The dream man? Well, he's tall, dark, handsome, and...wicker. In case you hadn't heard, having a boyfriend is kind of embarrassing now; they ruin your birthday, and can behave appallingly. No wonder, more women today are "chronically single" and would rather date a basket than a man.
Ok, obviously not really. But the new trailer for Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson's comedy Wicker suggests that, at this point, we're not too far off from pining after men made of rattan.
In case you haven't seen it, the trailer teases a film in which Olivia Coleman, playing a grimy fisherwoman, asks Peter Dinklage, playing the local basket weaver, to fashion her a husband of wicker. He weaves up a storm and produces a woven creation that looks an awful lot like Alexander Skarsgård in sexy basket form, complete with entwined plaited wooden abs and a thick head of raffia hair.
He and a rather giddy Coleman quickly tie the knot and proceed to have a lot of raunchy sex. (Don't think too much about the splinters.) In between all of the sex, he is sweet, stoic, and utterly besotted, saying things like, "You are the reason I live and breathe." The local women watch on in part-horror, part-awe, part-envy — "I heard that he's as strong as a tree and just as hard!" — while their male partners scoff and guffaw, complaining that "men are not like that!"
The girls that get it, get it. "TikTok fyp (for you page) is full of women thirsting over wicker baskets ??" someone wrote on X. "I didn't have me thirsting over a hot fictional man made of wicker on my bingo card, but here we are!" another TikTok video was captioned. Even IKEA has gotten in on the action, while Etsy has seen searches for 'personalised/custom wicker baskets' skyrocketing by +2,664% in July. "Pop culture has a way of giving us unexpected new design cues, and the buzz around this fall’s most talked-about movie trailer has already given ‘husband material’ a whole new meaning," says Etsy’s Trend Expert Dayna Isom Johnson.
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And this sexy basket isn't the only homemade man getting women worked up. Last year's Frankenstein saw Jacob Elordi playing Frankenstein's creature. Instead of wicker, he was fashioned of a sickly blue patchwork of off cuts from decaying corpses, but, nonetheless, people were into it. “Somebody sedate me," one TikTok video caption read. "It's not a hear me out, it's a hold me back," another fan wrote. Wicked Part II also saw Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba transforming her boyfriend into a man of straw. He wasn't an immediate hit—and initially drew comparisons to Ryan Reynolds—but a subsection of the internet still found themselves drawn to him. "I personally think that Jonathan’s Fiyero looks WAY HOTTER as his Scarecrow form than he did as a human!" one wrote on Reddit. Another added a gif that simply said: "Would."
@elitereading ♬ original sound - laura (elitereading)
Why Are Women Getting Horny For The Homemade Man?
It's no secret that heterosexual women are becoming disillusioned. The disappointing reality is that being in a relationship with a (human) man comes with a host of practical and emotional drawbacks.
Romance aside, coupling up with a man often means taking on extra labour, both domestically and emotionally. Working women take home an average of £631 less than their male counterparts each month. Meanwhile, the division of domestic labour remains heavily imbalanced, with women undertaking an average of 26 hours of unpaid work per week compared to 16 hours for men. Add to this the fact that women tend to be saddled with the bulk of the mental load in their heterosexual relationships, tasked with remembering dates, chores and just about everything else. How many women do you know who remember to call their male partner's mum on her birthday, because he's never had to?
All of this can lead to resentment, and even to women falling out of love with their partners. During a long relationship, women reportedly fall out of love at a rate of 55.2%, while only 9.2% of men experience the same decline in affection, according to a 2024 study. “Women more often express frustration about communication and the division of labour,” the study leader said at the time. “And men more often are concerned about a sexual relationship and wanting less frustration from their partner.”
As dating men becomes more disheartening and, at times, disempowering, many progressive women are starting to feel not only pessimistic, but self-conscious about admitting to their romantic preference for men. It's a phenomenon known as "heteropessimism", coined by Asa Seresin in a New Inquiry piece.
Heteropessimism describes a "vocal rejection of heterosexual culture and the heterosexual experience by people who find themselves in heterosexual relationships or desiring people of the opposite sex and gender," says Dr. Luke Brunning, a philosopher specialising in intimacy, love, and relationships and Associate Professor in Applied Ethics at the IDEA ethics centre in the University of Leeds. "They might express frustration, embarrassment, or regret that they are straight in an attempt to distance themselves from these structures and experiences and the expectations [that come with them]."
The fact of the matter is, patriarchal rhetoric and patterns are hard-wired into our culture. It's impossible to find men who have managed to avoid soaking it up just a little. Even men who take pride in being feminists, men who actively try to extricate themselves from the deep-seated patriarchal model, often find that the biases, habits, and thought processes are too deeply encoded to shift. The problem with so many straight men in the dating world is that, whether they like it or not, they grew up in a world that upheld patriarchal values: a world that taught them time and time again that being in a heterosexual relationship was inherently imbalanced.
"I think the problem is that there can very often be a big disconnect between the changes in superficial things like attitude and belief versus the actual changes in behaviour and sentiment and feeling," Brunning says. "It's easy for people to think about how they're showing up in relationships, to think about things like equal distribution of housework or the way that they treat each other. But actually, evidence shows that even those couples that are self-avowed feminists, that are striving for equal distribution, it's not equal. If you're in a relationship with somebody who's avowedly feminist, but also you sense they're subtly not pulling their weight, then that little bit of dissonance can creep in."
The Ultimate Fantasy
In the real world, a straight woman's best hope is a man who is doing his best to unlearn his encoded patterns; to show up and work on it. But in the fantasy world? What better than a man who was never exposed to them in the first place? A man who was literally made from scratch and plopped onto the world with zero assumptions about his supposed superiority and no expectations about what he should contribute to a relationship?
"It's the ultimate fantasy, isn't it?" says Brunning. "To have the features that you want without the social imprinting. To have a romantic sexual experience that meets your needs, satisfies you, but isn't accompanied by the baggage that often goes with it. It's playing with these ideas of desocialised masculinity."
These stories also provide a "safe space" for exploring the seemingly incongruent tension between the attraction to men and how it butts up against our dissatisfaction with modern masculinity. "There are aspects of masculinity that people find very desirable—that they want incorporated into their sexual lives—but they may not want incorporated into other aspects of their lives. [These stories] provide a space to portray those tensions. To find them funny and amusing, stimulating, make them safe, exaggerate them," explains Brunning.
The sexy basket, the decaying corpse creature—they are refreshingly untouched by the world's toxic patriarchal modelling. Plus, they're hot! And what could be more attractive than that?
