Being a lesbian who spends way too much time online and loves movies, TV, and pop culture takes a toll. One is that I spend a lot of time online.
I also know a lot of useless stuff that takes up prime real estate in my ever-shrinking brain, where “understanding math” might just be. But while I may not have been exposed to something like the Dow (a person?), I was always up to date and informed real Things – such as popular figures in today’s society. This includes those who glow in the public eye, or emerge like moths from their cocoons, unable to live among us normal folk but instead bound for the bright lights of Hollywood.
Sometimes we find a trend, some of which seem to occur at the same time, are similar in some way, and notice it. This time, it’s “hot rodent boyfriends” – popular actors with rodent features and faces, such as Timothée Chalamet, Jeremy Allen White and Joe from “Contenders” Sh O’Connor. Not to be confused with the “rat boyfriend” I met, which is a compliment that people find very attractive. This categorization of the popular and famous is not a new phenomenon. It seems like at least once a year we come across a new person that we now want to admire. That’s okay, but my question is: where are the new types of girls?
Over the past few years, we’ve had the internet’s most popular comments about “dad bods,” “short kings,” “old men,” “big dick power,” “mistresses,” “nerds,” “golden retriever boyfriends,” and Today’s internet trend of “rat” aspiration – a generally strong admiration for certain types of men that are somehow outside the norm, but that many people clearly desire. I think this is great! I love seeing society (very slightly) expand the definition of what we are allowed to find attractive. I love seeing stars in movies and TV who look different, normal, or interesting, or whose teeth don’t look like they would glow when they enter a nightclub. I just wish women would see this trend too. Society is already more open to different types of sexy (white) men than women, but we continue to come up with new ways to expand what women not only accept as sexy, but celebrate it. This kind of thing almost never goes the other way.
There’s never been a story like “guy goes crazy for ‘sexy teapot girl'” or how another movie cast another “angsty spider girlfriend” type yawn as its protagonist. Definitions of female attractiveness remain inflexible, except sometimes vacillating from “big butt fashion” all The road to “big boobs pop” – as long as you’re still slim (always in style) and conventionally beautiful. Women who transcended these strict norms were largely excluded, and even when they did break through, it was just that, like the slightly chubby Nicola Coughlan, it became a discourse—not an interesting trend.
Newsletter Promotion Post
Of course, most fashion involves men who are still traditionally attractive, if slightly remixed in some way—and that trend comes and goes. But I think anything that allows people to see the possibilities of desire outside of the strict boundaries we enforce is good. Especially if it goes both ways. Barry Keoghan, for example, went from playing oddball characters to starring in movies and dating one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Sabrina Carpenter. Will things go the other way? These trends may be embraced and promoted by those attracted to men or by publicity agents, but they come from the media and patriarchal culture. We draw sex symbols at a shallow level, but men can work on the deep end. Even if they are short.
As a man, if you have crooked teeth, are chubby, have a rat face, or (for some) look like a face that was kicked by a horse, you can still play the romantic lead or action star in a blockbuster movie ; You can still be a sex symbol. If a woman is beautiful, but not attractive in the right way, or “not attractive enough”, she will never become a protagonist. If a woman has a unique face, a strange body, or “rat” features, she’s likely to become a character actor. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to categorize people like this at all, because all kinds of bodies and faces can be attractive, and everyone has a hungry audience. But before this system explodes into some giant disgusting mess, I want to continue to expand our ideas of what is attractive—to everyone, not just those hot rodents.
