H ave you heard it’s the summer of the “Hot Rodent Boyfriend”? No, me neither. Sadly, Pizza Rat has not had a glow-up and found love in New York City. The latest internet trend is something far more insidious and gross.
It seems that a certain faction of the internet has decided that the desirable male aesthetic for the coming months is...
anthropomorphic vermin. As a single man with shorter stature, who has on occasion been referred to as “an annoying little rat,” this trend should come as fantastic news to me. Lines of eligible ladies suddenly willing and eager to engage in a heady fling from June through September.
I’d certainly be onboard. But no, the “Hot Rodent Boyfriend” trend is the latest demonstration that we as an online society have lost our collective minds. In brief: a “Hot Rodent Boyfriend” is a conventionally attractive man, typically a celebrity, who, if compared to an animal, would fall into the “mouse or rat range.
” Harmless enough perhaps, especially when we consider such du-jour Hollywood hunks as Josh O’Connor or Tom Holland, with their angular faces and cutesy affability. It’s also hard to deny that Jeremy Allen White doesn’t embody certain characteristics of Remy from Ratatouille while scuttling around the kitchen in The Bear . I’m sure too, that some men wouldn’t mind being compared to choice fictional rodents, such as the suave, sophisticated, tuxedo-wearing Roddy, from DreamWorks’ 2006 animated masterpiece Flushed.