When ‘Toxic’ Masculinity Meets ‘Good’ Motherhood: #NanMama (Male Mothers) as a Maternal Male Ideal on Xiaohongshu (RedNote)

Hybrid Masculinity and the Female Gaze in Post-Feminist China

The evolution of masculinity is a subject of ongoing debate. The concept of ‘hybrid masculinity’ captures how men selectively incorporate marginalized masculinities and femininities while preserving masculine privilege (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Scheibling and Lafrance 2019). This recent concept provides a theoretical lens for understanding how the seemingly subversive ‘male mother’ ideal, which appropriates maternal femininity, may simultaneously reproduce patriarchal privilege. Building on this concept as a theoretical intervention, this study focuses on how it intersects with digital performance, the female gaze, and post-feminist sensibilities in the Chinese context.

Influenced by South Korean (Kkonminam; flower boy), Japanese (Bishōnen; beautiful boy), and Western popular culture (metrosexual masculinity), an effeminate masculine ideal known as ‘little fresh meat’ (小鲜肉), young, soft, and available for romantic consumption, has emerged as a sexual ideal among young Chinese women since the 2010s (Song 2022). This ideal provides a crucial precursor to the ‘male mother’, as both involve women’s active consumption of soft masculinity, yet the ‘male mother’ goes further by explicitly incorporating maternal care, intensifying the tension between subversion and re-inscription. The paradox of post-feminism is an important social and cultural context. McRobbie (2004, 255) defines post-feminism as a denial of feminism ‘while simultaneously seeming to be engaging in a well-intended response to feminism’. This definition is further condensed as a ‘double entanglement’ of empowerment and subordination, which refers to the coexistence of liberal and conservative values (Van Bauwel 2018, 23). Post-feminism brands and commercializes consumption as women’s empowerment, emphasizes self-surveillance and self-discipline, and celebrates female sexual agency, while obscuring structural gender inequalities (Gill 2007).

On the one hand, the prevalence of ‘pan east-Asian soft masculinity’ exactly benefits from consumerist empowerment for women (Kim et al. 2013). ‘Empowerment’ connotes self-determination and autonomy (Wagner 2023). Kabeer (1999, 437–438) argues that empowerment is constructed based on three pre-conditions: ‘resources (e.g., finances, family or community support), agency (the ability to define one’s goals and act upon them), and achievements’. Since China’s economic reform was initiated in the late 1970s, growing national income has resulted in the emergence of consumer cultures, with the consequent creation of a new ‘desiring China’ (Rofel 2007) and the role of ‘consumer-citizens’ (Tian and Dong 2011). Chinese women’s socioeconomic status has also improved, and ‘structural empowerment’ from economic autonomy enables women to increasingly become powerful, desiring subjects and consumers of young and attractive male bodies (Song 2022). In this process, the traditional ‘male gaze’ is reversed into a female gaze, which conveys a form of ‘symbolic empowerment’, characterized by women’s sexual liberation and sexual agency (Riordan 2001). This reversal is central to ‘little fresh meat’ and the ‘male mother’, as it positions young women as active spectators who define ideal masculinity.

On the other hand, although ‘little fresh meat’ is criticized for lacking manliness by the state and for threatening the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Wen 2021), as Louie (2012) notes, this feminized male ideal is still a powerful man possessing wealth and career success, who inherits the wu (武, e.g., force and power) aspect of Confucian normative wen-wu (文-武) paradigm of masculinity. Recent studies of hybrid masculinity in young Chinese women’s romantic fantasies echo this argument. For example, Tan (2024) observes a hybrid of soft masculinity and hegemonic masculinity on Chinese TV, characterized by ‘steely exterior but gentle internally’ military masculinity. In recent years, hegemonic masculinity has been reaffirmed in China, and the image of a heroic, tough, and powerful soldier is reinforced to signify the Chinese nation’s strength, as exemplified by ‘wolf warriors’ (Hu and Guan 2021), in response to state-sponsored ‘sissyphobia’ (Song 2022). Liao (2023) proposes ‘techno-nationalist masculinity’ in post-socialist society to highlight the collusion between the state and digital platforms in manufacturing and amplifying hyper masculinity in digital spaces. Xu et al. (2025) further argue that the blend of hegemonic and obedient enables young women in digital romance to avoid the risks (e.g., violence, infidelity, and male chauvinism) associated with hegemonic masculinity in real-life relationships while retaining its attractive elements (e.g., bravery and strength). These studies encourage a reconsideration of whether the concept of the ‘male mother’ remains entrenched in the essence of muscular strength and patriarchal power, even when cloaked in the guise of motherhood.

