Stop it with the "hot rodent boyfriend" talk

Can y'all hear yourselves?

The first inkling I heard about Hot Rodent Summer was in an IG comments section about the movie Challengers. Specifically, about Mike Faist, who did for West Side Story’s Riff what Harold Perrineau did for Romeo + Juliet’s Mercutio, looking like Despereaux the mouse. I found that comparison very charming at the time, because Despereaux is cute and Mike is also cute! Alas, it didn’t end there. Josh O’Connor also looks like a really specific cartoon mouse, apparently. Timothee Chalamet is small and slight, and he claims a desert mouse as his namesake in Dune II, so he goes on the list. The guy fromThe Bear/current Calvin Klein spokesmodel does not look like a mouse so much as he looks like a young Gene Wilder, but people feel the need to explain why he’s a thirst object, so onto the list he goes. And very quickly—I would say circa the extremely tall and muscular Adam Driver being included on this list—the vibe became utterly sinister.

The first guy to clock Timothee’s hot rodent appeal.

First of all, y’all need group chats. We may be in the midst a cultural yearning to tear down the concept of “celebrity,” but publicly saying that you find someone’s attractiveness unusual or confusing is weirdo behavior. And saying someone has a rodent face is just kind of mean? But there’s something nastier at work here, I think.

Hot Rodent Boyfriend is just a new name for ‘unconventionally attractive,” AKA “ugly hot/ugly sexy.” And there is a whole world to unpack about what “unconventionally attractive” means, and who gets to qualify.

If you peruse these lists, either on media outlets like Elle or social media platforms like TikTok, you’ll notice a certain homogeneity among the entrants. It’s largely white men with noses that are either big, crooked, or both; and then a maximum of one light-skinned Latino or Asian man. It’s giving “if I brought him home to meet the family, Grandpa would have some really specific jokes to suddenly and relentlessly share.” Put another way, it’s men who wouldn’t have been considered white 100 years ago. In 2024, the suggestion of non-WASP ethnicity is still reading as “unconventional.”

But when was the last time you remember a dark-skinned man called unconventionally attractive? To Blakely Thorton’s point here, in order to even be in the “attractive” conversation, it seems men of colour have to fully be GQ models. Not to overgeneralize, but I saw someone on Threads the other day say “hear me out” about André 3000, the owner of dimples so deep you could lose a quarter in them.

blakelythornton

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It feels almost too obvious to talk about the other end of the gender spectrum, but since we’re here: the women and femmes who are even able to get on-screen are meeting truly inhuman beauty standards, so the idea of “unconventionally attractive” becomes even more warped. And once you factor in trans and gender non-conforming identities, suddenly people’s ability to fit specific norms becomes a matter of physical safety or peril.

This is one of my all-time favourite tweets, and my sharing it prompted a friend to tell me that his “hear me out” was Janeane Garofalo 💀

I’ve complained before about the comforting myth that beauty standards have eased in the past 20 years. As a society, we’re still very into policing people’s appearance and adherence to said standards. We just find more whimsical, obfuscatory language to let people know that their attractiveness—their very presence—is conditional. That they have a place in our hierarchy, and they shouldn’t get ideas about stepping out of it. That they should be grateful. Like I said: utterly sinister.