Bad Bunny and Kid Rock: A Tale of Two Masculinities

Equimundo and Young Men Research Project are partnering to examine the cultural forces shaping boys and men today.

As Bad Bunny electrified the Super Bowl LX audience on Sunday night, falling through roofs in his cream white suit and salsa dancing with Lady Gaga, Turning Point USA (TPUSA) hosted its own competing halftime show, where Kid Rock and a lineup of country artists rallied for “faith, family, and freedom.” Early reports show that Bad Bunny’s performance earned more than 135M views, the most-watched Super Bowl halftime ever, while the TPUSA concert received about 6.1M concurrent views on YouTube – Bad Bunny’s audience nearly 23 times larger.

Through the split screen, viewers heard not just two different languages but witnessed two fundamentally different images of masculinity.

This wasn’t Kid Rock’s first rodeo with the MAGA crowd.

Robert James Ritchie, taking the stage name Kid Rock, has spent the better part of the last decade ensconcing himself in conservative American circles, from his 2017 White House visit to his on-stage performance at the 2024 RNC. Presenting a cartoon-cowboy image, Kid Rock’s high-octane, staunchly anti-cancel-culture brand has built itself around provocation.

In 2023, he joined Candace Owens and other right-wing activists to boycott Bud Light, posting videos of himself firing at cases with a machine gun after the brand partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. His attacks have expanded to the LGBTQ+ community more broadly, once calling select concertgoers “f**gots,” and posting on Truth Social in 2022: “If you’re anti-gun, you don’t get to celebrate the 4th of July,” closing with “Enjoy your pride month. Pussy.”

His misogynistic, racist masculinity is no less brazen. In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview, he dismissed those who find Beyoncé attractive, replying, “Cool, I like skinny white chicks with big tits.” As Taylor Swift began to become more politically vocal in the first Trump presidency, he tweeted, to the applause of 105K likes, “Taylor Swift wants to be a democrat because she wants to be in movies … And it looks like she will suck the door knob off Hollyweird to get there.”

Following TPUSA’s announcement, lyrics from his 2000 song “Cool, Daddy Cool” have resurfaced, where Ritchie and Joe-C boast about liking girls “underage,” saying, “Some say that’s statutory but I say it’s mandatory.” The lyrics surely speak for themselves; considering the recent Epstein revelations, the depravity is even harder to shrug off.

Kid Rock’s unabashed misogyny is part and parcel of his rough-and-tumble, gun-toting, Confederate-flag-waving machismo. He’s ridiculed Bad Bunny for his native language and sartorial selections, reinforcing a rigid masculinity that polices femininity and queerness in the name of traditional values. But live from Levi’s stadium, the Latin superstar’s most avid fans and casual spectators alike witnessed the display of something altogether different.

Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, has also built a career around creativity and defiance.

But for the Puerto Rican phenomenon, his artistic provocation isn’t about humiliation, it’s about challenging the artificial boundaries that confine us, the social norms that harm us all.

The 31-year-old spent his childhood experimenting with music, drawing from the island’s rich history to craft his own blend of Latin trap and reggaeton. Raised in a working-class family in a territory exploited by the U.S., global stardom was the furthest thing from predetermined. But when fame arrived in the late 2010s, Martinez Ocasio refused to compromise his identity. And as he’s ascended to the highest heights, his dogged commitment to social justice has never wavered.

Watch Bad Bunny’s music videos or spot him on Rodeo Drive, and you might see painted nails, bright colors, floral or mariachi suits, and quite possibly some futuristic shades. In the music video for “Yo Perreo Sola,” he’s dressed in full drag, donning a red dress and fitted for prosthetic breasts. Ricky Martin has called Martinez Ocasio’s style “refreshing” for the industry. Bad Bunny has summed up his approach plainly: “I have always felt there [was] a part of me that is very feminine … But I never felt as masculine as the day I dressed up like a drag queen.” His fluid display of masculinity is all the more remarkable and rebellious within the context of reggaeton’s firmly machista history.

Martinez Ocasio’s unapologetic self-expression isn’t merely aesthetic, it’s central to his music and defense of the vulnerable. The “Yo Perreo Sola” music video features a neon sign in the background that reads “Ni Una Menos” (Not One [Woman] Less),” a phrase taken from grassroots Latin American feminist movements to protest gender-based violence. In a demonstration against domestic violence, the “Solo de Mi” video features a visibly bruised woman telling the camera, “I’m not yours or anyone’s, I’m only for myself.” And in February 2020, after transgender woman Alexa Negron Luciana was murdered in the streets of Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny used his Tonight Show platform to commemorate her, wearing a black shirt that read “They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt.”

His language echoes that of our organization, Equimundo, working to curb gendered violence. Speaking with Rolling Stone at the height of the COVID pandemic, Martinez Ocasio said, “As a human being, violence against women affects me. So I am going to do what is within my reach to [work] against that.”

Of course, not every young man hopes to emulate the flashy fashion of Bad Bunny. But there’s a clear hunger for more expansive expressions of masculinity. Young Men Research Project’s summer 2025 survey found that 32 percent of men aged 18-29 feel masculine in ways that are “sometimes different from the traditional definition,” and about one in ten have no interest in fitting the label at all. The 31-year-old offers one of infinite examples of how to break the mold and how to do so proudly.

In his halftime show, Bad Bunny celebrated the community and lives of those he grew up with. We saw working people harvesting sugarcane, working on electrical poles, and selling food on the street. We saw diverse families, and even a real wedding. There was no shortage of celebrity cameos, dancing crowds, and flashy clothes, the familiar markers of young male pop stardom. But the performance was infused with a sincere empathy and love that cuts against the “me-first” ethos of other male stars.

As his fame swells and his megaphone grows louder, the Latin star has waded deeper in political waters.

Following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, and exposed corruption across the Puerto Rican government, Bad Bunny joined Ricky Martin and hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans in a general strike to demand accountability and has since become an outspoken advocate of Puerto Rican independence.

Soon after Trump’s inauguration and the release of his newest album, he decided to exclude the U.S. entirely from the tour, not from lack of demand, but to protect his Latin fans from ICE harassment outside of stadiums. Most recently, knowing full well the already-simmering controversy over his selection by the NFL, he told the Grammys audience, “ICE out … If we are going to fight, we have to do it with love.” No love is lost on either side, as Trump bashed his Sunday performance as “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!”

In one of the more overtly political parts of the performance, Bad Bunny ended the show by shouting out the countries of the Americas, hoisting their flags, and holding up a football that said “Together, we are America.”

The two performers, wealthy, famous, platinum-selling, represent vastly different visions of what it means to be a man.

Yet while Bad Bunny and Kid Rock have both achieved immense levels of fame, the real story is how they’ve spent the concomitant cultural capital. One has used his fame to punch down, to propagate hate, to advance a cartoonish and tired masculine ideal. The other models masculinities of creativity, swagger, and multitudes, with the strength to stand up for community, uniting an audience under the banner: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

And on Sunday night, only one of these visions took center stage.