Picture your middle school locker. There’s probably an eye-level mirror (for applying Lip Smackers) and a stash of mechanical pencils and/or jelly pens. And there’s also probably a bunch of taped-up magazine pages of various “hunks,” which if you’re between the ages of 40 and 45, go by first name alone: Brad, Johnny, Leo.
Indeed, the pre-internet (to say nothing of social media) era meant we got our celebrity crushes almost entirely from Seventeen Magazine and Sassy, and that we had a relatively homogenous definition of male hotness—beefy but sensitive and approximately 10 to 15 years our senior. It felt grownup to be crushing on a 26-year-old at the age of 12. Wait for me, Keanu, for my bounty is as boundless as the sea!
Over the years, we got hotties our own age: Jake, Ryan, any of the Chrisses. But then, some time around the dawn of TikTok, something peculiar happened. The Hollywood “hunks” got scrawnier and mopier. Most egregiously, they started getting younger than me.
Timothée Chalamet? Younger than the kids I used to babysit. Tom Holland? Born the year I started high school. It felt wrong to lust after these man-children, but also sad to still be pining over the heartthrobs from my youth, many of whom had shown themselves to be creepy at best, abusive and rapey at worst. (The exception being Keanu, who is a stand-up citizen with a 52-year-old girlfriend.)
