Is Tony Soprano really that alluring, or are we trying to say something else entirely?

An investigation into an investigation

WTF is so hot about Tony Soprano?

Everyone is talking about Catherine Shannon’s recent investigation into the allure of Tony Soprano. Men didn't get it, she said, typically citing his notorious philandering ways (and fatness) among the more obvious lying, thieving, and murdering required of him in his job in “waste management.”

Shannon’s essay painted a picture of a man who was, by all accounts, pretty perfect in his behavior toward his family and his responsibilities to them and his wife (notwithstanding the ever-present exceptions of the cheating, lying, thieving, and murdering).

The essay was so convincing that it made me immediately go see what was so great about this murderous mob boss and determine whether or not I would, as someone later asked, date him in spite of all the other shit.¹ I hadn’t seen more than the first episode before this, but I was suddenly very interested in discovering for myself what was so attractive about Tony Soprano.

One might assume, at first, that Shannon is going to talk about the power, money, and cars or whatever that are associated with Mafia dudes and are supposed to be universally sexy or something, but she explicitly says that isn’t the case:

A few men will concede that Tony is attractive to women, but only because he’s “powerful.” Wrong again. This is only a small part of the story. Tony’s real allure is not related to his success, if you could even call it that. All the talk of sigma, rizz, yap, and aura, and no one knows it when they see it.

This isn’t about being “alpha” or “dominant.” It’s about loving attentiveness—thinking about the other person before yourself.

She goes on to explain some foundational things that most women can be counted on to want from men, and that they complain that men just don’t seem to ever understand no matter how they explain it. Referring to men's feelings about these basic “boxes” that women want men to check off:

[They lament] that women (1) have too many of them, (2) have impossible standards for each, or (3) “don’t know what they want.” None of this is true. What most women want is so foundational, so basic, it’s actually rather hard to explain.

The scattered list of the attractive qualities Tony allegedly possesses are varied, but they tend to orbit around one basic attribute: competence. I told a story about this not too long ago.

What Do Women Really Want?

In my own essay, I concluded that the sexiest qualities a man can have are confidence and competence, and that it doesn’t really matter exactly what you are competent in, just that you are, and that you are confident about it, because we really like that:

I think that if I had to come up with an answer on the spot for my original question (what do women want?) I’d boil it down to confidence and capability. Chris fighting Sean wasn’t really about the fact that he fought him; it was more about the self-assuredness he had in his ability do so, and the responsibility he felt for taking care of a situation that was irritating the hell out of everyone. And, looking back, the fact that Chris never really hit Sean and instead used his considerable strength to restrain, instead, probably allowed me to more easily justify the aggression I witnessed and my bewildered and heightened attraction after the fact.

The irony of this story being about my ex-boyfriend fighting his roommate is not lost on me, but anyway, Shannon concludes pretty much the same thing:

The Sopranos is mostly about Tony solving one problem after another. First it’s Johnny Sack, then it’s the air conditioning, then it’s Janice, then it’s A.J., then it’s the Feds, then it’s his mother (well, it’s always his mother). There is nothing more unattractive than a man who is incompetent or incapable of solving problems. Women need to know you got it. Tony gets things done. He knows how to handle himself. I pray for the women who have to send their husbands to the grocery store with a picture of what scallions look like.

This is true about Tony, for sure; he’s definitely a guy who’ll get shit done — at work. He takes care of all that stuff and then some. But what do any of those things have to do with him as a husband or even part-time secret boyfriend?

Next is basic affection and attraction. Tony doesn’t just love women, he genuinely likes them. This may seem like the very definition of a straight man, but there are plenty of men out there who barely conceal their hatred for women. When a man likes women, he enjoys their company. He asks them questions about themselves. He listens to their answers. He acknowledges them as human beings. […]

Tony might kill a guy and throw his body in the river, but he wouldn’t cold-shoulder you out of the conversation circle. You’ll notice he’s baseline attentive to almost all women in the show, whether they are an object of desire for him or not. For all of Tony’s faults with women—and there are plenty, he’s a real dog 97% of the time—he does genuinely like them.