Navigating the Paradox of Gender Politics in Digital China: Patriarchy and Feminism

The term ‘patriarchy’ is originally derived from the Greek word patriarkhia, meaning ‘ruling father’. Walby (1990, 20) defines the term as a system of social orders, structures, and practices through which men exercise various forms of manipulation, oppression, and domination of women. Chinese society is heavily influenced by patriarchal Confucianism, where women are disciplined to bear a ‘natural obligation’ to produce and care for children (Liu 2014, 19). Normative women are supposed to be soft, gentle, domestic, and submissive (Chae 2015). In the patriarchal myth of ‘good’ motherhood, mothers are expected to be saintly sacrificers who support their children in their successes through sacrifice and give everything for the upward mobility of their offspring (Chang et al. 2018).

Since China’s economic reform was initiated in the late 1970s, Western feminist narratives have gradually permeated post-socialist China (Cui 2026). The post-one-child policy generation of urban women is the embodiment of the permeation; they have used social media as a transformative tool for challenging traditional gender relations (Tian and Ge 2024). Since its inception in 2013, Xiaohongshu has been known as a female-centric ¹ and consumption-oriented social platform and an emerging bastion of Chinese post-feminist sensibilities. Xiaohongshu has advocated women’s independence, self-confidence, self-esteem, mutual support, and sisterhood, and encourages women to pursue liberation and rebel against societal oppression. For example, the hashtag activism #RejectingBeautyDuty (脱美役) encourages women to break away from traditional aesthetic norms catering to male standards (Zhan 2024). The hashtag activism #StopMenstrualShaming (拒绝月经羞耻) aims to increase awareness about menstrual health and challenge the cultural stigmas associated with menstruation in China (Gu et al. 2024). The alternative narrative of #MarriedChild-Free (已婚无孩) constructs motherhood as a choice rather than a societal decree, challenging patriarchal reproductive ideologies (Ge and Tian 2024). These interventions create the conditions of possibility for the ‘male mother’, opening space to re-imagine gender.

However, Xiaohongshu’s feminism is criticized as pseudo and neo-liberal, prioritizing self-empowerment through consumption over structural change (Peng 2021). In addition, the ‘pale, slim, and young’ (白瘦幼) aesthetic of female beauty still prevails on Xiaohongshu, disciplining young Chinese women to self-sexualize and self-commercialize (Liu and Li 2024). The ‘neo-liberal motherhood’ and the patriarchal power behind it have also been unconsciously internalized by more and more postpartum mothers on Xiaohongshu, who conduct self-surveillance, and pursue the unattainable goal of girlishness (e.g., innocent, cute, and underweight) and the perfect balance of work and family (Liu and Wang 2023). Chinese women are, once again, ‘urged to assume attributes of care, communicativeness, and gentleness’ and increase their sexual attractiveness to ensure ‘everlasting’ romantic relationships (Liu 2014, 20). These studies provide a crucial parallel to this study: just as feminist discourse can be co-opted by consumerism, the ‘male mother’ ideal, despite its subversive appearance, may similarly be complicit with patriarchal power.

