If you’ve spent time within a particular type of online space in recent years you might be familiar with the motif or trope of a ‘type of guy.’ A development, perhaps, from the longstanding cultural trope of the ‘nice guy’, today ‘types of guys’ have proliferated to become a great example of a digital folk taxonomy. In turn, this provides a useful insight into the way that masculinity is expressed and discussed online.
It’s hard to find pieces written specifically on the topic. However, last year Miles Klee and Alana Levinson argued in Mel Magazine that “2020 was a banner year for new kinds of guys.” In their piece, they suggest that categorising ‘guys’ has been a longstanding cultural obsession: “for as long as men have been guys,” they write, “we’ve categorized them by their passions and roles in life.” I’m not so sure this is true: it’s difficult to imagine the proliferation of ‘guys’ outside of digital spaces. The shared activity of developing the folk taxonomy that is central to the ‘type of guy’ phenomenon is, in fact, entwined with the logic of digital identity and ‘networked publics’ (boyd, 2010). ‘Guys’ always seem to emerge from collapsed contexts, through the disjunction between their online ‘performance’ and the imagined audiences (Marwick & boyd, 2010) in which they are received.
How does a guy become a ‘type of guy’?
In case you’re unfamiliar, here’s how it works: you become a ‘type of guy’ when the particular quality of your behaviour online (usually in some way peculiar or exaggerated) is such that it is received within networked publics as a new and general category. Or, to be more accurate, it forms a new sub-category within the superordinate ‘guy’ category.
Guys never quite fit in. They disrupt the mirage of the stable flow of information with their outlandish or misjudged online performances. Consequently, they must then be placed within this wider, collectively produced folk taxonomy.
Curvy Wife Guy
To understand how this plays out in practice, it’s best to look at an example. In this case, let’s look at Robbie Tripp – a man who is probably better known online as ‘Curvy Wife Guy.’ Tripp gained notoriety after an Instagram post in which he praised his wife for being “curvy and confident,” and celebrated her “thick thighs, big booty, cute little side roll.” The response, as you might expect, was overwhelmingly negative. This was, to many, a bizarre instance of self-congratulation, expressed through the public objectification of your partner.
The response was so extensive that numerous publications felt it worthy of coverage (including the Washington Post). Many excitedly collated the funniest responses (usually taken from Twitter – but this cross-platform conflict is a topic for another blog post), an activity which suggests old media is just as implicated in forming networked publics as new media (but again, that’s also a topic for another post).
At a basic level, the reaction to Tripp’s post was caused by context collapse. It was being seen by people Tripp hadn’t expected to see it. Or, to put it another way, his imagined audience suffered from a lack of imagination. It was too rigid; he expected us all to simply get what he was saying, to smile warmly in appreciation at this very public display of affection. (For what it’s worth, his wife appreciated the post, and there are also many comments on the original post that thank him for his candour).
This might seem a lot like social surveillance (Marwick, 2012) at work, as if the digital crowd is ‘correcting’ Tripp’s behaviour through its collective response. But this ignores the comedic nature of most of the responses. Moreover, while it would seem that Tripp’s Instagram post failed in some way – that he’d simply just got it wrong and misread social etiquette – the extent of the response, such that it even earned him his own absurd moniker, would indicate that something succeeded. Something resonated with the audience. It was as if Tripp had expressed something through his misjudgment that demanded discussion and calibration – something needed to be integrated into the folk taxonomy of guys.
The comedy of excess guyness
This something, I think, is what I’d call his guyness. And this guyness, moreover, is crucial to understanding the comic nature of the response to him – and indeed, to the wider ‘type of guy’ phenomenon. In the case of Tripp and other types of guys, it’s worth considering that they’ve not simply failed in their performance of masculinity (ie. as husband), but that they’ve performed it too well – they were too decipherable; their masculinity all too visible.
This aspect of comedy can be elucidated by Alenka Zupančič. Zupančič argues comedy is built not on the reduction of the infinite to the finite, but instead on a “leak in human finitude” (Zupančič, 2008, p.52). That might sound confusing (and not particularly funny), but the way to understand it is that comedy isn’t so much about failure (in which ideals are ‘brought down to earth’), but rather about what persists in spite of finitude. So, what persists as far as ‘types of guys’ are concerned is their ‘guyness’: They can’t help but be guys. They are trapped by it, performing a role that both precedes and extends beyond them.
So, it is not so much that we are dealing with authentic (if problematic) expressions of masculinity, but instead that, when placed in the domain of networked publics where content is persistent and can circulate almost freely (boyd, 2010) – the thing that seems essential (masculinity) emerges as something inauthentic. It is produced through a process of coded performance, decoded reception, and, eventually, taxonomisation.
Networked interpretive communities
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler explains the concept of gender performativity by highlighting how it is iterative and citational (Butler, 1990). To a certain extent this is what we are seeing here: ‘guyness’ emerges through the iteration of digital speech acts. But maybe not so much citation – more interpretation. Guys are interpreted as a ‘type of guy’ by guy-literate networked publics – or, to be more specific (and steal from Stanley Fish (1980)) – networked interpretive communities.
But where does this need to interpret and taxonomise come from exactly? Yes, it comes from the guys themselves, many of whom are impossible to miss. But does it not also come from the form of sociality this phenomenon offers? The production of the ‘type of guy’ folk taxonomy is an example of participation through recognition – learning social codes and patterns of meaning to join a specific linguistic community.
Moreover, the existence of this folk taxonomy of ‘guys’ and the humour with which networked interpretive communities discuss it might be viewed as symptomatic of an ironised attitude to both masculinity and the platforms that enable the often ludicrous ways in which it is expressed. It’s as if to say: Masculinity might be a performance, but guys are very real. Social media keeps producing them. If that’s the case, social media will remain one of the best places to explore and trace changing attitudes to and expressions of gender.
References
boyd, d. (2010). “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 39-58. New York, NY: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge.
Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text In This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Boston, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Kircher, M. (2021). Twitter Is Rolling Its Eyes Over News Posts About This Guy’s ‘Curvy’ Wife. Retrieved 8 December 2021, from https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/08/man-dragged-for-instagram-post-about-loving-curvy-wife.html
Klee, M., & Levinson, A. (2021). 2020 Was a Banner Year for New Kinds of Guys. Retrieved 7 December 2021, from https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/best-new-guys-2020
Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133.
Marwick, Alice E. (2012). “The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life.” Surveillance & Society 9(4):378-393 (https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/public-domain-social-surveillance-everyday-life/docview/1314689547/se-2)
Ohlheiser, A. (2021, October 26). Analysis | how a man’s viral Instagram ode to his ‘curvy’ wife went from ‘required reading’ to mocking meme. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 8, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08/06/how-a-mans-viral-instagram-ode-to-his-curvy-wife-went-from-required-reading-to-mocking-meme/.
Zupančič, A. (2008). The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.