2020 Was a Banner Year for New Kinds of Guys

How many kinds of guys are there?

It’s an unanswerable (if not imponderable) question. But, should you start naming types of guys, you won’t run out. There are pizza guys, cable guys, wife guys and reply guys. Guys who still cape for the movie Avatar, guys who love stuffed animals and guys who want to break the world record for edging to orgasm. There’s a guy who beat LeBron James in a game of H-O-R-S-E. What about that guy who’s a real guy’s guy? And no list of guys is legitimate without Guy Fieri!

For as long as men have been guys, we’ve categorized them by their passions and roles in life. Think about 2017’s Curvy Wife Guy, who has tried to forge a lifestyle brand out of cringe-posting about his partner’s body. It’s essential that we can spot and avoid the “Just Asking Questions” Guy, as well as the “Fluent in Sarcasm” Guy. The arguments over Boob Guys vs. Ass Guys seem to be never-ending. Perhaps no one is more dreaded than the infamous Nice Guy.

All of these guys are familiar by now, and all have left their mark on the culture. But 2020 was a watershed year for recognizing — then exploring — the phenomenal biodiversity of guys. You couldn’t log on without seeing that a new kind of guy had been discovered and celebrated in the field of guy anthropology: “New guy just dropped.” “Found a guy.” “Incredible new guy.”

Two years before, the oracle @dril had predicted something along these lines, tweeting that he planned to invent “a new type of person to get mad at on here,” yet the reality turned out to be far stranger: many subspecies of guy somehow inventing themselves.

Yes, 2020 turned our world upside down as we attempted to survive a mismanaged global pandemic. But it’s also been a breakthrough year for our understanding of guys — manifesting a spate of them that few could have anticipated.

Because you haven’t suffered enough, here are some of this year’s most fascinating guys, now key figures in the Guy Taxonomy, curated by your favorite Guy Experts at Guy Magazine MEL.

Mixed-Orientation Marriage Guy

In 2019, the wife guy was king. Yet each wife guy went viral for his own reasons, with his own confounding personal brand. Of this year’s crop, you have to admit that the self-described “gay, and happily married to an amazing woman” guy is a slam dunk. It’s baffling, it’s wholesome and they look very cute together! No judgment here at all — only a genuine appreciation of the pioneer spirit that motivates this guy. He knows what he wants and loves when he gets it. Bravo.

Guy Who Masturbates in a Zoom Meeting

One of the joys of new technology: new guys! More specifically, state-of-the-art ways for them to inappropriately masturbate. Enter Jeffrey Toobin, the lawyer/longtime New Yorker columnist who was fired in November after jacking it during a Zoom work meeting. It was, bizarrely, an election simulation — arguably the least horny context on earth — with public radio folks that stimulated Toobin so much he couldn’t help but expose his dick to colleagues including David Remnick and Masha Gessen. The lesson for Other Guys? Perhaps don’t pleasure yourself during a meeting, but if you do, rest assured: There’s a legion of female Pick-Mes and Guys Who Definitely Don’t Don’t Crank Their Hog in the All-Hands who will run to your defense.

Guy Whose Balls Are on Wikipedia

When you search “testicles” on Wikipedia, you can see a photo of some. How that particular image came to attach itself to the page is the subject of a fascinating investigation by MEL’s Brian VanHooker, who reports that more than a decade ago, there was an epic power struggle between users “Nikon307” and “Emptybone,” each of whom wanted to cement his scrotum as the internet’s prime example. Ever since, the winner has fiercely defended his balls guy turf.  That’s peak guy shit.

Guys Who Are Completely Made Up

As noted, @dril gave us the gift and curse of making up people, or guys. It’s an invaluable option if you want to look like you’re winning an argument online — after all, what is a “straw man” if not a shoddily constructed “guy”? The beauty of the @makeupaguy account is that you can forever customize guys without necessarily getting pissed off by them. The guys, whether good or bad, are manifestations in the ether. Galaxies of guys, spinning across the universe.

Guy Who Puts His Negative COVID Results in His Online Dating Bio

The past 10 months have meant unprecedented levels of horny. They’ve also been defined by a broad range of hygiene theater, which, when performed by Guys Who Wanna Fuck, makes for a real doozy:

Does it matter that this screenshot of a negative test result is essentially meaningless? Of course not. It’s about broadcasting that you’re the kind of guy who hypothetically cares about infecting someone with a potentially fatal disease — but not enough to stop cruising for a hookup. As with both COVID-19 precautions and horny men more broadly, it’s less about reality and more about creating an illusion of safety. In this case, a real win-win!

TikTok Guy Who Only Posts His Heely Tricks

You expect to see kids coasting sidewalks on Heelys, the skate shoe with a wheel in the heel. You don’t expect to see an adult performing elaborate Heely tricks on the icy streets of St. Paul, Minnesota, for tens of thousands of Tik Tok fans. That’s Jamesg, a musician and guy bar none. He exemplifies the principle that any hobby or talent taken to its limit can be used to forge another lane of guyhood. He’s a role model for guys everywhere — guys searching for a “thing.”

Cowboy MAGA Lawyer Guy Who Was Once a High School Cheerleader

Some guys have names, and some guys have names that destine them to eventually become a main character on Twitter. In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, lawyer Briscoe Cain — with a name that sounds like if a box of cereal tried to become a sport’s announcer — tweeted that he was flying to Philadelphia to “fight for a fair and honest election”:

Briscoe was just one of many losers the Trump era seemed to manifest, guys who were convinced they were “saving America’” and had to let you know with the cringiest posts ever. But not all of them had the good fortune of being Briscoe Cain, who as Sydney Leathers pointed out on Twitter, simultaneously looked like a child and date rapist.

How did this end, you’re wondering? The only way it could for this kind of MAGA macho guy: with a high school classmate revealing they were on the cheerleading squad.

Seven-Foot-Tall Hot Antifa Guy

Everyone is so starved for human contact, at this point they’d fuck a lamppost if it looked at them the right way. As such, no one stood a chance when it came to the Seven-Foot-Tall Hot Antifa Guy who was protecting protesters from the cops in full riot gear. Did we mention he is seven feet tall. And dressed in all black. And looks like the kind of guy who would carry you on his back to safety during the next civil war without saying a single thing.

Adjacent to the Seven-Foot-Tall Hot Antifa Guy are resistance heroes like the Large Lieutenant Governor Guy From Pittsburgh Who Fucks. We couldn’t have gotten through this election year without these guys (or a steady stream of alcohol and muscle relaxers). Thanks!

Former Enthusiastic Child Laborer Guy

Politics can twist any guy into a pretzel, especially if he means to bolster the anti-Marxist stylings of washed-up TV dad Tim Allen. Whether @44_cubsfan was truly forced into physical labor at a young age as he claims is beside the point; what matters is that he’s a guy willing to stand up for the hard-working 10-year-olds content in their factory jobs. He wishes we could lose the red tape around child servitude. He has his lonely cause, and that makes him a guy.

Guy We Refuse to Learn About

You know what? Our brains are totally full of guys. We cannot possibly absorb the facts relating to another guy. Just gonna have to let this one go. Sorry, guy.

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Miles Klee

Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’

Alana Hope Levinson

Alana Hope Levinson is deputy editor, where she oversees features and special projects. She specializes in editorial strategy for new media ventures, with stints at Talking Points Memo, Medium and Fusion before joining MEL in 2017. Occasionally, if you ask nicely, she will write.