This week, the internet wants to know one thing: are you a man, or are you a mouse? We appear to be scurrying into the summer of Rodent Men, a category of boys that—I can’t quite believe I’m typing this—look like rodents? That is literally the whole trend. Men that look like rats. Let that sink in. Something out there has changed; perhaps rodents have hired banana bread’s PR from the pandemic? Everyone is horny for mice, beaver-whipped, rat-lusting.
Rodents are defined as “relatively small gnawing mammals,” which is gross because scampering around in unpredictable zigzags looking for stuff to mindlessly chew on is gross. This time last week, we were all in agreement that rodents are bad vibes, rodents are ick. But a colony of rodent men have been busy taking over Hollywood, a rat pack that can be traced from Will-hamster Dafoe through Guinea Pig Malek, and all the way to The Bear’s Jere-mouse Allen White.
Hickory dickory dock, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist ran up the clock. Modern-day rodent men include Blink-182’s Travis Beaver, the 1975’s Rat Healy, and Brooklyn’s intergalactic space-rodent, Adamuskrat Driver. Last month, rodent men walked the Met Gala carpet like uninvited cockroaches, but rather than find ourselves squeamish, verging on hysterical, our fight-or-flight response kicking in, we found ourselves…a little turned on.
Now we’re categorizing men into Rodent Man or Not Rodent Man, like Zuckerberg starting Hot or Not in college. You might be asking yourself if you have a rodent man at home. Is he hot, but also mouse? Is he handsome, but somehow squirrel? Does he have porcupine eyes? Chipmunk lips? Ask yourself the hard questions. Is this man a prairie dog? Is he a capybara?
Rodent men aren’t dirty, aggressive vermin fighting over a dropped slice of pizza, an eroticized Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—though no shame if that is your kink. Rodent men may be sinewy, with almost-Concorde-pointed noses and tight jaws, but they also possess a Disney softness, a mischievous and enchanted charm. Some even have big, playful ears! Imagine, if you will, a man drawn by the team behind Ratatouille. A man who always orders a cheese plate at dinner. A man who doesn’t have a tail, but whom a tail would suit. The tail wouldn’t be the reason it didn’t work out.
The rodent-man trend is daft, but what is the summertime if not a collection of arguably daft trends? And, anyway, these men are still hot, and the David Attenborough-esque classification of them dims not their light. Rather than see this new obsession as an emancipation from traditional Hollywood hotness, rather than herald a doomsday for the most symmetrical of our stars, let’s instead think of this as a summer fling, no strings attached. This summer the beaches are awash with rodent men, each of us rat catchers. Go bait some traps, and wait.