It was rereading this part about halfway into my own viewing of the show that made me start wondering if I was watching a completely different series than the one the author was writing about.

Does Tony actually check any of those boxes, though?

Women everywhere will probably agree that they want a man who can protect and care for them and who is confident and attentive enough to her needs to be decisive. Not just someone to make money for her, but someone to trust and rely on. Money factors into it as long as things like shelter and medical care cost money, but it isn’t the end, nor is it ever enough. Women don’t all want to stay home and be pampered housewives, and most of us know that in this economy, it doesn’t even matter if we do because we probably have to work, regardless. And we probably have dreams of our own that we want to achieve, and they probably don’t revolve around his laundry. But women do want to know that the unspoken things that they are generally expected to do for their men — domestic work, childcare, sex, whatever — is going to be reciprocated proportionally.

And Tony doesn’t do jack shit.

Carmela explains exactly what the fuck is wrong with Tony while they’re separated, Carmela finally intent on divorcing him:

He’s a good dad, we can give him that, I guess, but really only because his kids are the only people he doesn’t treat with outright cruelty. Despite being a great problem solver at work, his efforts to do it in his marriage are half-assed and much of the time performed under obvious duress of the most transparently manipulative kind. He doesn’t do much in the domestic sphere other than make money for the family and show up to family functions to grill sausages.

I’ve been watching this show through the lens of “would I date this man,” and the number one reason why my answer is “absolutely not” as I have just finished the final episode is that he’s just so damned mean. And I’m not even talking about murdering his best friends or breaking unnecessary kneecaps and shit — when it comes to that, I see the mob shit more as an ethically self-contained unit. Most people on that side of the mob world have chosen their place in it, agreed to the terms, and usually have whatever it is coming to them.

What I mean is that he talks to his wife and his various mistresses like they’re contemptible idiots almost all of the time. If we’re only talking about Season One Tony like Shannon says in the footnotes, I really can’t see how we get the impression that he’s at all interested in women as people because most of what he does is cut them all down, call them names, and treat them like whores. He doesn't start showing positive, genuine, sustained, nonsexual interest in any women until later seasons (post-coma Tony is a noticeably improved character, at least in some ways). He’s nice to his daughter, but is that how low the bar is? Damn.

The rest of Tony’s overall personality is hardly worth mentioning because I think that his meanness is what’s so striking about his undesirability. It reminds me of when I was in my twenties and my friends and I would talk about dudes and relationships and dating and sex. As we started approaching “settling down” ages, we all dated with different goals in mind, but something I noticed about the women who were explicitly doing the financial hypergamy thing is that they were willing to put up with some of the most ludicrous shit in exchange for potential access to more money.

To back up a little, I’ve always been a little fired up about the hypergamy issue, mostly because it baffled me for so long, not believing I participated in it and not understanding why anyone, especially women, would want to. I didn’t know how to put it to words when I was younger, but I was always uncomfortable with the idea of men paying for things for me, and even more so with the idea of being in a relationship with a guy who made a lot more money than I did. I guess I thought I’d feel inadequate in some way, or that he’d expect things from me that money would make me feel obligated to give even if I didn’t want to. Maybe I was just insecure about not having an impressive career, myself, or being on a path to one.

Whatever it was, my tendency was not to look for someone with money and whatever “power” looked like in my world, but to find the perfect storybook romance with a compatible guy that I’d stay in love with forever. Money was an afterthought because being poor together was just one more possible ingredient in the romantic “us against the world” thriller I was looking to act out, and anyway, I already knew how to be poor. I also don't think I ever exactly had that transition from a casual dating mode to a settling down mode that I mentioned; I was usually in settling down mode, always in search of a soul mate. It needed to be romantic. Anything else seemed horribly unromantic to me, and maybe even a little deceptive before it occurred to me that men do exactly the same thing in their own superficial ways.

