Esther Zuckerman - A Field Guide to Internet Boyfriends

C elebrity crushes are nothing new. For almost as long as there have been famous people, we plebeians have gazed upon their beautiful visages and imagined what it would be like to be in their company. I mean, when you look at it a certain way, even The Aeneid was sort of fan fiction, as were many of Shakespeares plays. The early days of Hollywood had Photoplay magazine. From the 60s through the 2000s, teen fans could pin spreads from Tiger Beat on their walls. More mature readers had Peoples Sexiest Man Alive starting in the mid-1980s. Now, theres the internet.

The internet has drastically changed the way we, as a collective public, interact with celebrities. There are still paparazzi pics and revealing interviews with artfully posed glamour shots, but social media has offered stars a direct line to our hearts. And its not just about what a person poststhough demeanor online can garner great affection if done correctly. But these days fans also have control over their favorites cultural presence. Through Tumblr, Twitter, and the like we have the power to isolate exactly what we find so appealing about an actor or musician or athlete or even politician and elevate them to new heights. We can create supercuts of their most charming moments. We can write long yarns imagining their activities. In other words, we can stan for days.

And thus Internet Boyfriends were born. The first person commonly regarded to have been deemed the internets boyfriend was Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor with the officious demeanor and confounding face who instigated Cumbermania around the year 2013. But there were other early Internet Boyfriends. Cumberbatchs fellow Brits Tom Hiddleston and Idris Elba won the title, as did Ryan Gosling, who became a receptacle for all our visions of an ideal man. Over the years Internet Boyfriends have come and gone. Rami Malek was one for a while, but turned into something of an Internet Villain instead during his Oscar run for Bohemian Rhapsody. Even Cumberbatch has arguably fallen out of favor.

What makes someone an Internet Boyfriend (or Girlfriend)? As with anything that was created by a hive mind, its an amorphous concept that means different things to different people. The simplest definition of an Internet Boyfriend is someone who people on the internet love. But that doesnt quite capture it. (A lot of people on the internet love Donald Trump, for instance.) To refine, an Internet Boyfriend is someone who gets almost entirely good press, who either gives zero fucks or just the right number of fucks, who seems like the type of person you would probably want to get to know and definitely want to date. An Internet Boyfriend often plays characters that are just as intriguingor even more intriguingthan the Internet Boyfriend himself. An Internet Boyfriend represents something.

Writing in 2016, in a piece for New York Magazines The Cut entitled How the Internet Picks Its Boyfriends, Sulagna Misra defined these men as such: When real men disappoint usin their politics, their bullshit, their basic human inconsistenciesthe internets boyfriend is a paragon of enlightened masculinity, constructed by committee. The term has evolved and mutated even since Misra wrote her nearly definitive piece, but this remains essential to the notion of an Internet Boyfriend: Usually its someone surrounded by an aura of authenticity. There must be a conception (whether its true is moot) that he earned his current position through hard work rather than dumb luck.

Writers since Misra have tried to argue for further specificity of the Internet Boyfriend. In Cosmopolitan in 2018, Emily Tannenbaum made the case that there was a distinction between Internet Boyfriends, the younger generation, and Internet Husbands, the older. An Internet Boyfriend is the sexy new fling you want to show off (and maybe get naked with), she wrote. An Internet Husband is someone you want to cuddle, who makes you feel safe and you still want to get naked with. Others might counter that by saying there doesnt necessarily need to be anything sexual about an Internet Boyfriend. But, maybe, just maybe, there does.

The very nature of the internet has made it easier than ever to publicly declare your love for a celebrity. This generations cultural critics grew up knowing that there was no shame in being one of the kids screaming on the tarmac when the Beatles arrived in America in 1964 or outside the Virgin Megastore waiting for *NSYNC in 2000. They channeled their affections creatively. Who chooses Internet Boyfriends and Girlfriends? Largely women and queer people. This is not a straight mans game, though he can participate if he stays in line and doesnt make things weird. Online lust can get playfully objectifying, but should never be exploitative or alienatingor, frankly, sexist.

Meanwhile, writers have developed a way of turning their devotion to specific stars into clever content. The dearly departed website The Toast had a recurring column If X Were Your Y, which began in 2015. The variables were always at liberty to shift, but the most common hypothetical was If [Celebrity] Were Your [Boyfriend/Girlfriend]. Channing Tatum was the inaugural entry. Writers Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins launched their podcast Thirst Aid Kit in 2017, which is both unapologetically horny and thoughtful as the hosts spend each episode fawning over and reading fan fiction about men, many of whom could be deemed Internet Boyfriends. The Cut meanwhile has a series in which they wonder whether a certain celebrity usually not thought of as totally kind of hot is actually totally kind of hot, like Bill Hader or Marc Maron. But for as much as weve learned to embrace our desires, weve also become wary as of late. The #MeToo movement has put us on alert, ready to sniff out false prophets, men whose perceived goodness is just an act.

In this book, I will introduce you to a wide array of Internet Boyfriends and Girlfriends and attempt to explain just how they achieved that moniker. Again, you can try to track an Internet Boyfriends or Girlfriends ascension all you want, but there is always going to be something subjective about fandom. Behavior thats cute to one person is off-putting to another. You just might not get someone in this book, and thats fine. The people featured arent perfect. They make mistakes. Some have had very public scandals. But they are mostly a net good in our society. Looking at them all collected together hopefully paints a picture of what plugged-in people have gravitated toward in this day and age. What is certain is that these people are not homogenous. An Internet Boyfriend is not one thing, but to the people that love him, hes everything.