Data Collection

Like other popular social media platforms (e.g., Instagram and TikTok), Xiaohongshu is a highly visual medium, with images and video clips as the primary means of posting. Hashtags are a core feature of Xiaohongshu, allowing users to insert up to ten hashtags into a single post. These hashtags are highly effective in organizing and categorizing massive content, making it easier for users to locate relevant material on a particular topic. While users can create hashtags by themselves, platforms also use algorithms to recommend potential hashtags in order to improve the efficiency of content clustering and increase the visibility of posts by engaging potential users. In addition, because Xiaohongshu’s algorithm can record and learn users’ interactive behaviors (e.g., browsing, liking, commenting, and favoriting) to identify their content preferences, related posts with similar hashtags can be subsequently recommended to users, regardless of whether users follow the content creators or not.

In January 2025, a cross-sectional dataset was built by tracking the most influential hashtag #MaleMothers, which garnered over 300 million views and sparked over 2.5 million discussions. These posts on Xiaohongshu ranged from female users’ personal experiences with boyfriends as ‘male mothers’, expressions of opinions regarding ‘male mothers’, curiosity toward ‘male mothers’, and erotic fantasies of ‘male mothers’, to provocative body displays of male users who claimed themselves to be ‘male mothers’.

First, referring to previous feminist works on Xiaohongshu (Liu and Li 2024; Zhan 2024), this study sorted posts containing the hashtag based on the number of likes, because ‘likes’ not only represent recognition from other users in the community but also influences the reach of the posts within Xiaohongshu’s recommendation algorithm. Then, the 50 most-liked posts were selected from the corpus to capture influential posts that had the widest distribution and recognition within the community. In addition, because the gaze is never unidirectional, binding both the observer and the observed (Rose 2001), popular posts produced by male users who claimed themselves to be ‘male mothers’ were also important. To develop a more comprehensive understanding of how this emerging masculinity of ‘male mothers’ is circulated and consumed, male creators’ posts were saved from the corpus based on the number of likes as a supplement. These male creators or influencers performed as ‘male mothers’ and used their bodies to garner visibility on a young women-dominated digital platform and accrue capital by catering to the ‘female gaze’. Finally, sixty-three posts (40 authored by young female users and 23 authored by male creators) were saved, along with the feedback (comments). User gender was verified based on the gender identification displayed in profiles.

Admittedly, there were limitations concerning data collection. First, social platform content may evolve rapidly. This study is cross-sectional and can only provide a ‘snapshot’ (Peng 2021) of available posts at one point in time. Second, as posts’ visibility is greatly influenced by the recommendation algorithm, some posts with fewer likes may also be theoretically valuable. Third, posts on Xiaohongshu might be censored and blocked due to content sensitivity, language, or word usage (Qin et al. 2024). For example, because the Chinese government has exercised close control over sexual content (Cui 2026), to bypass censorship, one male creator in the samples especially claimed that he was merely showcasing his fitness, without the intention of sexual guidance. In this sense, platform affordances are utilized as a strategic resistance to state censorship, which craftily protects the female gaze.

Analytical Procedure: Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and Compositional Interpretation (CI)

Preliminary analysis of the data suggests that most female users post images merely as visual complements to the texts of their posts, or sometimes completely unrelated, given the visual attribute of Xiaohongshu. By contrast, male creators’ posts are mainly image-centric, visually displaying men’s muscularity (particularly the pectoral muscles) as ‘male mothers’, with accompanying text that is usually short in length. Therefore, this study draws a methodological mixture of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and Compositional Interpretation (CI).

Introduced by Lazar (2017), FCDA focuses on how discourses maintain gendered assumptions and hegemonic power relations within the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework (Fairclough 2003). For example, when analyzing how young women endowed ‘male mothers’ with connotations, this study analyzed textual content from three dimensions: (1) textual dimension, (2) discursive dimension, and (3) social dimension (Fairclough 2003). First, the researcher read these posts to identify keywords and metaphors (e.g., traditional men, daddy-like boyfriends, and coconut milk) from the textual dimension. Second, the discursive dimension focuses on the relationship between the text and discursive practice. This study observed that these posts sparked wider conversations along several dimensions, such as gender stereotypes, the cliche of ‘virtuous wife and good mother’, and male chauvinism. Third, this study connected these gendered discourses with Chinese society’s broader post-feminist gender politics to analyze how they were contextually produced.

