super nice about seeing two young Black men talk about their feelings, demonstrate affection for one another and be vulnerable in that way. Meanwhile, in Filly’s case, it was his genuine friendship with YouTuber Nella Rose that made me like him more. This is very, very parasocial of me, but I think I subconsciously perceived those qualities as indicators these men didn’t subscribe to toxic masculinity, making them mostly unproblematic and ‘safe’ to listen to.

 But then. Last month, Duncan and Dawodu went viral for all the wrong reasons when they appeared on Andrew Schulz's podcast, Flagrant, during a stop on their U.S. podcast tour back in July. As Refinery29’s Susan Akyeampong explained last month, Schulz, a controversial comedian whose work has increasingly skewed alt-right, “twisted the ‘Black girlfriend effect’ (a trending social media term used positively to highlight how Black women’s influence improves their partners' appearance and lifestyle) to joke that white men with Black female partners only improve their appearance under duress and physical violence. Schulz also made other racist remarks during the episode, including comments about slavery, disparaging opinions about Nigerian people, and insinuating that James and Fuhad’s claims of being attracted to women of all races were a cover for their unspoken preference for white women, which Schulz claimed they were too embarrassed to admit.” It wasn’t just that he said those things in their presence, of course—it was that the duo laughed along, and didn’t even try to defend Black women.

As Akyeampong went on to say, “ShxtsNGigs seemed to offer a positive alternative that rejected hyper-masculine narratives in favor of a more supportive and emotionally open dynamic. It makes their betrayal of trust all the more painful for their audience, who had seen them as an exception to the toxicity that pervades much of the podcasting space.”

Meanwhile, this week, Filly—whose real name is Andres Felipe Valencia Barrientos—was charged with rape in Australia, where he has been touring to support his new music. Obviously being funny on the internet does not preclude someone from being predatory, and in fact, rumours about his behaviour toward women, especially much younger women, have been swirling for years now. But even if I wasn’t actually surprised to hear that he’d allegedly leveraged his fame, money and power to abuse women, I was still dismayed to hear about it.

These are obviously very different situations, and both are different from the model of masculinity we saw in Nobody Wants This, but I think there is a common thread: the idea of ease. Noah’s appeal in the show could perhaps be distilled to his self-actualization; he doesn’t need someone to explain that actually, women are people, nor does he feel threatened by this fact; he already gets it, and behaves accordingly. Similarly, Duncan, Dawodu and Barrientos are imperfect humans, sure, but their appeal was similar: they seemed to have already unlearned sexism, which made their corners of the internet safer for everyone. 

So, not to upend everything I’ve written so far, but what if the actual fantasy of the show, and the parasocial appeal of ShxtsNGigs and The Chunkz and Filly Show, isn’t the idea that there are men who are fully formed human beings with emotional intelligence and the capacity for kindness? (Which, of course there are. I know a ton of them!) What if the fantasy is actually the idea that this type of behaviour can happen without any perceivable effort? Duncan, Dawodu and Barrientos vs. Brody’s Noah is an imperfect comparison, of course, and it’s definitely upsetting to think about how real people appear to fit the criteria for being good and then let us down so frequently, but thinking about these different stories in relation to one another crystallized for me how attractive it is to believe you can find people who have already done their ‘unlearning,’ when in fact, this doesn’t happen without effort—nor does it happen just once.

And Did You Hear About…

This week’s political drama in the Snoopy fan community. 

The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka on journalist Taylor Lorenz’s pivot to Substack—and what this says about the current state of media. 

Culture critic Louis Staples on pop culture’s new (“refreshingly, perfectly cynical”) take on the love triangle.

A$AP Rocky’s W mag profile, or more accurately, the photos that accompany Rocky’s cover profile, because they were shot by Rihanna.

Toronto Star reporter Richie Assaly’s thoughtful profile of songwriter and poet Mustafa.

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