By Giorgia Butler, Chief Strategy Officer, Innocean
Conversations around harmful and outdated portrayals of masculinity in our industry continue to gain momentum, and it’s getting harder for brands to ignore. Now is the time to take meaningful action.
We first started dissecting this over 18 months ago when we embarked on a study with the 100% Project, and shared key findings at Mumbrella 360 earlier this year, in a session we called “The Evolution of Masculinity: Breaking Out of Archetypes – and How Marketing Can Lead the Way.”
As part of the research, we asked men to choose one of the three masculine archetypes most commonly presented to them in the media: Hero, Provider, or Hedonist.
The most interesting insight? How much they hated the question. Not only were the options too narrow, they resented having to choose just one.
But if you think three archetypes are limiting, consider that a century ago, Freud gave women just two: Madonna or Whore.
Women rejected that binary — and media, marketing, and culture have since evolved with them.
It’s time men did the same.
Advertising to the rescue?
Advertising has never just mirrored social change — it’s driven it.
From L’Oréal’s “Because I’m worth it” in the 1970s to Dove’s “Real Beauty” and Always’ “#LikeAGirl,” brands have helped reframe what it means to be female in the modern world.
These weren’t just feel-good ideas—they worked. Commercially. Culturally. Globally.
In Australia, campaigns like Libra’s “Blood Normal” and Mecca’s “Beauty is a Blank Canvas” also tackled taboos and redefined beauty.
The result? For many young women today, empowerment isn’t a concept they aspire to—it’s the water they swim in.
Now, it’s time for brands to turn empowerment messaging toward men – especially young men and boys.
Because while we keep asking boys and young men to support equality, smash the patriarchy and check their privilege — many are quietly wondering: “What about us?”
Meanwhile, in their own lived experience, young women are running rings around them everywhere they turn.
● In pop culture, women dominate the charts; in 2024 Taylor Swift was Spotify’s most-streamed global artist for the second consecutive year, while Sabrina Carpenter topped the Billboard Global 200, just beating Billie Eilish
● At the the box office where 54% of 2024’s top 100 grossing films featured a female protagonist, marking a significant increase from 30% in 2023
● And social media where 70% of influencers are women
In schools, they’re outperforming boys in both retention and qualifications, trumping boys in every subject but maths. And yet boys are told they must do more to level the playing field — in a world where they often feel they’re already behind.
It’s no wonder young men are confused about what ‘Masculinity’ means now.
They’re expected to champion systems they didn’t design, behave better than generations before them, and suppress their uncertainty about their own role in society.
They’re being told that masculinity itself is toxic, that more and more bad men are behaving badly and being called out for it, while even the ‘good’ guys can fall from grace in a tweet. Any complaining from men is akin to playing the world’s tiniest violin.
It’s time to evolve our views on what manhood and masculinity can look like for boys.
But masculinity won’t evolve without the same nuance, flexibility and fluid identity-building women have been granted. Men are humans first—men second.
Fluidity is central to identity exploration.
Women did not gain empowerment by agreeing femininity meant something universal.
It was only when they stopped asking what kind of female archetype they would be (housewife or harlot), and started asking themselves what kind of human they wanted to be. Then brands and audiences gave them further permission to change their minds as many times as they wanted, for any reason or no reason, and then they made it pop culture.
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour didn’t just show there are a million ways to be a woman—it proved that embracing those evolutions is powerful. Her explorations were far from career limiting: the tour made a metric shit-tonne of money. In fact, the “Eras Tour” was the first in history to gross over $1 billion, and ultimately amassed more than $2 billion across 149 shows on five continents. Investopedia
But this is where it gets tricky for men.
The ability to flow, bend, reappraise and evolve identity has become decidedly female-coded in pop culture (see Madonna, Miley Cyrus, Kylie Minogue).
While identity fluidity has become a female-coded superpower, the same process of self-reinvention for men somehow got coded ‘queer’ or ‘other’.
One of the earliest mainstream male artists to fluidly shift gender presentation, sexuality, and persona was David Bowie, evolving from Ziggy Stardust to The Thin White Duke, to his later electronic and Neoclassicist eras and exploring art, film, music and fashion as forms of self-exploration and expression.
Bowie set the blueprint for male reinvention: glam, glitter, ambiguity, art. He defied masculine norms and became a queer icon—despite living much of his life as a straight man.
Today, men like Harry Styles and Harry Garside walk similar paths, blurring gender lines and confronting stereotypes—even as straight men. But because these expressions are still coded as queer or feminine, many boys don’t see them as options for them.
Let me make this very clear: this isn’t about policing gender, but about making room for male exploration that isn’t boxed.
So here’s the TL:DR:
The concept of “containing multitudes” feels authentic to women, but it wasn’t always the case. Time and hard graft have empowered women to recognize that they are not confined to a single archetype, or even 3. And that they never have to stay still.
Brands – listen up.
The media plays a crucial role in shaping cultural perceptions, and we must begin portraying men as multidimensional, changeable and human. This shift would provide men with new tools to break free from limiting archetypes and explore their true selves.
Let’s stop portraying modern men as doofus Dad’s, sporting heroes and hedonistic men of mystery.
So what can marketers do?
Find your #likeagirl, #sharetheload or #realbeauty message for MEN and BOYS.
Show them that you see the confusion and can help them navigate.
Stop tokenistically representing men, and start talking to them outside of men-only spaces. Show them they can be themselves without judgement, while they figure it out. Stop comparing men to women, and allow them to compare themselves to each other.
Move away from a false dichotomy of good guy / bad guy, and embrace the multitudes within a group, a cohort, an individual,
Move the conversation away from gender and into selfhood.
It’s heartening to see this discussion gaining traction more broadly, with initiatives like Channel 4’s “Mirror on Masculinities” piece highlighting how brands are often missing the mark when it comes to modern masculinity.
What’s even better is that we’re talking to more and more local brands who totally get it. They agree we need to move past those narrow, old-fashioned archetypes that do a disservice to today’s men and boys, and to all of us.
Because the actual job men need to do is not to figure out what masculinity is. Or which archetype they most align with.
It’s to figure out who they are as humans —whole, imperfect, real, ever-changing. Just like Taylor Swift. Just like David Bowie.
Top image: Giorgia Butler