And what of the West Village Boys?
A few weeks ago on one of the first sweltering nights of the summer, I sat with an editor of mine in a bar’s backyard and talked about boys and girls. Our glasses sweated little beads in the heat as people on dates talked closely and smiled.
“What about the West Village boys?,” my editor asked me. It wasn’t a coy question. She was serious in wondering how the other half of Brock Colyar’s viral
’s magazine story lived. “What are they doing? Where do they go? What are they wearing?”This is a common game my editor and I play. We look at something happening in a gendered zeitgeist and try and figure out what the inverted trend looks like, e.g. what does a female pick-up artist look like? What’s the male version of a tradwife? Etc. I imagine that’s a common brand of dialectic conversation between writer and editor, in that writing about a countervailing force to the mainstream is sort of journalism and criticism 101 because it both unearths something unexpected and allows you to frame something within larger cultural forces.
I was a big fan of Brock’s reporting for this story, and thought the handwringing over their not addressing gentrification in a piece about the West Village was stupid. Would it have benefitted from some nuance about affordability and the ‘what does it all mean’ of it all? Sure. But Brock’s enviable skill is disarmament and getting people to open up to them. I don’t need to read a treatise on the real estate lobby in the middle of all this.
After talking with my editor, I decided to reread the piece and see if it contained any fella coordinates. There were, unsurprisingly, very few mentions of boys, though one quote stood out to me:
“The girls that we knew from college who moved to New York before us told us to go to the West Village, and we just kind of trusted them,” said one. Their boyfriends followed. “Our guy friends live nearby too. They all work in finance. They do what we do; we live parallel lives. They’re boys; we’re girls. We see them all the time. They do their dinner; we do ours.”
The West Village boys do exist, but really only in relief to and in pursuit of the women that live there. That checks out to me. I occupy a weird space where I’m basically a straight frat guy that also happens to be curious about and write a lot on masculinity and What It Means to be a Dude Today. But that desirable hetero guys would want to live where there’s a concentration of desirable hetero women isn’t old nor does it require some sort of deeper anthropological explanation.
I do think it’s interesting that there’s a sort of layered mimesis happening though. The West Village girls are trying to mimic what they see on social media while boys are sort of a shadow imitation, imitating what they think those girls will like or going where they think they’ll be. It’s like a scaled up model of how every conversation with a group of guys of a certain age planning to go out for the night goes. Some variation of “are there girls there?” gets asked sometime in the first few minutes.
Sure, you can boil it down to the pursuit of potentially getting laid — I honestly think that’s what that quote nods to and there’s even a very heavy nod towards sexual self-possession that didn’t get talked about enough in there — but I also think this sort of dynamic is fun in a dumb way. Boys don’t really merit this sort of trend report coverage because all they’re doing is reacting to those trends and how they impact their relationships with girls. It’s cute, it’s very schoolyard.
My editor and I soon moved on to another topic, both of us wishing there was something more complex at play. The light got lower and zebra-striped mosquitoes lanced bare legs. It was a difficult question with an easy answer. West Village boys go where the West Village girls are, just like they always have.