Men aren't just hot anymore—they're hot in a surprising way
The growing taxonomy of men's attractiveness tells us plenty about shifting masculine norms and the delight of unexpected attraction.
My social feeds make it feel like men aren’t just desirable anymore—they are unexpectedly so. It’s the buzz about Walton Goggins being surprisingly attractive playing a depressed middle-age tourist in The White Lotus, and all the viral fan edits of Adam Scott on Severance that convey his unexpected hotness.
I might just chalk this up to the algorithm having my number, except it feels like the culmination of how we’ve been talking about men’s attractiveness for a while now.
Over the last several years, we’ve seen a slew of new labels used to describe desirable men: zaddy, short king, himbo, golden retriever boyfriend, daddy, rodent man, and babygirl. Obviously, this profusion is irreverent and ironic, and the result of fan culture online—and TikTok memes, especially.
Each successive label has inspired a raft of trend articles. What is a babygirl? Why I married a zaddy. Which “rat boy” would date you?
Ostensibly, the result of all these labels is a playful taxonomy of desirability, a mapping of “types” of hotness. These words zero in on specific physical traits, like shortness, or attempt to wrangle the je ne sais quoi of a particular vibe, à la zaddy. But across these categories there’s shared evidence of shifting and sometimes conflicted ideas about masculinity.
There’s also performative commentary on the absurdity of desire itself, the intensity and surprise of it.
Many of these terms speak to a man’s perceived tenderness and vulnerability with a sense of attraction and endearment, but also sometimes belittlement. The himbo and golden retriever are portrayed as simple—maybe lacking in savvy or intelligence—but hot and lovable. The term babygirl is attached to men who are seen as cute, sweet, and maybe a bit naive, but it’s also used for troubled “middle-aged antiheroes,” which means it applies to everyone from Jacob Elordi to Goggins on White Lotus.
Even where tenderness and vulnerability aren’t implied, there’s a signaling of traits that are not traditionally associated with masculinity.
“Rodent men” are said to have an angular rather than “a chiseled face like Brad Pitt.” And “short kings” are alleged to be dudes of “modest stature” who exhibit the “strength of character to flourish in the face of conventional male beauty standards.” They are not Hollywood heartthrobs; they are the anti-Brad Pitts and considered all the hotter for it.
Even “daddy” can convey the opposite of the power dynamic it seems to suggest, which is to say: it carries its own quality of surprise. The term has been carried away from its kinky roots and injected into the mainstream, where it’s taken on a diffuse meaning and is often an ironic joke. Take, for example, the Pope being told, “Fuck me daddy,” or the hideous mushroom monster on The Last of Us being dubbed Big Daddy Mushroom.
Pedro Pascal was famously called “the internet’s daddy,” in part because of his tendency to play “gruff father figures who provide care and authority,” as Vox put it in 2023. And yet Pascal has also been proclaimed “the ultimate babygirl.”
Daddy seems like the antonym of babygirl—Rolling Stone defines a babygirl as “a man who is very cutesy in a slightly submissive way”—but that cutesy-ness is built into the daddy discourse, too. Remember Pascal reading all those horny fan comments about him? Remember that endlessly recycled clip of him saying, “I am your cool, slutty daddy”?
Your “slutty daddy.” There’s a delicious reversal of the power dynamic there.
In some ways, this cataloguing seems like an expansion of what is recognized as attractive for men, particularly hetero men. You could even argue that it represents a flight from toxic masculinity. And what to make of the fact that all of these terms started to break out post-MeToo and in the midst of Trump’s first presidency? Or the fact of this latest “unexpected hotness” discourse at the start of Trump’s second term, when traditional masculinity is looking uglier than ever?
At the same time, there are troubling undercurrents in some of these pronouncements. As Evelyn Frick pointed out last year, when “hot rodent” is directed at Jewish men it draws on a “deep-seated vitriolic antisemitic history.” These terms are also often directed at white men, which says plenty about the narrow scope of men who are teed up for celebrations of hotness outside certain Hollywood ideals; and many of these supposed exceptions are still pretty traditionally hot (see: Jeremy Allen White, sometimes said to be “dirtbag hot”).
I would fold “Big Dick Energy” into this taxonomy, too—and it’s often used for men who aren’t considered conventionally attractive but have the kind of swagger associated with “BDE.” Not exactly revolutionary stuff. There is much opportunity for simply re-entrenching toxic masculine metrics. A label like “short king” can flip so easily from a rejection of suffocating masculine norms into a backhanded compliment. Calling a man a babygirl could be a welcomed flirtation or experienced as an unwelcome policing of gender.
If the usual masculine ideals were broadly recognized as bullshit—a total falsity—then there would be little need to assert all these qualifying descriptors. They could just be… men… who are hot. Instead, this taxonomy seems to wrestle with uncertain and shifting terrain, and I’m not so sure about the result.
It is, as they say, complicated.
Baked into these terms is a sense of the way that attraction can catch you off guard. It’s not always or even often what we’re taught is attractive. You could say that these labels are mapping a world of surprised delight, which describes so much of the horniness on social media. On TikTok, women, especially, are going wild for vaguely “nerdy” guys spinning Rubik's cubes and doing elaborate yo-yo tricks. A sampling of comments on the latter video:
this guy fucks
Ngl this did something for me
He definitely knows where it is
I’m gunna need to [understand] the psychology behind why I am immediately attracted to this man
Even with more traditional masculine types—say, the wood-chopping guy on TikTok—the thirsty commentary often dramatizes the absurd intensity of desire itself (e.g. “Chop me into a million pieces”). As I wrote in 2023 of the evolution of the term “daddy”:
It often reflects playful and outrageous horniness; it’s all about the unrepentant giddiness of the person declaring someone’s daddyhood. It’s a humorous response to the spark of desire—or even just the weird flutter of feeling that can arise for, say, a monster with a mushroom for a head. [It’s] the spirit of teenage fandom directed with comedic, self-aware zeal toward a particular category of middle-aged men.
That years-ago Pascal media frenzy emerged from a trend of having men in Hollywood read “thirsty tweets” out loud. The joke of it was the over-the-top nature of these comments. It’s routine now for famous men to be confronted with evidence of fan horniness, only to express an aw-shucks befuddlement (see: Gavin Newsom and Christopher Meloni asking what “zaddy” means).
These interactions are often silly, light-hearted attempts at virality on the part of journalists, but they’re also revealing of the fraught gender politics of men—straight men, especially—being treated as objects of desire. Men act and women appear, right? “Men look at women,” as John Berger wrote. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” What happens when men are looked at by women?
It’s almost like we feel the need to invent a whole new language to talk about it.
This is the only news I want to read rn