I wanted to ask an important question: what does it feel like for Black women to objectify white men? Lol, even something this petty can be made political.

This list was curated by me. It’s based on conversations with other Black women born during the 20^th century, and of course on my own thirst. The dates below indicate the time period of hotness that landed them on the list. This list is a living document. Don’t be surprised if I update it.

And if you’re a Black woman, send me your fave hot white guys! Maybe I’ll add them 🙂

11.) Jason Patric (1987-89)—My Big Sis, Tammy, was obsessed with The Lost Boys when it came out. I wasn’t sure if she actually cared about the plot, since the only thing she wanted to tell me about was how fo-ine Jason Patric was. I thought this was strange. He wasn’t Black. More to the point, he wasn’t her main man, Ronnie DeVoe, from New Edition. Her talking about her thirst for Jason felt naughty. Like, not only was she cheating on the man she assured me would one day be her husband, but she was thirsting after a white man?! My inability to wrap my mind around the problem, however, dissolved the instant I saw the movie. I might have been only around 8 years old, but the punk-queer aesthetic of the movie and the man—all spiky hair, bare chests, and pouty lips—required no further explanation. (And don’t act like you didn’t have crushes in elementary school.)

10.) Rafa Nadal (2005-2011)—When I first encountered Rafael Nadal on ESPN, I had to ask myself why I didn’t start watching tennis sooner. I mean, there had been Patrick Rafter (and I encourage you to do your Googles there). But Rafa was an entirely different order and magnitude of hot. Besides his adorable face, who could deny this badunk? Y’all, this was before everybody in the mainstream started talking about thickness. And to this day, not enough men make those lists. Technically, as a very tanned Spaniard, I’m like is he white? And that uncertainty did allow me to follow him unabashedly for years. But race isn’t about just skin color. Everybody in his family is white. And he is too. But you do wonder about the origins of that back baby got.

9.) Brad Pitt (1992-2004)—It almost feels obligatory to have him on the list, but lowkey, did you know a single Black woman during this era who wasn’t trying to fill her eyeballs with as much Brad Pitt as was available? Admit it—you didn’t. My own mother wanted me to watch Legends of the Fall, just to see how hot BP was in it. And she was right. But the peak of his hotness has to be Troy. Even though Paris (Orlando Bloom) is technically the cute one in the Greek myth, Hollywood does not pass up an opportunity for a hot-white-guy two-fer. So they put Bloom alongside a Mr. Pitt dripping with sex appeal. Was it the pecs? The shoulder-length wavy hair? Hmm, I’d better watch that movie again to be sure I can really remember the time, like MJ.

8.) Chris Cornell (1994-2005)—Soundgarden’s albums spoke to the strangeness of being alive in the aftermath of the Reagan era, as we watched our collective spiritual vacancy get filled with sheer buying power. But even in eerie videos like “Black Hole Sun,” you can see he’s got the goods. Then, when he joined supergroup Audioslave, I started to get annoyed by how good looking he was. That powerful, resonant voice mixed with that face seemed like the sin of overindulgence. Or maybe double-dipping. But I soon realized I had no business questioning the Divine.

7.) Arnold Schwarzenegger (1977-1994)—You know how you like someone, but you’re not sure why? I always loved Arnold’s movies as a kid. It didn’t occur to me until I watched Pumping Iron in grad school that it was all about them muscles! Lord Jesus. It’s a good thing he won all those awards for his physique, because otherwise I was going to propose we give him one now. Like a Lifetime Achievement Award. Put your liberal politics in your pocket, and look at this man from a purely objectifying lens. His body for nearly 20 years was a marvel. You almost want to be killed by him in Terminator. It feels like an honor.

6.) *Keanu Reeves (from then, until now)—OK. You might think it’s cheating to have a man who is part-Asian on the list. But the way race works is that if you’re white passing, people can consider you white. Which is one reason why he’s able to get so many leading man roles. The other? Sheer hotness. Go back and watch My Own Private Idaho, Point Break, and Speed. Then ask yourself why didn’t do that sooner.

I once (almost) dated a man who looked like a young Keanu Reeves. I spent our entire one dinner date staring at him in wonder. Our waiter was a blond white guy, and I wanted so badly to turn to him and ask, Can you believe I’m dating this man?! Which anyway, technically, I wasn’t. Turns out that this guy—the lead guitarist of some local garage band—mostly wanted to talk to me about being like head groupie/roadie. Which I would have agreed to, except I got the impression he wasn’t actually going to have sex with me. So, I left him alone.

But Keanu? Who is aging like a man who is Asian and not white, plus has a partner who is accomplished in her own right and near his own age?! No! This man is to be cherished.

