I’ve seen the video so many times I’ve lost count. It’s 2017 and Spider-Man actor Tom Holland is wearing a black wig, a latex corset, fishnet tights, and dancing to Rihanna’s “Umbrella” with unembarrassed commitment. Watching on is his then-co-star, now wife, Zendaya. She looks on in disbelief, then with unmistakable admiration. Many fans have since decided this was the moment she fell in love with him.
Now I, a grown-up woman who analyses gender for a living (I’ve even written a book on it), knows better than to get emotionally involved with two actors. And yet, here I am, undeniably emotionally involved with two actors who don’t know I exist.
In many ways it’s not my fault, I tell myself as I scroll TikTok. Who could escape the marketing machine of the two new films both actors appear in? Brand New Day and The Odyssey have taken roughly $2.77bn (£2.05bn) at the box office in a couple of weeks. They’ve already surpassed Barbenheimer’s $2.4bn (£1.7bn). The film hasn’t opened in China and Japan yet, so expect the figures to climb.
The joint press tours show the warmth between the couple (I’m sure some is real and some is more scheduled, the studios have every reason to make sure the aw moments arrive on cue): he blew her kisses on the red carpet, and joked her character couldn’t have feelings for Matt Damon because “she’s married to me”.
Like the Rihanna lip sync dance, these moments endear us to them, and yet they don’t really tell us anything about their personal lives. Why then do so many of us enter into parasocial relationships with famous couples? I.e. A one-sided bond where one party feels a deep connection, while the other doesn’t know they exist.
Parasocial attachment is supposed to run on access. We mistake exposure for intimacy: the Vogue house tour, the crying Instagram reel, the couples’ podcast, until a stranger’s face is as familiar as a friend’s. By that logic these two should be the least parasocial couple alive. They give us nothing. No kitchen tour. No lifestyle brand. Confusion about the wedding (did it happen? No date. No venue reveal. No photographs.)
And yet, we’re obsessed. Why?
Tom Holland with his wife Zendaya on the red carpet. ‘We aren’t attached to them, we are attached to what we project on to them,’ says Megha (Photo: Emma McIntyre/Getty)Start with the climate they arrived in. Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the year they met. Incel culture, and the manosphere, was going mainstream. High-value male is now a phrase people use without irony. The tradwife aesthetic sells women their own submission back to them, soft-lit and shoppable.
Teenage boys are coached in their bedrooms, through their phones, by men who insist tenderness is weakness and a woman is a depreciating asset. This is not a Western story. The same content reaches boys in Lagos and Manila, dubbed and localised.
Into that steps a superhero in his gran’s fishnets. The quality the manosphere insists will make a man undesirable is the one that got Zendaya (and millions of others) attention. It was one of the things I kept finding while writing HERLANDS: gender rules look inevitable before someone demonstrates that they aren’t.
When I watch footage, shared by Zendaya’s relatives, of Tom turning up at a family party (one of the few white men present and looking extremely comfortable), and telling the world’s press that his wife is the more talented one, it feels like I’m watching a man who takes genuine delight in his partner’s world and what matters to her.
This is not how modern men are supposed to win: the manosphere coaches a generation of boys for an inheritance regime they are not going to inherit. Tom seems to be playing the game in front of him, and winning it so comprehensively that Elon Musk felt moved to call him a cuck (Holland ignored it). He is compelling precisely because he is the counter-example, an alternative.
After a decade of being told the aggressive man is the natural man, Zendaya and Tom decline to explain themselves, and fans like me fill that silence with the argument we most need to win. They are not letting us know them. They are letting us hope.
We aren’t attached to them, we are attached to what we project on to them. They have withheld enough to be almost anything, and what we have decided to make them is an argument, a referendum on whether a man can be soft and still be wanted, whether a woman can be, say, taller, or more popular, and still be adored. Every clip is entered into evidence. Every fan edit is a closing statement.
And finally, there is one aspect many of us skirt around, perhaps because naming it exposes an unease that has become harder to ignore lately. Zendaya is biracial, married to a white British man, and there is something profoundly affecting about watching a Black woman be publicly, tenderly, unmistakably cherished – by a superhero – in a culture that still so often denies it to women of colour.
Of course, Zendaya has clocked a lot of this fan adoration. On the NYT Modern Love podcast she said she understood the investment – that they had grown up in front of people and played characters who fall in love, and that she did not want to dismiss it by telling anyone to stay out of her business. A remarkable thing to say to the people watching – I see what you are doing, I know why, and I will not shame you for it.
And so your algorithm (and definitely mine) will remain full of their young love. Adoring them a little is harmless. Mistaking it for more is the trap.
Megha Mohan is the author of HERLANDS: Lessons from Societies Where Women Make the Rules, published by Harvill Secker
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