You get Playboy for the articles, I know. But I came to the most recent issue by way of the photographs of its scantily clad cover star, pouting provocatively in heels, red lipstick and the iconic bunny ears: Ezra Miller, the 26-year-old American actor, best known for portraying a high school shooter (We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2011), and fresh from a turn in a superhero franchise (last year’s Justice League).

Miller’s appearance in Playboy is ostensibly to promote Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald – but really, the film takes a back seat to the extraordinary photo-shoot. Gaze steady above his cut-crystal cheekbones, Miller is the picture of radical vulnerability in fishnet tights and size-14 heels, a peach tulle dress, a cream boiler suit, bunny ears in blush and black to suit.

Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength Michael Ian Black

The “gender-bending” styling was at the actor’s request, we’re told, as well as that he is attracted to men and women, and identifies as queer – if he must identify at all. In the freewheeling interview, in which Playboy’s Ryan Gajewski is moved to tears by Miller’s stories of surviving sexual abuse, both within relationships and at work, Miller says he is proud to be among those leading Hollywood away from the “racist, sexist, rape-culture mess” that it once was, “that we still sort of celebrate”.

While Miller’s insights on sex, death, politics and his “polyamory molecule” (emergent from the fug of an “impressive” joint) might kindly be described as oblique, if this is the new face of Hollywood, it’s welcome. Popular culture is increasingly making space for different ways to be, beyond the binary of male and female – even Playboy, a brand that has historically upheld the gender roles that Miller and others are now trying to disestablish.

True, while reading the interview, I couldn’t shake the sense that it was casting this new sexual revolution in the same fabulous, titillating light as it did the last one of the 1970s, swapping out the tired fantasy (the eternal bachelor, surrounded by a bevy of bunny-women) for something more modern (the “polycule” squad of sexual beings, still drawing on prepubescent experiences of the Kama Sutra). Would Playboy’s embrace of Miller’s “non-identification” extend to someone older, less beautiful, with less self-confidence, and cheekbones closer to cottage cheese? (Not to mention the fact that Miller accepts male pronouns and is clearly male-presenting.)

cole (@dolansxavier) oh my good god ezra miller's playboy shoot is everything pic.twitter.com/mZrR753qNw

Possibly not. But the fact that a brand so integral to straight-male fantasy is making room for non-binary identities at all can be read the same way as Nike’s endorsement of Colin Kaepernick over his “take a knee” protest against racial injustice: simultaneously a) a shrewd commercial decision, and b) an indication of the way the arc of the moral universe is bending.

The other place you can look is at young people – no, not millennials, the properly young: Generation Z, and whatever comes after it. They have a more fluid understanding of sexuality, with recent research by Ipsos Mori finding that 66% of people aged between 16 and 22 identify as “exclusively heterosexual”: the lowest figure of any generation. You can see the shift reflected in their stars.

The last lightning rod for the internet’s adulation was pop star Harry Styles, 24, in conversation with Call Me by Your Name actor Timothée Chalamet, 22 – “the hottest actor on the planet, interviewed by music’s most charismatic star”, per i-D magazine. Styles swaps female pronouns for male ones in lyrics and is co-host with Lady Gaga of next year’s Met Gala, theme: Camp. Last month he was papped with a book of Susan Sontag essays in hand. Chalamet, meanwhile, is often said to be his generation’s Leonardo DiCaprio – but where DiCaprio, at his age, was making a name for himself as ringleader of the “Pussy Posse”, Chalamet is talking about dismantling toxic masculinity.

As with Miller’s Playboy shoot, it would be easy to dismiss the pairing of Styles and Chalamet as a cynical ploy for internet buzz. But even if that were the extent of it, the end result is still a different representation of how to be a man, one that is high-profile and celebrated. Chalamet himself demonstrates the importance of role models, citing as influential Lil B, Kid Cudi and, elsewhere, Frank Ocean: rappers who have made vulnerability a cornerstone of their work and public personas. Styles has pointed to David Bowie. And while boys are restricted from acting outside gender norms – and are in some ways less free than girls, according to recent research – representation matters.

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As Michael Ian Black wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times in the wake of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February: “Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others … the language that exists to discuss the full range of human emotion is still viewed as sensitive and feminine.”

That young, commercially successful celebrities not only feel a desire but a responsibility, as Chalamet and Styles agreed, to represent “a new form of masculinity” is a big step in the right direction. That they might be applauded for throwing out the binary altogether in a frilly dress in Playboy feels, at a gut level, seismic. “How blessed are we all to exist at the same time as all of these pictures of Ezra Miller,” was one representative comment on Twitter.

As for GQ, the self-appointed “authority on men”, it said of Miller: “Please, God, tell us the next generation of movie stars is going to be more like this.”

• Elle Hunt is a commissioning editor for Guardian G2