Why would any normal woman actually be attracted to Tony?

I always thought “marrying up” was for old-fashioned types and people who were already rich; it felt awkward and gauche to watch my fellow working-class acquaintances nakedly attempt the same thing, and to often disastrous results. One complained that her dude refused to go down on her. One complained that she never had orgasms with hers and then explained the mechanics of their sex life — she was basically describing banal, male-centric porn where the whole woman could be substituted for any random hole and no one would notice, and I was perplexed at how she didn’t see the connection. Another was straight out of a CoHo novel and ended up abused, isolated, and pregnant, pretty much the property of this psychopath she met online after exclusively filtering for rich guys.

These other women’s experiences only drove home the point to me that trying to date in such an “old-fashioned” way in modern times was not only pointless and unromantic, but also potentially dangerous. What good was money if the guy who had it was controlling and abusive? What kind of life even is that? How could you enjoy that money with someone's boot on your neck? And you were expected to fuck the asshole on top of it?

It’s a life that is attractive to someone who wants a traditional lifestyle but who wasn’t born into the kind of socioeconomic reality that assures an easy go of it. Someone for whom marrying within her own socioeconomic class ensures that she'll have to work and worry about money and resources for her family forever and who will do anything to avoid that stress. When you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint instead of a romantic or misogynistic one, it's frankly pretty sensible.

“Mob wives” are the quintessential kept women. What you see between them is a shared purpose: a cultural and religious imperative to birth and raise the next generation and take care of the family, but also The Family. They are given generous allowances to keep their families taken care of and themselves attractive, and they are incentivized to keep quiet and dumb about what their men do to protect themselves and their children. This also incentivizes a natural inclusivity among the wives and soon-to-be wives, keeping outsiders, those who couldn’t understand, and loose lips at bay. They're promised to be taken care of by The Family if, God forbid, something happens to their husbands (provided he is not a rat).

The kind of woman who has decided that she needs to marry a wealthy man at all costs has hopefully accepted those costs and knows exactly what she’s getting herself into. Those alluring qualities attributed to Tony — the ability to get things done, to make more than enough money, the financial generosity, the knowledge that your family is taken care of no matter what happens to your husband — could be enough to make his cold and dismissive behavior worthwhile to someone like that, if one is desperate enough.

The class differences are apparent in The Sopranos and in the mob wife archetype as a whole. No one really seems to come from “old money”; like the stereotype about “new money,” they tend to dress in a gaudy fashion — animal prints, fur coats, impossibly big hair, gold jewelry — drive flashy, expensive cars, and spend lavishly on entertainment to flaunt their wealth. While some of the women come from middle class backgrounds, none are already upper-class — at least not in a way that happened legally — and not culturally. No matter how many generations the families maintain their criminally-gained wealth, the aesthetic remains exactly the same.

Mob wives have a look and a vibe, and it’s not one usually associated with sophistication. Independently wealthy, high-class women aren’t usually the type to marry violent thugs; they aren’t desperate enough for the money to put up with it, and they tend to inherently believe they’re worth more than a low-class, chronically abusive man. And let’s be real, what kind of wealthy man is out looking for working class girls to rescue in this day and age? Not usually the kind from the romance novels inspiring the fantasies.

Are normal women actually attracted to men like Tony?

I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and say… I don’t even fucking know anymore, man.

There’s been some pushback to Shannon’s assertion that Tony is alluring.

Sadina A.

doesn’t hold back:

You don’t have a linear understanding of your own wants at all. In one sense, you claim that Tony Soprano is the man of dreams and then in the next, begin to describe an entirely different man to Tony fucking Soprano. What you want is an assertive man who’s a traditional breadwinner and a gentleman, and you’ve conflated that with a bald fat criminal who’s terrible to his wife and in general to the greater community & other women. You would never be with a man like Tony Soprano, you genuinely only like about 4 characteristics about him…

Your writing in this piece was non convincing, your ideas are childish and incomplete, your analysis of Tony as a character was moot. The people, namely women who agree with you are equally as trivial as your analysis. Painting Tony as a woman lover is proof you believe a man choosing to put his penis inside of you is the ultimate form of love & commitment. Your general recollection of the series and his character development are a projection of your desperation.

