One of the ideas we stress most at Reimagine Gender is that everyone has a gender story. Many people find this concept surprising and sometimes even confusing at first – especially straight, cisgender (cis) men, who usually haven’t spent much time reflecting on their own experience with gender.
But across countless professional trainings, we’ve found that when cis men are encouraged – sometimes for the first time in their lives – to retell the story of their relationship to masculinity, boyhood, and manhood with the new gender vocabulary we offer them, they often find it to be a positive, sometimes even transformational, experience.
Outside of our work, though, the assumption that cis men have no direct stake in our society’s collective reimagining of gender is often left unchallenged.
And that brings up a key opportunity: we need to pay attention to how young cisgender men and boys coming of age with a far more expansive understanding of gender are renegotiating masculinity. That’s not to say we need to center cis men and boys in conversations about gender because their interests are more important than anyone else’s; to the contrary, we are missing an opportunity to include a very large segment of the population in an ongoing conversation about expanding our understanding of gender in a way that is ultimately beneficial to everyone.
Luckily, we are beginning to see more media representations of the relationship between masculinity and expansive understandings of gender, especially among millennial and Gen Z men. Take, for example, the character of Albie Di Grasso (Adam DiMarco) from season 2 of HBO’s widely popular series, The White Lotus. The second season of the show follows several groups of wealthy guests as they interact with locals and one another during a weeklong stay at a luxury resort in Sicily.
The dynamic between Albie, his father, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and his paternal grandfather, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), provides rich ground for unpacking how cultural beliefs about masculinity are passed down and renegotiated intergenerationally.
Albie’s agreeable but sometimes meek temperament, combined with his extreme privilege as a wealthy white man, has led many to view his character as the quintessential ‘Nice Guy’ – though whether that’s a positive or a negative is certainly up for debate. In fact, in a show full of complex, morally dubious characters, Albie stands out as perhaps the most surprisingly controversial.
Although many fans of the show sing his praises as the naive but well-meaning underdog of the season, others have written him off as a purely performative “Nice Guy™” — a wannabe savior. They argue that Albie embodies the misogynistic belief – which arose alongside incel forums and online anti-feminism – that treating women with basic decency entitles men to sex or a romantic relationship in return. Despite outward appearances, they say, Albie’s expression of masculinity and underlying attitude towards women are just as flawed as his fathers’ and grandfathers’. While this perspective is not without merit, the prevalence of it reflects a potentially self-defeating mindset that treats cis men with suspicion when they express progressive attitudes towards gender.
There is no one ‘correct’ take on Albie’s character. Still, we might derive the most interesting insight into how young men are renegotiating masculinity if we put Albie somewhere in the middle of those extremes. He’s an imperfect person who is struggling – but actively making an active effort – to counter gender norms passed down from men in his family and society at large. This is the lived reality of countless young men and boys, so it’s worthwhile to take Albie seriously as one of the few mainstream representations of this experience.
In one episode, Albie, Dominic, Bert, and Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) – a young woman Albie meets at the hotel – eat lunch at a villa that served as a filming location in The Godfather franchise. After Bert asserts that The Godfatheris the best American movie ever made, Albie retorts that his grandfather only thinks so because he is “nostalgic for the solid days of the patriarchy.” He continues that “men love The Godfather because they feel emasculated by modern society. It’s a fantasy about a time when they could go out and solve all their problems with violence, sleep with every woman, and then come home to their wife who doesn’t ask them any questions and makes them pasta.”
After Bert objects that The Godfather represents “a normal male fantasy,” Albie responds, “No, movies like that socialize men into having that fantasy.” His father and grandfather object that men are “hard-wired” to have that fantasy and that it “comes with the testosterone.” Albie holds his ground, stating, “No, gender is a construct. It’s created.” Bert quips to his son, “You spent all that money on Stanford; he comes back brainwashed,” and the scene ends.
This scene captures generational differences in attitudes toward women, masculinity, and gender that sit at the core of the tension between Albie, Dominic, and Bert. Some have interpreted Albie’s argument with his father and grandfather as nothing but a performance intended to impress Portia, with one article describing Albie’s commentary as a “lifted-straight-off-a-Twitter-thread feminist monologue that rejects traditional gender roles.” While this may be part of the truth, Albie’s actions in this scene also seem to be rooted in something more significant than wanting to impress a potential romantic interest: a deep desire to distance himself from the patriarchal expression of masculinity embodied by his father and grandfather – and the destruction it brought upon their family.
From the first episode of the season, the primary source of tension amongst the Di Grasso men is the acutely felt absence of Albie’s mother and sister from what was intended to be a trip for the whole family – the result of Dominic cheating on Albie’s mother, and not for the first time. Albie’s scathing remarks about the male fantasy embodied in The Godfather seem much more personal in light of these circumstances.
So whether Albie’s statement that gender is a social construct is performative, something he genuinely believes, or a combination of both, he has real personal stakes in that understanding of gender. Albie’s knowledge that gender is constructed is crucial to his ability to reject his father’s and grandfather’s attempts to excuse their actions as natural expressions of masculinity. If masculinity is a social construct, Albie then has the agency to choose a healthier way of being a man than the generations before him.
Throughout the season, the ways Albie engages with women and expresses his masculinity are far from perfect – but perfection isn’t the point. When cisgender men are presented with an expansive view of gender, which may often be a new and confusing concept, they have a choice to make. They can choose to reject it and double down on the essentialist view that allows them to excuse their own harmful expressions of masculinity as ‘natural,’ like Dominic and Bert. Or they can choose to be open to it like Albie, opening the door to critical self-reflection and claiming responsibility over what being a man means to them. The first option may be easier, but Albie shows young men and boys that even if the process is messy, expanding their understanding of gender is the first step in creating a healthy masculinity of the future – and leaving the past in the past.