For just $399, you too can have robot Kylie Jenner tell you the UV index from inside a natty pair of cat-eye specs. The Kardashian princess and makeup mogul has seen fit to expand her business empire — already worth upwards of $700 million — by “collabing” with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to release the Starfire Kylie Edition AI glasses, available in three tasteful colorways, with Kylie’s own voice used for the embedded AI assistant. The product’s six microphones and in-built camera with 3K ultra-HD video quality allows you to discreetly capture, record and post anything and everything you do over the course of your day. Welcome to the future, diva!

My guess is that for Meta, recruiting Kylie is less about shifting stock than detoxifying its brand. The tech giant must know that women the world over are highly — and rightly — suspicious of covert recording devices. Its glasses were first released in 2021 in a collaboration with Ray-Ban; since then, public surveillance has well and truly Metastasized. To date, more than nine million pairs of Meta glasses have been sold; growing demand means the company is considering producing 20 million by the end of this year. 

Remember: this is the company — alongside Google Glass — which gave the world the “glasshole”, the marauding wanker who craftily records interactions with women on the street for his own, often nefarious, purposes. In recent years there has been an explosion in junk internet content involving “Karen” interactions, or pervy shots of scantily clad women tumbling out of nightclubs — a 27-year-old man was arrested in 2024 for doing exactly this in Manchester — made to be clipped and posted to social-media sites as thinly veiled softcore porn. In the Manchester case, police did not clarify what sort of device the man used, but the victims reported being recorded “without their knowledge of consent”. While such behavior can often be blamed on the ubiquity of camera phones, covert devices — including glasses — compound the ability to film by stealth. 

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Another contemptible breed of glasshole is the YouTube “auditor”: a content creator who films himself testing whether public officials — police officers, government employees etc — respect his “legal rights”. These insufferable jobsworths, most notoriously the blogger Charles Veitch, go around deliberately provoking people in uniforms, or haranguing low-level staffers who have nothing to do with policy, for the sake of a viral clip or two. The alibi, as with most public recording these days, always appeals to a flimsy notion of the “right to record” — broadly true in any public space unless another law, location rule or civil right cuts across it. In the case of harassment or stalking — impulses which propel many of these viral videos — the right to record simply does not hold. I knew it was bad when my own dad appeared in the background of one of Veitch’s auditing videos, minding his own business outside his local bank branch. If the sleepy high streets of the East Midlands aren’t safe, where is? 

Should the “right to record” be exercised so relentlessly? Obviously, emphatically not. Consent in these cases is asymmetrical: the glasses-wearer opts in, and the rest of us are involuntarily recruited. It is highly disturbing for the act of recording no longer to look like a weirdo shoving a phone in your face, but for it to be very likely taking place all the time, undetectably and as a matter of course. Low-level paranoia seems the only possible result. There is strong evidence that this recording technology is being gleefully taken up by a new cohort of ill-intentioned men — including a BBC investigation released in January which unearthed “hundreds” of videos of women who had been covertly filmed on Meta glasses. Many of them were “bombarded” with creepy messages after footage of them was posted to social media. In a lip-service attempt to make video-recording obvious, Meta has installed a white light on its glasses to tell us when we’re being filmed or photographed. Yet the archetypal glasshole will simply put a piece of black duct tape over the light — an unforeseeable outcome. 

Nowhere has the scourge of men secretly recording women been so sorely felt as in Japan. There, upskirting and cameras hidden in women’s loos have instilled low-level dread into everyday life; as a result, smartphone manufacturers are required to build a shutter sound into camera applications which cannot be turned off, so that people always know when they are being snapped. In the West, if Kylie’s Meta glasses are anything to go by, the trend seems to be moving away from making devices obvious: these fashion-forward frames look like something you’d pick up in Urban Outfitters, not the shadowy shelves of Perves R Us. Yet smart glasses stealthify content-creation by design: you don’t need to point a phone, nor even swipe to open your camera; filming is as simple as looking at the subject, then murmuring “Hey Meta, start recording” or silently pressing the “capture” button. The result is to make the social act of surveilling your peers as frictionless as possible, while minimizing the warnings to others that anything they do could be broadcast to the world. 

To those who protest that if women feel comfortable dressing or acting certain ways in public, they have nothing to fear in appearing online, it’s worth remembering that a video does not have to be pornographic to be fetishistic or grim. We know that peeping through a keyhole is violating — but would you feel any less violated if someone zoomed in on your body on the bus? To many of us, being filmed at all feels like a transgression. Regardless of the context, it is impossible to predict how footage could be edited and used. In 2024, two Harvard students connected Meta Ray-Bans to a facial-recognition system which instantly found the personal information of strangers on the street. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to conceive of bad-actors using these details to disarm targets or gain their trust. 