As for visual content, CI provides a way of looking closely at and analyzing every compositional part of images in detail (Rose 2001). For example, when analyzing the composite visual presentation of a male creator’s selfie, this study not only focused on the content, such as his tight or revealing attire, accessories (e.g., chest chain or necklace), props (e.g., aprons), and settings (home), but also analyzed spatial organization, point of view, and light of the picture. All of these visual symbols could be used to convey the creator’s intentions and his identity construction.

Through this rigorous process, this study analyzed how discourses are embedded in and in turn reflect the tensions between ‘toxic’ masculinity and ‘good’ motherhood, and how their textual/visual features influence the dynamics of feminism and forces against it in post-socialist China.

Ethical Considerations

Xiaohongshu is a public platform. Due to the public nature and wide viewership of these posts, the analysis of this content is considered ethically justifiable (Fossheim and Ingierd 2015). Despite this, as Eysenbach and Till (2001) note, ethical considerations are still important, especially when dealing with bodies and sexualized representations. Therefore, first, this study anonymized usernames to prevent reverse searching. Second, although this study partially used direct quotations and word-to-word translations, it is still difficult to accurately identify the original Chinese texts from the English translation, due to the variable nature of translation (Li 2024), which could avoid reverse identification to some extent. Third, drawing on previous work (Toffoletti and Thorpe 2020), this study ultimately chose to describe the pictures being analyzed instead of providing screenshots of sexualized bodies, in order to safeguard user privacy.

Positioning ‘Male Mothers’ With Satiric Parody and Binary Contrast

In endowing ‘male mothers’ with connotations, female users on Xiaohongshu generally employ two discursive strategies: satiric parody and binary contrast. In this study, the former highlights the creative reformulation of dominant narratives in an ironic way, while the latter focuses on comparative differences, sometimes involving the appropriation of pop Internet buzzwords, but without a process of re-giving meaning.

Specifically, the discursive strategy of parody usually involves ‘altering the style of the original piece while often retaining its subject matter, plot or characters’ (Hutcheon 1988, 92). Through such intentional, playful reformulation of the existing text, creators implicitly criticize social issues. For example, the post that received 5,892 likes endows ‘male mothers’ with connotations in this way:

“Virtuous men with big boobs are like Coconut Milk suitable for all ages, sweet and low-fat, innocent and simple. They conform to big women’s aesthetic instincts engraved in their genes. A subtle sense of inferiority is the best dowry for muscled men with big boobs, who try to attract your attention to their bodies with the help of barbells and protein powder.”

Traditionally, one essential aspect of Confucian womanly virtues is being virtuous, mainly encapsulated in the role of a ‘virtuous wife and good mother’ (Liu 2014, 19) that constrains women to support their husbands in their successes through self-sacrifice. Another old Chinese saying, ‘a woman dolls herself up for the man who loves her’ (女为悦己者容), highlights women’s obligation to relentlessly seek beauty to cultivate their erotic capital to enhance their appeal in the heterosexual milieu. This post retains the above subject matter and plot of a ‘big’ man’s chauvinistic comment on ‘ideal’ wives, but switches the roles of men and women, and humorously assigns a series of stereotypical traits typically associated with women to men. The term ‘big women’ represents an important subject of ‘neo-liberal feminism’, which refers to confident, passionate, and powerful women who pursue career success and financial independence (Duan 2020), echoing the cliché of ‘big men’. Ringrose and Lawrence (2018) note that this fun feminist politics could create a transgressive potential to challenge power structures beyond traditional confrontation. In this post, such potential also manifests in the metaphor of Coconut Milk, which parodies the vulgar advertising of a well-known local Coconut Milk brand using sexualized female breasts to tout its products.

In addition, young female users creatively incorporate ‘male mothers’ into a well-acknowledged form of contemporary socialist ideology to negotiate with anti-feminist nationalists (Peng 2022) and state-sponsored ‘sissyphobia’ (Song 2022). For example, the above post also states:

“Male mothers with big boobs symbolize the new direction for the evolution of carbon-based life and are an important topic for the sustainable development of human civilization: the people have faith; the nation has strength, and the country has hope.”

