Social media started smouldering at the end of last week when GQ magazine dropped a teaser for their forthcoming blockbuster summer issue featuring a noticeably beefy post-divorce Brad Pitt, 61, in various states of brooding alpha masculinity.

Photographed in Glenorchy, New Zealand to promote his forthcoming Formula One movie F1, the shots come with an accompanying 30-minute video (I joke, it’s one minute) which has been liked nearly half a million times on the magazine’s own Instagram page.

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We see a motorbike-fan Brad clad in vintage Belstaff, huge sunglasses by Jacques Marie Mage and a grade-three buzzcut, riding a throaty vintage Harley Davidson across a very bumpy-looking dry river bed.

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Then there’s a grey-bearded, bare-chested Brad complete with leather-thonged necklaces and a titchy fisherman’s beanie staring wistfully out across the craggy New Zealand countryside.

A leather-clad Brad Pitt on the front page of GQ ahead of the release of his latest film, F1 - Nathaniel Goldenberg/GQ

Weary-yet-sexy Brad comes next, tattooed, oiled up, splayed on a faintly smelly-looking mattress staring contemplatively through the windows of his wilderness cabin, all bulging biceps, grease-covered unbuttoned Henley and an artfully dirty-looking craggy face.

Enter; pensive Brad, seen in a grubby sleeveless vintage jerkin before the final hurrah, a shot of the actor, clad all in black, walking through the Dart river in £3,350 black thigh-high leather waders by Saint Laurent designed by Anthony Vaccarello – also recently worn by modern masculinity exemplars Pedro Pascal, 50 (hunky in Gladiator), and 48-year-old Alexander Skarsgård, who recently added 20lbs of muscle to play the ultra-ripped Northman.

Gladiator star Pedro Pascal is an exemplar of modern masculinity, wielding the thigh-high Saint Laurent leather boots to prove it - Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic

Alexander Skarsgård also recently wore the exact same design to wade through the red carpet madness at Cannes - Getty

Yes, they are vaguely reminiscent of a pair country star Johnny Cash was photographed in at his lakeside retreat in Tennessee in the 1960s. But if we can judge anything from their recent history, these Saint Laurent thigh-high leather boots are for bulging alpha manly thighs only.

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Leather, motorbikes, the wilderness, body hair, rippling muscles, engine oil… It’s hard to see the semiotics of Brad’s shoot as anything other than a paean to the traditional notions of “manliness” and something of a two fingered salute to 2024’s dominant aesthetic, the rather horribly termed “rat boy” or “hot rodent boyfriend” look.

“A hot rodent man is… a way of describing a skinny, lanky, unconventionally attractive dude who does not embody stereotypical macho-like attributes,” said Men’s Health magazine last June. Think Barry Keoghan to Timothée Chalamet and Josh O’Connor. The hot rodent man “has more of a pointed, angular facial structure that is almost rat- or mouse-like, he rocks messy hair, sports vintage clothing, and, to borrow the internet’s phrasing, is so wan as to appear one cigarette away from death.” While the internet’s obsession with unconventional men will doubtlessly continue – and online, there’s room for everyone – in celebrity circles and in Hollywood it feels as if the sinewy hot rodent boyfriend has smoked his last.

After a star turn in Challengers, Josh O’Connor became the poster boy for the so-called ‘hot rodent man’ - Getty

Brad Pitt is not the only man in the public eye sporting a bulkier look. As The Guardian reported in 2023, these days the size of your biceps has become as much of a status symbol as the size of your bank balance, particularly amongst men of a certain age.

Much has been made of 41-year-old Meta founder tech bro nerd Mark Zuckerberg’s beefcake transformation – we’re talking martial arts-honed muscles (he took up jiu jitsu in the pandemic), a foil-boarding hobby, a cringy gold medallion and an expressed desire for a return to more “masculine energy” in the corporate world… “A culture that celebrates aggression a bit more has its own merits,” he told fellow muscle man, Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan in January.

