In case you hadn’t heard, having a boyfriend is, like, really embarrassing now. At least, it is according to this viral Vogue essay. And the countless social media reactions that followed.

The embarrassing boyfriend discourse comes alongside a notable rise in heteropessimism, a term coined in a New Inquiry piece to refer to “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment or hopelessness about straight experience.”

Basically, the trend seems to be that people who like, love, date and marry men are becoming rather tired of all of the stuff that can often come with a relationship with a straight guy — you know, stuff like putting up with an imbalanced domestic workload, imbalanced pay, imbalanced childcare duties, imbalanced… most things.

All of this being said, it’s hardly surprising that many straight women are kind of over the whole being-into-stereotypical-straight-guys thing. If having a boyfriend is embarrassing, having an aggressively macho man type boyfriend is even more embarrassing. It’s no wonder, then, that a few unexpected “types” of internet boyfriends have risen from the sidelines in recent months. This summer, for instance, the girlies found themselves daydreaming about “hot rodent” boyfriends — yes, I’m talking guys with rat-like features and a certain charming, sly, weedy je ne sais quoi. Think Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in Challengers or Jeremy Allen White of The Bear. We also found ourselves proudly simping after “black cat” boyfriends — aka, soft, gentle, sensitive, brooding boyfriend types thanks to the likes of Conrad Fisher from The Summer I Turned Pretty, Marcus from Ginny and Georgia and Will from Too Much.

As the darker months of winter set in, a new boy seems to be stealing our hearts: the full-on monster guy. Yes, apparently, we are all kind of into actual monsters now.

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Leading the charge of the hot monster guys is Jacob Elordi’s Creature from Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which landed on Netflix last week. A ghostly patchwork quilt of various body parts pulled from dead soldiers, he’s hardly the most obvious on-screen hottie. And yet, the girlies can’t get enough.

“Just to clarify, I’m not sexualising him, I just find him very attractive,” one TikTok fanvid caption reads. “If being attracted to a creature is a crime, then I’d be sentenced to life,” reads another. And one X post: “Victor Frankenstein giving the creature long, beautiful lashes and expressive eyes that are reminiscent of that of a sad puppy…….so true”