One major dilemma that Chinese contemporary feminism faces is digital nationalism, an anti-feminist tactic used by male opponents who associate Chinese feminist activities with the interference of Western forces (Peng 2022). Such nationalist discursive tactics are also appropriated by state-sponsored ‘sissyphobia’ to link ‘soft masculinity’ with the crisis of the Chinese nation’s rejuvenation and to re-legitimatize hegemonic masculinity (Hu and Guan 2021). In this context, instead of directly combating the above critiques, young female users on Xiaohongshu parodically interact with the official language by referencing the form and content of socialist slogans and nationalist narratives.

The other key discursive strategy is highlighting the contrast between ‘toxic’ men and revised ‘male mothers’: the former are average yet authoritarian, egotistical, and confident, while the latter are sacrificial, gentle, and inclusive. For example:

“Male mothers are the opposite of fathers, and are essentially spiritual women.”

In contrast to the universal myth of ‘good’ mothers, the figure of fathers is often perceived as ‘authoritarian’ and absent from home and parenthood (Evans 2010). The term ‘the smell of fathers’ (爹味) has gained prominence in recent years and soon became emblematic of online parodies that criticize Chinese dictatorial and commanding men who assume expert status and discount a woman’s intelligence, similar to the term ‘mansplain’. Interestingly, the term ‘daddy-like boyfriends’ (爹系男友) is generally positive, integrating the archetype of ‘sugar daddy’ and the fantasy of ‘good dad’ in contemporary popular culture, which typically refers to mature and powerful men who are engaged in caregiving in intimacy. However, as the female user implied, ‘daddy-like boyfriends’ convey patriarchal romantic codes. The disciplining patriarch and the dependent daughter are one typical hierarchical metaphor, in contrast to the sacrificial mom and the beneficiary daughter. The term ‘average yet confident men’ (普信男) has been widely embraced as a way to criticize Chinese men’s outsized egos and sense of entitlement (Meng and Literat 2024), in contrast to ‘male mothers’ who castrate male stereotypical superiority. The above contrasts, along with the appropriation of pop Internet buzzwords, not only construct a clear boundary between ‘good’ men and ‘toxic’ men but also build and strengthen participants’ identity and belonging because decoding these buzzwords requires shared values and experiences.

Challenging Patriarchal Norms With Domestic Authority and Sexual Subjectivity

In fantasies of ‘male mothers’, female users portray a traditional ‘moral angel’ disciplined by patriarchy, who perfectly performs the gender role of a ‘good’ mother, shouldering daily chores and practicing an ‘ethic of care’ (Henderson and Allen 1991). For example, the post that won over 11,000 likes defines ‘male mothers’ in this way:

“The essence of the male mother is inclusive motherhood: he will slightly complain but smooth the wrinkles of your sheets; he will wash your socks while crying with a cold face after a quarrel with you; he will not simply advise you to drink more hot water but take good care of you when you are sick…”

In this fantasy, young women become the ones with power, and their boyfriends become so-called ‘traditional men’. Some female users further disclose their personal love stories regarding how their boyfriends, as ‘male mothers’, please them through life care and housekeeping, in contrast to themselves who are messy, sloppy, and unable to take care of themselves properly:

“I don’t have to tie my own shoes. Each time the shoelaces loosen, a pair of hands immediately ties them for me before my feet have reached out.”

Although these examples come from different female users, these vivid descriptions commonly convey young women’s resistance to gendered expectations of feminine order, cleanliness, beauty, and hygiene. They also package male mothers’ care and devotion as a form of female empowerment and authority establishment in the field of domesticity.

