Gone are the days of the golden retriever boyfriend because now the hottest thing a man can be is a sexy, sexy rodent. Remy, Roddy St James, Matty Healy, Stuart Little… What do all these men have in common? They’re rats sexy.
I mean it when I say: the girlies want one thing (their boyfriends to look like rats) and it’s fucking disgusting.
While we used to reserve the term “rat” for when our friends’ boyfriends were acting up, the moniker is now a term of endearment used to describe hot men like Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Allen White and Timothee Chalamet.
Rat men have skyrocketed in popularity thanks to their prevalence in pop culture, with certified rats Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist blessing our screens in Challengers recently. If the rats are good enough for Zendaya, they are good enough for me.
According to Jenna Bush Hager (yes, George W Bush‘s daughter and rat boyfriend expert, for some reason), “you should want to date Stuart Little.”
“Stuart Little is actually quite attractive, right?” the former First Daughter said on Today with Hoda & Jenna.
But what exactly makes a rat man and how do you know if you have a sexy rat boyfriend?
Physically speaking, rat men have sharp, pointy features, but in a more unique way than the likes of a Hemsworth — who is conventionally chiseled by the gods. Other rat-like features such as beady eyes and a tiny mouth, may also be present. They’re often not conventionally attractive, which is what makes them so hot.
But on a deeper level, sexy rat men are more intelligent and witty than other male tropes like the golden retriever. According to Bush Hager, they convey the opposite of toxic masculinity and publicly love their partners in a “slightly weird but sexy way.”
And, much like actual rats, they often appear aloof and are hard to catch (see: emotionally unavailable), which makes the prize even sweeter.
Rat men have a certain je ne sais quoi that, in my opinion, makes them superior to the golden retriever boyfriends we all used to fawn over. Is that because they’re scrawny and not opposed to eating a slice of pizza out of the gutter? Probably, but Stuart Little has a car and honestly, that’s an upgrade from a lot of the single men roaming the streets right now.