I can't speak for Shannon and what she'd do, but clearly plenty of women are interested in being with Tony Soprano. It is apparent in the show that not only do women fall all over themselves to get in his pants, but they lose their absolute shit when he leaves them, with the only one he actually seemed to like killing herself in a later season (and two others trying to or threatening to). Not to mention the legions of women apparently openly lusting after the fictional character here, today, in 2024. What this says about the state of dating in the modern world…

Anyway, all that said, I can’t help but agree with some of the points behind the (frankly unnecessary, good lord) vitriol in Sadina's note: this entire essay kind of just feels like projection. I am glad to have finally watched the series because it’s very good (the ending, though! What the hell did I just watch?), but what drove me to actually sit down and get started was that essay and all those familiar traits listed in such a recognizable way, about the kind of man that most of us would never expect to exhibit them, and I was surprised to see that the man accused of having them, well, actually doesn’t. Tony is so bizarrely the complete opposite of the way he’s portrayed in the essay about his allure that I am starting to wonder if the whole thing was just a big troll, not unlike Tony himself.

Stephen Bradford Long

also made a good point about what the commonly-held desire for a strong, capable man implicitly excludes: vulnerability or weakness.

Since men are human, they will at some point be most of the things this author decries in her article. They will despair; their courage will fail; their strength will crack; their attentiveness to detail will break. It’s impossible not to. And the question that is often burning in a man’s mind is “will I still have connection to the people I love most if I show them any of this?”

This is an excellent point that often flies under the radar in these discussions: at what point is normal human weakness allowed in a man if these are the criteria on which we're judging him? I don't mean to pick on Shannon specifically here, as I've obviously floated the same answers to “what women want” and it's a pretty well-known thing that women want since we say so all the damn time, but it's worth investigating.

One thing everyone seems to know about Tony Soprano even if they haven’t seen the show is that he’s seeing a therapist, something that is both unusual and also not exactly recommended for a mob boss. He’s depressed and anxious and he suffers panic attacks; his therapist puts him on Prozac and other anti-anxiety medication in addition to seeing him for talk therapy for the entire series, minus a few breaks here and there.

We learn later that he’s not the only one in The Family to have seen a psychiatrist and go on medication for their mental health, and the entire show is rife with examples of a macho sort of environment where men are expected to remain stoic and refrain from publicly showing any emotions that aren’t anger. When Tony's mother finds out he's been seeing a psychiatrist, she thinks it means he’s insane and psychologically weak, failing to recognize (or admit to) her own contribution to Tony’s ongoing mental health struggles.

The Sopranos depicts a world of exaggerated gender norms and stereotypes in the Italian machismo and womanizing of the mobsters and the materialism and helplessness of the housewives; of course men aren’t allowed to display vulnerability, just as the women aren’t allowed to display body fat² or a spine. All the negatives for each gender-based expectation are present in their world.

In Season 2, Episode 12, we see Janice, Tony’s sister, shoot and kill her mobster fiancé, recently released from prison, after he hits her in the face for sticking up for his son, who he suggests might be gay and isn't happy about it. It was one of the few times we see a woman strike back, literally, after she’s brutalized by one of the mafia men, for whom hitting their wives is seen as a natural and private affair as we learn when the older guys are reprimanding Christopher for hitting Adriana — before they're married. For all her faults, Janice — who left the family early and escaped to the west coast and is something of a left-wing hippie returning home — will not tolerate the abuse many of the other mob wives accept as part of the deal.

What is “normal,” anyway?

