soft boy

English

Noun

soft boy (plural soft boys)

1. Alternative form of softboy
   • 2008, Martin Ashley, Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers, page 37:

     Mac an Ghaill (2002) raises the intriguing possibility that the majority of boys are soft boys, and that masculinity scholars have yet to develop the vocabulary and means of analysis to tackle this.

   • 2015, Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, Tal Peretz, Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women:

     Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Urbana, Illinois, Craig Norberg-Bohm was “always a soft boy, always more sensitive. I was afraid of the guys who were harder."

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see soft,‎ boy.
   • 2013, Elisabetta Girelli, Montgomery Clift, Queer Star, page 33:

     Steven Cohan highlights the suggestive qualities of Red River's dominant narrative, the opposition between the radically different masculinities Clift and Wayne represent: "the highly charged context between the soft boy and the hard man in Red River dramatizes such a shift in the mainstream culture's demands upon masculinity".