Last year, Bella Hadid was snapped grinning from ear to ear at the rodeo in Arlington, her wide-brimmed cowboy hat casting a shadow over eyes fixed on her boyfriend, cutting horse champ Adan Banuelos.
That night, her leather pants, silver rings, and meticulously beaded top were the last whispers of her high-fashion roots — her heart was all cowboy now.
In fact, longtime horse girl Hadid appeared to be living out the plot of “Cowboy Take Me Away.” It’s a 1999 song by The Chicks that informed the sexual development of basically everyone ever, in which a rugged man sweeps our narrator away to the freedom of the wide-open plains. Hadid may be living the dream, but she’s far from the first to fall for it. That fantasy — the allure of a cowboy and the promise of escape — has endured for generations, woven into country songs, romance novels, and pop culture alike. But while sexual fantasies seem mysterious, they reflect broader culture. That the cowboy endures as a symbol of sexual and romantic fantasy reveals deep truths about contemporary American culture.
In a world where male power increasingly looks like Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, is there any surprise we’ve got pictures of the Marlboro man tucked into our proverbial sock drawer?
The myth of the cowboy looms far larger than the actual profession. The era of itinerant cowboys driving cattle herds through Texas lasted roughly 25 years, but the cowboy in our hearts has been around far longer. He is founded on the duality of loner and protector. As a mythological figure, the cowboy encodes American values, both real and aspirational: hard work, independence, courage, honor, and freedom. In a Reddit thread on r/Cowboys last year, someone asked “why cowboys are so attractive,” and the answers spoke volumes. “What does it for me is when a bigger, stronger guy can be gentle to the people and animals around him,” wrote one Reddit user. “Also that I like good, honest labor.”
With cred like that, it’s no wonder the American cowboy has been a popular leading man in romance novels since the 1950s.
“With the cowboy, you get a version of an American male archetype — an individualist, and pretty self-sufficient, and something of a loner, usually. But, very capable,” says Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, in an interview with The Barbed Wire. Where other romantic heroes need to be healed, the cowboy needs to be tamed.
Ruggedness is a form of sensuality. This is a man who knows how to use his hands, whether he’s repairing a fence or running his fingers over your collarbone. He can hoist a bale of hay or lift you onto the counter in the kitchen of his humble-but-charming ranch house. He can ride and fix and shoot, which means you can feel safe — a necessary precondition for sexual desire.
All of this helps to explain why the cowboy fantasy is alive today — 135 years after the U.S. Census Bureau closed the frontier. Glen Powell has had an excellent few years, thanks to a modern, sensitive twist on Texas cowboy swagger; basically, he looks like he could change your tire and then whip up a candlelit dinner. Yellowstone is one of America’s most popular television shows, suggesting we are just never getting sick of cowboy stories. Meanwhile, TikTok buzzes with cowboy thirst traps — guys saddling horses and tipping their hats with devastating charm — a more R-rated kind of cottagecore content. Last week, Style Race published a headline claiming “NBA Star Bruce Brown Is Living Every Man’s Cowboy Style Fantasy.” Women want them, and men want to be them. And let’s not forget gay cowboys.
At the heart of the cowboy fantasy lies a longing for a simpler time when we were more attuned to our senses. The lyrics of “Cowboy Take Me Away” give little airtime to the cowboy himself. Natalie Maines sings of his “simple smiles,” but the song spends more time describing who she will be with her knight in shining spurs. “I wanna touch the earth / I wanna break it in my hands / I wanna grow something wild and unruly,” sings Maines, illustrating an alternate future reality where her only pillows are bluebonnets and her only blanket is the starry sky. The fantasy is ultimately about being swept away to a life where Maines, too, works with her hands and feels connected to the Texas land.
In 2020, Maines doubled down on the urgency of the cowboy fantasy with “Texas Man.” The song is more overtly sexual — with references to bodies tangled up together all night — but her gaze is still firmly fixed on the narrator, who longs for a man to match her: “If you got the strength I do / Then sign me up / If I’m not too much for you / Then sign me up, sign me up,” trills Maines. Maines’ messy split from husband Adrian Pasdar was fuel for The Chicks’ album Gaslighter and, one imagines, this song. On the other side of divorce and infidelity, the cowboy becomes the sexual object of “Texas Man,” symbolic of honor and capability. Maines might be older and wiser, but she’s still yearning.
And it feels so good to yearn. It’s bittersweet. It contains both the discomfort of lack and the deliciousness of anticipation. “Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part from its lack,” observed Anne Carson in Eros: The Bittersweet. There is a naturally arising tension between absence and attainment. Who better to embody this ambivalence than the cowboy? He barely exists. Because the cowboy is anachronistic, he contains an innate and stimulating tension between past and present. Consider Hadid, whose relationship with Banuelos pulled her out of her cosmopolitan orbit and into his fifth wheel. (Banuelos reported that she took to trailer life like a champ).
Humans are built to revel in contrast, or so says the original thought leader on desire, Sigmund Freud. “We are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts,” he noted in Civilization and Its Discontents. No matter who you are, the cowboy’s lifestyle — barren of technology, digital devices, and guys using AI to craft messages on dating apps — is probably different from your own. That’s true whether the cowboys of your fantasies look like Johnny Cash, or a cattle ranch harem à la Four Ranchers’ Bride: A Reverse Harem Romance.
And while Hadid might have taken easily to Banuelos’ unusual lifestyle, willingness to live in a trailer isn’t necessary for fantasizing about cowboys. Fantasy is less about what we want so much as it’s about creating a context that allows us to be a different, particular version of ourselves. Early romance novels offered women an opportunity to explore the feelings of passion or desire that were discouraged in respectable society.
While women today are no longer forbidden from experiencing passion and desire, the fantasies shaping romance have evolved. In an era where sexual liberation is the norm, it’s not an absence of desire that defines modern yearning; it’s the search for a competent, respectful man who offers both emotional and physical security. On TikTok and Instagram, women have been testifying that there are no good men left — by which they mean, no men they can respect as their equals.
“I feel like men aren’t sending us their best people,” tweeted one frustrated user in 2018.
That’s because their best people are cowboys.
That’s more or less a restatement of the conflict driving Paula Cole’s 1996 single “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” in which John Wayne and a happy ending on the prairie are presented in opposition to Cole’s actual partner — who drinks too much and rarely does the dishes. The obstacle to Cole’s happy relationship is psychological; as much as she wants to, she just doesn’t respect her man.
Today, that incompetence is often fused with power. Men like Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, and Trump control the world without commanding our respect. In a January opinion for The Guardian, Rebecca Shaw expressed the strange sensation of both fearing and hating men she doesn’t respect: “I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice — but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.” Between them, Musk and Trump have 19 children with more than six women, and Musk is currently under fire for being “a deadbeat dad” who is ignoring his ex-partner’s pleas to help their sick child. Musk, it seems, has been too busy cheating at video games to be much of a dad.
The cowboy fantasy offers relief from that cognitive dissonance because the cowboy is perennially capable and worthy of respect. Within the cowboy fantasy, the fantasizer can feel safe relinquishing control. Because he is rugged, she can soften.
The cowboy, then, isn’t just a romantic fantasy — he’s a reaction.
When the men with real power feel unserious or unworthy, the cowboy remains a figure of competence, restraint, and quiet strength. No wonder, then, that he endures. In an era of disillusionment, the fantasy of a man on horseback, riding off into the sunset, still feels like the surest way out.