Hear Me Out: Defending Our Most Unpopular Thirst Opinions

Some thirst objects are simply universal. Nobody could reasonably debate the general hotness of people like Idris Elba, Michael B. Jordan, Janelle Monae, or Prince Naveen from The Princess and the Frog. (What? We can lust after cartoon characters, too.) These folks just look good, and there’s no point in trying to downplay that. Still, when it comes to thirst, there’s no secret formula. Eurocentric beauty standards be damned, there is no exact science to explain what gets us going or what gives us the ick. We just like what we like — even when it doesn’t make sense to anyone else on the planet. Even when it doesn’t really make sense to us! Blame it on the pheromones. 

In celebration of Unbothered’s first-ever Thirst Week, a few brave (very brave) souls have gathered to get candid about our most questionable crushes, the people with faces that may not quite appeal to the mainstream but still get us hot and bothered all the same. Be warned: these controversial takes range from quirky to downright deviant, but we’re letting our freak flags fly freely. We know that the world might not immediately agree, and that’s okay — more for us. But before you judge, just hear us out…

“Season 1, episode 25 of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Hilary gets a job as the assistant to Queen Latifah’s character (the first of two Queen Latifah’s characters on the show) who treats her like shit. At one point, Jazz stands up to defend her, riding for his girl and standing up to the boss. I remember at that moment being like, You know what? Jazz is kinda cute! He was begging — begging! — the whole series to be with Hilary. At certain points, it was a problem because he was bordering on being an incel. There’s no defence of that, but we love a man who begs. One thing I’ve always been attracted to is the man who can’t get enough of his girl; he just wants to be around her, kiss her feet, and bow down before her. And Jazz knew how to do that. He also had a little bit of that Dwayne Wayne, A Different World vibe, and I love me some Dwayne Wayne. If Hilary had just given him a chance, I know Jazz would’ve been a doting boyfriend.” 

“He’s also so cute! I feel like nobody saw Jazz’s cuteness because he was always beside Will Smith, but he’s got, like, a Lakeith-Stanfield-skinny-Black-man je ne sais quoi, and I was into it! Actually, one of my high school crushes looks a little like him — nerdy Black guy with glasses — and personality-wise, as far as begging and I’m-just-happy-to-be-in-your-presence energy, and that’s 100% the time my husband is on, so I definitely have a type.”

“I feel like y’all haven’t really seen him like I have, but I didn’t start feeling this way until adulthood. I was rewatching Shrek — because it's very much a childhood movie that I loved and it always makes me feel very comfortable and nostalgic — and I was like ‘Wait, hold on.’ I understand Fiona better than I ever have because I feel like as a child, they made Shrek out to be ugly, but that was very Eurocentric thinking. It was giving white supremacy. I could see why Fiona would like him, and why she would give up her entire life as a princess to be with him. He has real estate, he takes care of his kids, he's tall, he's wide, he can chop wood, he's loyal to his friends and family, he's funny, he's a hard worker. He doesn't depend on anyone, and I like how he's confident on his own.”

“Shrek 2 is where I really developed this taste. But I think in that one, he turns into a white man? I'm not sure of that direction…I like to pretend I didn't see that, because when Shrek goes into human form, it’s like, ‘My God. That is not who I thought he was going to be.’ So I was very happy when he went back to his ogre self. Then as soon as I started realizing my feelings, I started dating men who are kinda… like Shrek. A lot of my exes are not gonna like this one, but I feel like they look like him a little bit. They definitely had ogre vibes.”

“I know this is making me sound like a furry, but Shrek is a COC — a creature of colour — and I really do respect him. He was silenced a lot in the movie, but he always stayed true to himself. Sure, he has his faults — he does stink, and his teeth could be worked on sometimes, and he's mean and a little bit crude — but I do think he could work on that. It’s nothing that if I was in that movie, I wouldn't be willing to fix.”