Meta probably hopes that by bringing in a fave of female pop culture, it can whitewash these realities and make women more comfortable with living in a fishbowl. Making such devices not only acceptable but cool makes resistance seem uncool. Selling these devices under the innocuous banner of feminine content creation is a cynical stab at removing our defensive instincts. You’re not the obvious subjects of this technology, gals — you’re its users, and you’re empowered! For Kylie, who has been featured on reality television in her own home since she was a child, the intrusion of cameras and microphones into daily life may not seem such a problem. For the rest of us, who have not had a desire for privacy whittled out of us since childhood, it should.

The problem goes beyond the gratification of the common-or-garden pervert. The constant paranoia of being captured doing something outrageous, or embarrassing, or accidental, or ridiculous is already warping the texture of public life. For those of us who spend hours watching videos of people falling over on TikTok, that feeling has come to saturate any time we spend in the outside world. Any perceived infraction is fair game for filming: dressing poorly, having the wrong political views, perhaps even having an annoying sneeze. Nobody is safe. What does it mean not only to fear slipping on a banana peel in front of 20 pedestrians, but to fear footage of said slip being broadcast to the entire world in an instant? 

Privacy in public — to the extent that your every move might not become a viral video — is a value worth defending. If we let it slip, then none of us, man, woman or child, will ever again feel comfortable going about our business at the gym, the supermarket or on the train. The unguarded moments of being sloppy at the pub, or groggy on the commute, or gormless in the yogurt aisle, will no longer be our own; we’ll become as straight-backed and meek as a Victorian child always in range of the schoolmaster’s cane. Err, and you’ll find yourself the star of a “Karen compilation”. The more we accept the rollout of these devices as normal, the more we all passively consent to the public space becoming a de facto content studio. Unless we shame those who use these devices in public, we submit to becoming performing monkeys. I don’t remember opting into that. Do you?

Within hours, the Metropolitan Opera and others posted pointed response videos, and media critics and TikTokers decried him as an “absolute fool” or a “closet Kardashian.” Some commentators even floated the notion that Chalamet had somehow talked himself out of Best Actor, and somewhere on social media, a meme circulated titled “How to Lose an Oscar in 10 Days.” Others angrily recirculated the young actor’s comments from Vogue’s December 2025 cover story, in which Chalamet described watching an interview with someone “bragging” about not having children and called it “bleak,” adding that “procreation is the reason we’re here.” On Tuesday, the BBC wondered aloud if “Hollywood golden boy Timothée Chalamet lost his shine.”

Yet Chalamet was right on the money — on both counts: the high culture of old is truly in its death throes, and there is nothing particularly noble or interesting about being childless. The controversy tells us less about his Oscar chances than about the culture’s growing discomfort with the newly bold, distinctly masculine version of Timothée Chalamet.

Consider what Chalamet represented to a certain slice of liberal millennials in the 2010s. From roughly the time he starred in the gay romance Call Me By Your Name (2017) through his donning of ill-fitting Willy Wonka garb in 2023, Chalamet served as the patron saint of the soft-boi era of masculinity. He was wispy, gentle-featured, androgynous in his fashion choices, conspicuously unthreatening, and seemingly designed to be appreciated by the female gaze without demanding anything uncomfortable in return. These qualities also made him the right choice to play Paul Atreides in the first installment of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy, released in 2021, which depicts the sci-fi protagonist in the soft-boi phase of his journey — before tragedy makes a man out of him.

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Chalamet cried beautifully on screen. Like Harry Styles, he wore pearls and ruffled blouses to red carpets without apology and seemed like someone who might carry Rebecca Solnit books in his “The Future Is Female” tote. Critics loved him. Feminist publications swooned for him. The industry adored him for embodying a certain vision of what sensitive, non-threatening maleness could look like.

The soft-boi era emerged from a moment when the cultural critique of bratty and boorish male behavior had widened into suspicion of all masculinity. “The Patriarchy” was treated as an omnipresent force, lurking in corporate offices and smoke-filled boardrooms, sure, but also in frat houses, subways, and in the suspicious motives of men both powerful and ordinary. Today’s man-spreaders would become tomorrow’s C-suite tyrants, trading promotions for sexual favors — or at least, keeping the office AC way too cold.  