The Sopranos also exists in a world in which these old ways aren’t quite serving the younger generations — as Tony says in the first scene of the first episode where he’s meeting with Dr. Melfi for the first time,

It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that. I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

Not only are these old wise guys dealing with their job industry dying, they're dealing with what it means to die, themselves. What it means to be a man, an American man and an Italian-American man, in the new 21st century. They're struggling with changing attitudes on how to treat women and gay people and female bosses and whether or not their methods are too brutal or becoming obsolete, as we see in a scene where some of the guys are trying to extort an hourly employee from a coffee shop chain and are thwarted by corporate rules. They're struggling with concepts of loyalty and grieving for the lost of days of omerta.

They're also struggling with their health — their mental health and their physical health. An ongoing theme in The Sopranos³ is that of mortality and the fear, or the realization, of aging and death. The older men watch each other drop dead one by one from cancer and heart problems and strokes, the issues of old men that they haven't yet accepted they have become. This plagued even the youngest of the capos, Christopher, as you can see in his obsession with writing his memoirs and making a movie out of his life.

The Sopranos isn’t just about Tony and the deaths he causes — it’s a meditation on death and aging in general. The existential crises we deal with every day as we age and watch people we love get older and sicker, even the most powerful among us.

Are the money and power really irrelevant?

Going back to the earlier part of Shannon's essay where Shannon says that Tony's power is not what makes him so attractive:

A few men will concede that Tony is attractive to women, but only because he’s “powerful.” Wrong again. This is only a small part of the story.

I think The Sopranos is like any other movie or TV show about the mafia in that it glamorizes it then shows its dark side and the price the involved parties pay for the luxuries the lifestyle affords them — and how most stick around, anyway. And I think that the women, both fictional and real, who are attracted to Tony Soprano are, in fact, attracted to his power and his money. And contra Shannon, after finally watching this show, I do think that's the primary reason. You can see it in the behavior of him and his girlfriends in the show, and you can see it by the actual absence of any redeeming qualities in the man other than the ability to earn money while he easily fucks any woman who catches his eye (with a somehow still devoted wife at home).

You also hear it from Carmela herself when she tells him that she could even ignore the rampant infidelity if he'd just act loving to the family in the clip above of their “second-best fight.” Later, when Tony is in a coma, she tells Dr. Melfi that she wasn't sure if she loved Tony in spite of his job or because of it, referring to the lifestyle that the mob life has given her. She's conflicted; is she really as shallow as that would make her? Is she really a good person if she went into all of this knowingly, regardless of her justifications?

I really didn't want to believe this myself because I personally find the fact that anyone is attracted to men like Tony Soprano to be deeply embarrassing to my entire gender. Like, I've spent half my life trying to tell people that women aren't really like this, that we don't really want assholes and bad boys and that we do want men to be emotionally vulnerable and nice to us, but then something like this goes and blows my entire worldview out of the water.

The verdict

I literally cannot fathom being anything other than afraid of a man like Tony Soprano. He will protect his family and his goomars from other people, but there's no one to protect them from him. While he’s never actually hit any of the women in his life, he’s regularly physically rough enough with them that I couldn’t fathom wanting to stick around. That would just tell me he doesn’t actually like me, and what the fuck would I want with a man who doesn’t actually like me? That kind of explosive anger management problem just ain’t for me. That ever-present existential danger is just part of the mysterious allure of the man, I guess!

Even though I now suspect Shannon may have been high or maybe just ovulating really hard when she was writing that essay, I ran to HBO to watch that show so fast because she so thoroughly nailed what women actually do want, which is a guy who loves and protects them and their families and, maybe most importantly, does what he says he's gonna do. They just want to be able to rely on the man with whom they've chosen to spend their lives and raise their children. The sheer abundance of reels and TikToks that the algorithm feeds me about attachment styles and what's wrong with certain male behaviors in relationships tells me that these qualities are apparently in short supply nationwide, or are at least perceived to be by both single and partnered women alike. Of course I'm not being fed the men's side of the story in the algorithm these apps have cooked up for me, but I'm sure when they're actually getting anything relationship-related,⁴ it's just as bleak in regards to women and our own collective relational pathologies.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

There's an obvious personal and societal benefit to pursuing an above-board “traditional” lifestyle for those to whom it appeals, and right now, it's less possible for families to live it. Most people don't earn enough to comfortably support both adults in a relationship, let alone a whole family, in most parts of the country. Asian dudes are knocking it out of the park, though.

