As an erstwhile Brooklyn nanny who spent all my college summers caring for small children – or, to be honest, rifling through their parents’ kitchen cabinets for organic snacks while the children in question were sleeping – I like to think I’m fairly adept at differentiating between different dad archetypes. There’s the kindly Midwestern dad, the overly flirty still-married dad (bro, I’m sorry about the less-than-ideal path your life and marriage have taken, but hitting on the 19-year-old hauling your kid to Gymboree officially makes you a scumbag), and, of course, that rarest of things: the sad, hot divorced dad, who manages to combine handsomeness with a slightly downtrodden energy that makes you long to heal him.
Ben Affleck can most definitely lay claim to the “sad” part of that moniker, at least if the ongoing rumours about the demise of his marriage to Jennifer Lopez are to be believed, but am I crazy to find him… somehow hotter now that he’s publicly Going Through It™ enough to sport a faux hawk and a Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt? (I won’t even mention the motorcycle.) The faux hawk on its own isn’t doing a lot for me, but somehow, the hair and the shirt have conspired to create a vision of a guy whose pain is vivid, obvious, and – sorry to be a ghoul – strangely attractive.
Pre-faux-hawk, Affleck was handsome, sure, but between the Seattle-goes-Silicon-Valley flannel and the close crop, he’s not serving up anything you couldn’t find at any school drop-off line in the country. Affleck with the faux hawk and band tee, though, is clearly a man on a mission, and that mission is trouble; am I deeply damaged for being a little bit into it? I don’t want to make light of the man’s pain, but if I could find it within myself to cheer on J Lo for getting her Nancy Meyers girl summer on in the Hamptons (as, of course, I could; that’s all I want for anyone I love, and the star of Maid in Manhattan most definitely falls into that category), it feels borderline sexist not to celebrate the deranged, slightly depressing sexiness of Affleck’s new look. King, let me know if you need someone to watch your kids while you go out for a cheer-up cup of Dunkin’ with the boys!