“Bro” became a knowing insult, and the language of feminist theory spilled from Tumblr and gender-studies seminars into mainstream culture — the campus-to-Condé Nast pipeline. In the liberal professional world, especially, the ideal man was portrayed as sensitive, meek, and seeking apologies or consent for nearly everything he did. The soft-boi was less a man than a customer-service version of one.

The drastic vibe shift of the mid-2020s has been well-documented. With the decline of #MeToo and “peak woke,” the soft-boi began to be derided as the “performative male”: the man whose sensitivity was seen as a self-righteous personal-branding exercise rather than what, in liberal Millennial culture, was deemed allyship. Starting in 2024, the backlash culminated in Performative Male contests, in cities and college campuses where men dressed in oversized cardigans and sipped matcha while making land acknowledgments or talking about how they loved “queer spaces.” Gen-Z men’s backlash to their ultra-woke elders began to be reflected in lifestyle choices, especially in the emergence of two distinct types: churchgoing trads who want children; and resentful caricatures of the old versions of manhood: Andrew Tate and Barstool-brained wing of crypto gambling, lookmaxxing, podcast swagger, and overt misogyny worn almost proudly. Think of it as holy versus unholy. 

Chalamet, however, has drifted into a third lane. No longer a boy wonder at age 30, he’s looking less like a Parisian art-film star. He has been photographed in streetwear and baseball caps, guest-starring in rap videos and confidently appearing on ESPN football broadcasts. And he’s dating Kylie Jenner, a figure overtly, even aggressively feminine enough to demand a properly masculine counterpart — her exes are mostly rappers. He is now laden with swag, as the kids used to say. It’s unclear whether he sensed the seismic shift in the culture wars and made a market correction or simply evolved or matured with age. But the upshot is that these days, the king of Performative Males is performing a different species of man.

This new persona is interesting because he’s neither Tate nor Matt Walsh; neither a cartoon reactionary, a chest-thumping podcast bro, nor a trad husband looking for a wife with whom to attend a Latin Mass. He isn’t particularly religious or political. He became something unexpected and, in its own way, more old-fashioned: an unapologetic striver. At the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards, accepting the best-actor award for the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Chalamet openly declared that he was “in pursuit of greatness” and wanted to be “one of the greats.” It was one of those rare celebrity lines that sounded both faintly absurd and refreshingly honest, something you’d hear from professional athletes, not artists. Some bristled at the fact that he’d violated the current code of prestige modesty, in which everyone is supposed to present success as an accidental side effect of sincerity.

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This attitudinal shift has been reflected in his recent work. In A Complete Unknown, his Dylan is a difficult young man shaped by ego, self-invention, opportunism, and a refusal to remain defined by the people who loved him first. His mid-1960s Dylan goes electric, over and against the objections of his fanbase, essentially telling the folk world that their ownership of him was not his problem. And then came Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet plays a swaggering, self-mythologizing table-tennis prodigy — a film explicitly about the American drive for greatness, for dominance, for being the best at something even when the something in question is defiantly small, like ping-pong.

The film isn’t uncritical of this drive. That’s the point. Marty director Josh Safdie uses Chalamet’s character to examine the specifically American pathology of wanting to be legendary and how ambition curdles into ego, how ego can hurt the people around you, and how the pursuit of mastery isolates those whom it elevates. It is a complicated film about a complicated type. Both movies ask whether you can separate the art from the artist, and whether greatness can be pursued without vanity and collateral damage. The critics now writing their concern pieces about Chalamet are, without realizing it, providing a one-note answer to those questions: no, and they’d prefer you stop asking.

Ironically, this controversy is a bizarre mirror image of the time when actresses were tut-tutted by male critics for being messy, outspoken, and lacking a demure personality. That dynamic had a name — the difficult woman — and we got reasonably good at recognizing it. We are less practiced at recognizing its male obverse. This time, it has to do with the specific cultural discomfort that arises when a man who was useful as a symbol of sensitive, non-threatening masculinity starts suggesting that he is no longer interested in being a symbol of softness and passivity at all. That he wants to be what history once called a man.

What comes next is uncertain. Chalamet may or may not win the Oscar on Sunday. The ballet controversy broke too late to affect the vote, and his awards momentum had already dwindled before any of this. But regardless, in today’s American culture — one that endlessly sermonizes about art, authenticity, and excellence but is unnerved when a straight male star hungers for it — here’s hoping that the new Chalamet-ism endures.