“First of all, Billions opens up with a very risque sex scene between Paul Giamatti’s character Chuck Rhoades and his hot wife (played by Maggie Siff), and I was into it. Listen, it was giving dom-sub. Chuck is this district attorney who works for the US government and goes after white-collar criminals. He has this big powerful job trying to take down these greedy rich people, but then the guy gets home and asks his wife to step on him with heels. So I'm like, Who is this man? I think it's just the power his character has. Also, Chuck really respects his wife as an equal; she is very much his equal if not his superior, and he acknowledges that, which I find very attractive.” 

“I recently found like-minded individuals on Instagram Threads, and there were 300 likes on a tweet that said, ‘Apologies, but Paul Giamatti can get it.’ So yeah, I found my people. I know I'm not alone, but I also understand that it is a surprising pick because he’s an older than white man who just isn’t the beauty standard for men. For me, attraction has always been about way more than physical appearance. It's about the energy you're walking around with, how you carry yourself. That’s all way more important to me than how you look. I've been known to have a crush or two that’s unconventional, but it's because of their energy. And I gotta say…Chuck Rose in Billions, he's got big dick energy.” 

“I won’t lie and pretend to be the least bit ashamed of this ‘questionable’ crush because I literally share the same taste as Jennifer Lopez: it’s Marc Anthony! (Always ‘Marc Anthony,’ never just ‘Marc’.) He may be all 5 foot 8 inches (Google, are we sure?? It’s not an issue, but that seems…generous) and like 165 pounds soaking wet, but there’s something about the man that’s had me looking respectively for years now. My Great Awakening probably came about a decade ago, when I started belatedly watching the gone but never forgotten gem of a hospital drama, HawthoRNe, starring Jada Pinkett Smith. It was your standard hospital show — wild medical cases, sex in supply closets, breaking the Hippocratic oath — but when Marc Anthony joined the cast in its second season, we really started cooking with grease. He played Detective Nick Renata, a prickly lawman who mixed business with pleasure after being assigned to investigate protagonist Christina Hawthorne’s (Pinkett Smith) sexual assault. His character obviously didn’t join the show under the best terms, but everytime Marc Anthony came on the scene, he made an impression. A very good impression.”

“Rumor has it that this was Jada’s first entanglement; there’s a whole conspiracy theory about how the show was supposedly canned prematurely because there was some…coworking that neither J.Lo, Marc's then-wife, nor Will Smith were comfortable with. I might have not been on Jada’s side with the whole August Alsina thing, but this alleged entanglement, I can fully understand and get behind. On the show, Marc Anthony had such a powerful aura about him, like a man who was about his business and was always going to take care of whatever (and whoever) was his. There was just something about the timbre of his speaking voice on the show — don’t even get me started on that SINGING voice in real life! Have you heard “You Sang to Me?!” — the sharpness of his bone structure, the piercing intensity of his wide-eyed stare, the dangerous (but never scary) energy he stalked around with. I was moved, to say the least, and when HawthoRNe suddenly wrapped after its third season, I truly never recovered. It broke me. And on top of that, we can’t even stream the freaking show anywhere, so we have to resort to fancams of HawthoRNe clips on YouTube to reminisce on the greatness that was Nick Renata. TNT, you will crumble!”

“I used to go hard for Lil Bow Wow when I was younger — like, I wrote fan letters and everything. The moment when I knew this was my man, my man, my man was when he first came out with “Puppy Love” and was playing basketball with Solange in the music video. I really felt like I could’ve (and should’ve) been in the video. Then, when he did “Like You” with Ciara? I genuinely felt jealous. “Basketball?” With Fabolous? Panty. Drop. I didn’t have my current aversion to short men at the time, so Bow was really my short king. We were like 13, so we obviously didn’t know anything about love, but it was the braids, the jerseys, the baggy clothes, the sneakers for me…it was everything. He was everything.”

“Bow Wow’s not really that unpopular of a crush, especially when he was the most poppin’, but I remember my friends clowning me like, ‘Sandy, you love this boy, but he’s so short!’ And people used to say that he looked like a cute girl with his braids (problematic, I know), but I saw the vision. I’ve since grown out of that stage — I’m trying to lower my height requirement to like, 5’10”, but I for sure won’t be checking for a short king ever again, and he somehow didn’t grow much after that — but if Bow’s paying for a date, I might have to see what’s up.”