Why Are We Calling the Men in Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue 'Boys'?

“Let’s Hear It for the Boys!” proclaims the cover of Vanity Fair’s 2026 Hollywood Issue, starring a select group of so-called “boys” with an average age of around 33.

The headline is enough to make any woman bristle. Most of the cohort—Jonathan Bailey, Austin Butler, Glen Powell, Michael B. Jordan, Callum Turner, Lakeith Stanfield and Jeremy Allen White—are in their mid to late 30s. Paul Mescal and Harris Dickinson are bringing down the average at age 29. Andrew Garfield and Riz Ahmed are, by all traditional definitions, not boys at age 42.

It’s hard to imagine a group of women in a similar age range would be dubbed “girls,” nor would it be particularly flattering if they were. In some ways, Vanity Fair nailed it. In their 30s, these actors are just entering their prime in an industry that awards most of its Best Actor Oscars to men aged 33 and up while women are predominately tossed out of the Best Actress category by 30. By Hollywood’s aging standards, these men are just boys.

The term “boys” has long been a way to infantilize grown men, cradle them in language that seems nonthreatening. How could they have caused all this? They’re just boys.

Last month, JD Vance used the term to defend the men aged from 18 to 40 who were caught using racist language and making jokes about rape and gas chambers in a leaked Young Republican group chat, saying “kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” The messages contained over 250 slurs made by men who hold local, state, and federal government posts, per Politico.

But the signifier Vanity Fair uses is also indicative of the moment we’re in now on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

Amid endless dissections of a perceived masculinity crisis, male loneliness epidemic, and men’s shift to the right, conversations around gender equality are centering men. “How can we save boys?” ask leading voices in masculinity crisis discussions like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway.

They cite stats like male suicide rates, women’s higher levels of college education, men’s failure to launch—though, as Jessica Winter recently noted in The New Yorker, these stats are often titled to avoid coming to a more sweeping conclusion that we’re in a multi-directional crisis of economy and identity that impacts us all.

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue seems to be born out of the widely held belief that men are in need of a new kind of role model, lest we continue to lose them to the right. It’s the first cover of its kind from new editor-in-chief Mark Guiducci, who is one of Galloway’s podcast listeners, according to The New York Times.

In his Editor’s Letter, Guiducci describes his cover stars as “often kind, sometimes vulnerable, each extraordinary,” descriptors that qualify them as boys rather than men, apparently.

What Vanity Fair is actually trying to champion within the issue is nothing to sneer at. They call these 12 men prototypes for the “evolved male star,” who is sensitive, down-to-earth, accessible, and the antithesis of the macho, Marlon Brando-type of Hollywood leading man of times gone by. So why weaken this message by calling them boys? The implication that men with softer sensibilities are best referred to as “boys” dilutes their status as an aspirational vision of masculinity and, thus, keeps traditional masculinity as the ideal.