5.) Eddie Vedder (1991-1996)—The night I knew I was quitting the academy, I dragged my ass home from a grueling academic term of nonstop racist-and-sexist onslaughts inside a Black Studies program that championed its own “justice-oriented” ethos. *sigh.

I lay on my couch and set YouTube to autoplay. Lo and behold a video for a song I loved as a teen, “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam, came on. I had never seen the video. I had seen “Jeremy” countless times on MTV back when it still played music. But this? Where the hell had this been all my life?

The video is grainy. It opens with Vedder berating the crowd about what the band will and won’t do. What they will and won’t tolerate. It’s anti-corporate, pro-community, leftist self-possessed raw power. Ooh, ooh, ooh. (Remember men like this? Is it just me, or are most of the men standing proud and loud in their firm convictions now on the right? Where are all of the bold leftist political men?? And between EV’s anti-corporate activism, and this Malcolm X rep (!), I think Vedder—potentially like many rock stars during that era—just might have been more radical than many of the mainstream rappers…)

The track cuts in and I quickly forgot my worries. I sat up. Vedder was whipping that long hair around. Then he free falls into the crowd. I was rapt. At the end, I realized I had been watching most of the video on mute—I’d accidentally hit the remote when I sat up. I watched it two more times, and it was even better with the sound on.

4.) Sergio Ramos + Fernando Torres (2006-2012). In the mid-00s, there was nowhere better to go drinking than in San Diego. San Diego had the most broke sloshes per capita in America, so the happy hours were incredible.

In 2006, a few friends and I went to a Spanish tapas place for happy hour. They had the World Cup on. That’s when I first laid eyes on these two men. Sports titans. Champions of the Spanish national fútbol team. Can you imagine seeing these two fine-ass (& rather close) friends on a 20-foot screen? It nearly gave me a heart attack.

3.) Cristiano Ronaldo (2008-2012)—It was close between having Ronaldo or Beckham on the list. I chose Ronaldo because the only reason I even found out David Beckham was hot (between like 1996-2005) was the docuseries on Netflix. That counts less than real-time thirst. (We’ll give DB an honorable mention.)

Actually, Ronaldo is cute enough as far as I’m concerned. But once for Mother’s Day, I wrapped a gift to give to my mother. I happened to be at the Vons near her house, and saw a magazine with Ronaldo on the cover of it, so I bought it for her. I was sure she didn’t know who he was, but I was also sure my mother had eyes.

I put the magazine in a gift bag and gave it to her, along with the wrapped gift. She pulled out the magazine,

“Oh! Thank you!” She cried. She loved it!

“Mom,” I said laughing. “That’s not the gift.”

“Oh,” she said. But instead of opening the gift, she kept thumbing through the magazine, searching for more pictures of Ronaldo.

2.) Alexander Skarsgård (2008-)— Who the hell is responsible for this man? Like who do I address about him?

Every time you turn around, here come this white man, in his late 40s mind you, being sold to us like a slab of meat. It was bad enough when he was young. Now, he wanna have the audacity to be a sexy, ageless white man? WTF?! No!! Aging gracefully is the one privilege denied white guys! How’d he slip through?

For years, I fell for it. Ever since I saw True Blood and did a double take, whenever he was in a movie I’d run out and see it. I wasn’t even pretending to care about the plot. Why the hell would I want to see The Legend of Tarzan? I didn’t. But I did pay to see it. And I got my money’s worth too.

Goddamnit Hollywood! You stop being a f*cking pimp, turning decent, respectable Black women like myself into johns, paying $20 a pop to see how many more muscles this man has added to his abs! How dare you?

I am not falling for this no more. I’m not gon keep paying to inspect the definition of his lower torso. (I’m waiting to watch Pillion on streaming.)

1.) Michael J. Fox (1985-)—I recently, randomly found a book by Michael J. Fox on Audible. It was a retrospective of the 80s classic Back to the Future. Like everyone else alive then, I loved that movie. I picked up the book, and it did not disappoint.

What appears to be my neurodivergence pushes me to try to know everything about something I really like. So, after I read that book, I read every other book he’s ever written—turns out he’s a prolific author—about Hollywood, Parkinson’s, marriage, and children. I was so moved by his vulnerability. It’s such a rare and beautiful quality.

After that, I (re)watched a number of MJF classics, starting with Teen Wolf. He’s just the cutest thing in it. I knew I’d seen it a couple of times before. But when I watched it again in 2025, I was freaked out to realize I had damn near memorized nearly every scene in the movie. I could recall multiple direct quotes. Imagine not seeing a movie for 30 years, and still being able to quote it. My only option was to admit that Michael J. Fox, the original short king, is my life’s biggest white guy crush.