On the flip side, I think we lost something when we decided to try to mainstream everything. Turns out there is maybe a real benefit, both to oneself and to society, to being the black sheep, the eccentric, the outlier. What if we stopped both fighting the idea of (positive) marginalization and mainstreaming what makes it unique? What if we simply let people lie where they most comfortably fall and neither shame nor lavishly celebrate it, but rather treat it as simply being what it is? The counterculture used to be cool; now it arguably doesn't exist. Eschewing the tired old hypergamy expectations is not only necessary in a world where no one is making enough money, but it can also just be a thing that we let ourselves do if it comes naturally to us and not worry about it so much. But regardless of how we actually want to live our lives, there simply isn’t enough money in the hands of average people right now for everything to be possible.

It's easy to see why a man like Tony Soprano would seem attractive in this economy, but ladies, can we retain some standards? I think it's perfectly fine to want a man to be confident and able to provide for your family and protect you from danger if need be. I think it's healthy to admit that and not be ashamed, or let yourself be shamed, by those perfectly natural desires. But we don't need to accept actual contempt and abuse in exchange!

In my essay about what women want that I linked to above, I talked about how “what women want” usually boils down to confidence and competence, and that describes hypergamy in a nutshell. Money is the common token we use to represent what women evolutionarily want in a man, which is safety, good genes, and loyalty to protect the result of their genes. Money is an easy token because it buys those things, or otherwise guarantees them to a satisfactory degree.

Most women are probably going to want a man who seems ambitious, and capable of acting on that ambition. I leave the object of the ambition vague because, again, it doesn’t really matter. Women latch onto men with crazy dreams all the time. Women love to believe in the far-fetched goals of their husbands and do everything they can to help them, fully buying into that “us against the world” mentality. Women aren’t a pile of empty-headed, twitchy gold-diggers just waiting for a meal ticket; if we’re going to buy into the idea of evolutionary desires and reasoning for our sexual behaviors and mate selection, then it’s easy to see how, if a woman wants to be taken care of, she’s also going to be wired to want to help her man accomplish whatever it is that will help him take care of her and their offspring.

I also think it's worth noting that when I told my therapist that I was bewildered by the kind of women who put up with the worst of the Tony-like behavior and who are actively attracted to the men who possess it, he mentioned that being regularly attracted to that kind of abusive person is often a trauma response. But I feel like we all knew that.

I don’t think we’re really trying to say that Tony Soprano is attractive in any traditional sense; at least, I’m not. I think we’re trying to say that we like confidence and capability and guys who get shit done and treat us lovingly. Beyond that, precarious financial security isn't worth your safety and dignity and Tony Soprano does not actually exhibit any alluring qualities at all, in any capacity, and everyone who thinks so has lost their entire goddamn minds.⁵

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Update 11.8.24:

Walt Bismarck

and I discussed Tony’s attractiveness and The Sopranos on his podcast. Check it out:

Why Tony Soprano and JD Vance are hot

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1. Shannon does mention in the footnotes that the Tony everyone apparently loves so much is Season One Tony, so I’m trying to keep that in mind here.

2. Johnny Sack is, at least, very protective of his wife to the extent that he murders people for making fun of her weight.

3. Honestly this seems to be a theme in pretty much all the old shows from the heyday of television. Boomers were having a bit of an existential crisis in their 40s and we were just along for the ride. What are we Millennials going to put out to compete with shit like that? It’s about time we get started, homies.

4. My husband tells me he exclusively sees videos of things being smashed by hydraulic presses, Indians building impressive things out of impossible materials, and explosions.

5. No offense to Shannon or anything