In addition, visually, ‘male mothers’ can be manly with appearances coded for strong visual and erotic impact, embodying what Bridges and Pascoe (2014) call ‘hybrid masculinity’. Specifically, the most commonly seen images of ‘male mothers’ in these posts typically feature young and muscular men baring their chests. They also often wear symbolic items, such as jewelry (a chest chain or necklace) and aprons. Their outfits (e.g., the slim white button-down shirt with leather straps, the deep V-neck backless halter top in lace material, or the diaphanous gym top that can highlight the contour of a muscular body) are often elaborately conceived and expressive, featuring characteristics such as tightness and reveal. As Connell (2005) notes, fashion and appearance are often framed in opposition to hegemonic masculinity. These male creators combine these elements of marginalized or feminine gender identities with their own performance of masculinity to achieve the ‘flexibility of identity’ (Bridges and Pascoe 2014, 249). Some scholars (e.g., McCormack 2011) argue that this complex and sometimes contradictory ‘hybrid masculinity’ may lead to the decline of patriarchal norms, destroying the binary proposition of consumption as the feminine and production as the masculine.

Meanwhile, these pictures are usually carefully staged. The settings tend to be a space that looks like one normal room in a home, and the common backdrops are a white wall, curtains, or a glass door, creating a private atmosphere with only the viewer and the performer. The subject (usually the male creator himself) usually occupies the central position of the frame, but without showing his face. The light, color, and the way male creators angle their bodies (usually in a sexually suggestive pose, such as kneeling, arching the back, placing a hand on the breast, and spreading legs wide open) are also carefully adjusted. The male subject’s body is segmented into its parts to highlight his muscle definition, particularly pectorals, cleavage, broad shoulders, and a smooth and fair complexion. As Bartky (1990) points out, sexual objectification comes into being when faces are hidden and isolated body parts are highlighted for their use to (or consumption by) others. Sexual objectification is historically feminine, determined by asymmetrical gender power relations, in which she is seen as a pure instrument that is ‘used, manipulated, controlled’, and valued (only) through her sexual appeal, without regard for her personality or dignity (Calogero et al. 2011, 5). The pervasiveness of sexual objectification acculturates women to internalize the observer’s perspective, which is referred to as ‘self-objectification’ (Vandenbosch and Eggermont 2012). In this study, this self-objectification is reversed and becomes a living testimony to what Li (2020) calls the ‘consumption of sexualized men’ (男色消费), catering to female desire.

Female desire, historically repressed by China’s Neo-Confucian gender hegemony since the Song Dynasty, which has advocated ‘de-lusting’ (灭人欲), has long repressed female desires (Hu and Wang 2025). Nowadays, social platforms have become an outlet for release. In the comment section of ‘male mothers’ selfies, young female users bluntly express their praise, admiration, and desire for their hyper-masculine bodies, especially their muscular chests, using words such as ‘yummy’, ‘eat’, ‘suck’, and ‘nice boobs’. The metaphor of food signals the gendered consumption of ‘otherness’ (Shugart 2008). Female users gaze upon or even consume ‘male mothers’ in a variety of erotic ways with their own preferences, through which they can gain tremendous visual pleasure and exert their growing consumptive power and sexual freedom. In this sense, young women seize the opportunity to take the dominant ‘masculinized’ position and challenge patriarchal power.

Inheriting Patriarchal Power With Romantic Rhetoric and Muscle Worship

However, from a post-feminist perspective, the ‘perfect’ protection from ‘male mothers’ is more a sweet trap than a gesture of love. Young women are enticed to be trapped in the romantic rhetoric of love, to slowly internalize others’ requests, and rules and to become dependent and passive in a comfortable cocoon. In addition, when female ‘resistance’ emerges by disregarding the man’s care and suggestion, ‘sweet’ boyfriends may react with altruism and moral judgment by condemning her for ‘being selfish’ and showing no care for her own body. Male power’s influence on female bodies is repackaged by the romantic rhetoric of intimacy, shaping every aspect of women’s daily lives, gradually and implicitly (Miller 1993). For example:

“I am too lazy to eat fruit. Each time we meet, he brings me several bags of fruit, peels them for me, and feeds them to my mouth… I didn’t care about some bad habits in life, and told him that death may be more liberating. He said I was being selfish. He couldn’t handle me leaving him like this. He would come after me and judge me in heaven.”

