Timothée Chalamet isn’t a ‘rat boy’ and neither am I

I could have been a contender. I could have been a rat boy.

Vermin have entered the crowded beauty lexicon to describe unconventionally attractive Hollywood actors with large ears, angular features and lanky frames.

Dune actor Timothée Chalamet, Challengers leading men Josh O’Connor and Mike Faistalong with The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White and Ferrari’s Adam Driver, have been tagged as “rats” and “hot rodent boyfriends” by supposed admirers.

I was born with the big ears, and while working at Voguesurviving on Prada and Diet Coke, a well-meaning fashion editor described my angular appearance as fabulously gaunt. A nose like a forgotten potato ruled me out of the rat race, but should this even be a competition?

There is something insidious about the hot rodent description of male celebrities that smells like, well, like a dead rat.

Using rats to describe someone’s appearance carries a political charge leftover from Nazi propaganda during World War II, heightened by the rise of antisemitic behaviour in schools. The 1940 German movie The Eternal Jew compared Jews to rats that carry disease and devour resources.

On the US Jewish news site Forward, writer Mira Fox puts a positive slant on the term’s social media use to describe heartthrobs. “Now that we’re in our sexy Ratatouille era, can you imagine those caricatures hitting hard?” writes Fox. “Picture it: someone draws a cartoon of a Jew with a long rat nose, and instead of thinking ‘Jews are vermin,’ people interpret it as Jewish sex appeal?”

“There’s a long history of reclaiming slurs and insults, like the LGBTQ+ community’s adoption of the term ‘queer’… I say we embrace it.”

However, when racist or homophobic terms are reclaimed, it is usually done by the minority groups being yelled at from open car windows. The offensive N-word is reserved in US music culture for use by black artists, and “fag” is only acceptable from gay men and visible allies in certain situations.