Credit: YouTube/ PowerfulJRE

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Then we have rocket-launching, Amazon-owning tech bro Jeff Bezos, who – also at 61, and as the world’s second-richest man – has been on a mission to optimise his physique for the past few years, reportedly enlisting Tom Cruise’s personal trainer and, of course, eating a high-end high protein diet (octopus for breakfast anyone?). The ripped results speak for themselves.

In a far cry from the Christopher Reeve as Superman days of old, today’s Hollywood superheroes have real-life bodies per their characters – think Jason Momoa, Hugh Jackman, Dwayne Johnson, all above 45 years of age.

Jason Momoa is among a growing number of Hollywood superheroes who have the real-life physique of their characters - Getty/Amazon

Fifty-four-year-old Matt Damon has turned hardbody for the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie The Odyssey where he plays Odysseus. Avengers star Chris Hemsworth, 41, is not only known for his hyper-muscular physique and home training videos, but also his Limitless TV series for Disney, in which he “pushes himself to new limits to try and stop the diseases of old age before they take hold… [and] discovers how we all can unlock our potential to stay fitter, healthier, and happier throughout our lives.”

At 50, David Beckham’s fitness goals are to remain “lean, strong and pain-free” according to his personal trainer Bobby Rich, who revealed he goes through rounds of push-ups and pull ups to give himself something he says he never had as a football player, a defined chest. “I never had pecs until I met Bob,” Beckham told Men’s Health in February, joking “You could say I’ve gone up a few cup sizes as a result.”

In midlife, Beckham has achieved something he never had as a professional footballer: a well-defined chest - Hugo Boss

Even the housewives’ favourite daytime TV presenter Ben Shephard is at it, appearing on a recent cover of the same magazine with a six pack, detailing his comprehensive workout plan and his diet consisting of six lean protein meals a day.

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Muscles have always been associated with manliness, but the last few years of social media saturation have been a shift in male beauty ideals, with the masculine beauty standard becoming a lot bulkier and more difficult to achieve, spawning a rise in body image issues amongst boys and young men. As building and retaining muscle becomes more challenging as we age – both for men and women – it makes the physiques of Brad, Bezos et al even more of a flex.

Ben Shephard recently appeared in Men’s Health magazine, where he detailed the six-meals-a-day diet he follows to bulk up - David Venni/Men's Health

Their looks exemplify the West’s growing obsession with biohacking our bodies for wellness and treating the body like a machine that can be optimised, a large part of which appears to involve (in the eyes of the consumer, at least) eating more lean protein to build muscle. In the UK alone, a national survey for Ocado carried out earlier this year found that in 2024, nearly half of UK adults increased their protein intake, rising to two-thirds of all people aged between 16 and 34.

“It’s hard to argue that muscles haven’t always been some form of cultural ideal,” says Andrew Tracey, Men’s Health UK’s fitness director. “You’ve only got to look at ancient Greek and Roman statues that accentuated muscular male physiques – and then fast forward to the larger than life action stars of the eighties. However, I’d actually posit that ‘smaller’, less muscled, more achievable physiques have come to the forefront in the last few decades. One of the biggest shifts has been in the level of education and awareness of the general population on health and fitness.

“Men are more enlightened and empowered than ever on issues surrounding their health. Strength and brawn have always been cultural ideals, to some degree, but now, a growing number of men are able to pursue that ideal with education and discernment – and many are choosing a more holistic approach that benefits and improves their health across the board, not just in the mirror. More and more research is emerging, highlighting the health and longevity benefits of carrying a bit of extra muscle mass. So as long as it’s done in a healthy and informed manner, there are worse things for men to do with their time.”

Of course, the body is almost always political and, in today’s hyper-masculine political climate perhaps it is easy to see why some men are eager to enhance anything about their appearance that could be construed as overtly masculine.

“The more conservative, regressive or perhaps the more ‘traditional’ a society makes itself, the more it will really endeavour – in its cultural work or product – to try to create two genders who look very different to each other,” says Meredith Jones, honorary professor of gender studies at Brunel University of London. “Fashions spring out of the times we are living in… These movements are always cyclical.”

In other words folks, get your fill of Brad, Ben and Bezos (if you so desire) while you can before these bods – and accompanying thigh-high boots – wade off into the sunset forever.