More importantly, the sacred role of a ‘good’ mother disciplined by patriarchy and associated Confucian womanly virtues, care, emotionality, communicativeness, and gentleness, are not really overthrown but are inherited. As many feminist scholars note, to be a ‘good’ mother in a patriarchal society conveys that women’s subjectivity is proactively ‘exploited’ in the name of devotion (Hays 1996; Rich 2021). Sharing the same logic as pseudo-feminist influencers who instigate women to exploit ‘emphasized’ femininity to profit from men (Wu and Dong 2019), here female users conflate the so-called ‘inclusive’ motherhood with domesticity (e.g., sheets, socks, and the role of caregiver), and exploit the name of maternal love to profit. Instead of deeply seeking motherhood’s complexity, they re-legitimate the exploitation of ‘good’ mothers based on a simple dichotomy, unconsciously or voluntarily becoming the maintainers of patriarchy. Chodorow (2019) concludes that the relationship between mother and daughter is ambivalent. On the one hand, as Freud (2010) notes, the early emotional bond between a girl and her mother is so intense that even when she transfers her devotion to her father or other men, she still preserves her persistent attachment to her mother. However, on the other hand, while the mother-daughter relationship consists solely of women, it can in turn be an accomplice to patriarchal ideology and be distorted, oppressed, and exploited (Ray and Karmakar 2022).

What’s worse, in contrast to vulnerable and fragile female beauty aesthetics dominated by the male gaze (e.g., pale skin, younger look, and slim body figure) (Liu and Li 2024), ‘male mothers’ gazed by women instead reproduce the normative hegemonic masculinity through their well-trained and muscular bodies. Connell (2005) notes that muscularity has long been a symbol of male dominance. Similarly, in China, since the invasion of the West in the 1840s, body strength has grown in importance in semi-colonial and nationalist discourses (Huang 2006). Men’s muscularity not only conveys traditional normative martial (or wu) masculinity but also echoes contemporary state-sponsored military masculinity (Hu and Guan 2021). Indeed, Chinese female users’ obsession with muscular bodies is related to a popular romantic fantasy of ‘relative size’ (身高差) characterized by obvious differences in partners’ height with smaller and more slim women and much taller and stronger men, which, however, in Goffman’s (1979) opinion, symbolizes women’s subordination and a loss of power.

In this sense, the appearance ideals of ‘male mothers’ further echo what Foster and Baker (2022) call ‘hybrid masculinity’ that blends traditional feminine aesthetics with hegemonic masculinity without sacrificing the power and privilege granted to men. These ‘male mothers’ borrow articles of so-called femininity (e.g., jewelry and aprons) for purely strategic purposes in a merely visual way so that they can use their sexual bodies to cater to the female gaze to win ‘traffic’ on social media, which can then help them acquire social or economic capital. As privileged young muscular men, they do not engage in real self-reflection on gender inequality, either, as in most cases, these photos are only accompanied by few provocative texts and several related hashtags, such as #male mothers, #contrast, #fitness, and #wide shoulders and narrow waist, to appeal to female voyeuristic readership’s admiration, along with their likes, comments, and follows on Xiaohongshu.

In addition, ‘male mothers’, though positioned as the ‘object’, who submits himself to the female gaze, are not entirely a ‘lesser’ to a ‘superior’ (Goddard 2000). When displaying their toned physiques, they are proud of exemplifying the officially accredited aesthetic values, and distance themselves from the controversial effeminate ‘little fresh meat’. They also tend to simultaneously emphasize their gender identity as heterosexual towards viewers to police the boundaries of normative masculinity. For example, two ‘male mothers’ in the sample specifically assert that they are straight in the profiles. Another ‘male mother’ often posts attractive pictures of himself with his girlfriend, reminding viewers of his heterosexuality. In Bridges and Pascoe’s (2014) view, this hybrid masculinity represents patriarchy’s strategic adjustments in the face of growing feminist strength to reinforce itself in a more subtle and complex way.