What Even Is a Twink, Anyway?

IF YOU LOOK a certain way—skinny, smooth-skinned, young for your age—or even just spend a lot of time online, then there’s a possibility that you might have heard the word “twink.” This term, coined and originally used exclusively by gay men, refers to a man (usually in his late teens or early 20s), with a thin build, and no body hair or facial hair. Youth and slightness of physique are the main characteristics: two celebrities who are most commonly cited as embodying the twink aesthetic are Timothée Chalamet and Troye Sivan, who represent a softer, slenderer alternative to the more typically swole male iconography that permeates culture.

There is some crossover here with the recently coined “rat boy” aesthetic, which similarly eschews hypermasculinity in favor of a kind of lean, goofy coolness.(Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in the first half of Challengers, for instance, are both twinks and rodent boyfriends in turn.)

There are also a few different types of twinks. A muscle twink, or twunk (think “twink” + “hunk”) is somebody with that youthful, fresh-faced appearance, but a more visibly muscular physique; think Tom Holland or Harris Dickinson. “Femme twink,” meanwhile, refers to a young, thin man whose mannerisms or gender expression don’t exclusively fit into a conventionally masculine binary.

The word “twink” can be found on most if not all gay dating apps, where users can search potential matches by body type as well as listing their own (a practice which is rife with its own issues). It is also a commonly used term in gay porn. In both arenas, the term tends to be used when referring to white men who fit this archetype. According to academic and former porn performer Zeb J. Tortorici, the popularity of this physique in porn and pop culture “normalizes both whiteness and youth through what are ultimately racist and ageist tropes.”

In his essay Queering Pornography: Desiring Youth, Race and Fantasy in Gay Porn, Tortorici wrote: “My earliest experiences as a gay porn model personally demonstrated to me how age and race are fetishized in complementary ways to convey a particular type of desirable masculinity.”

When did people start saying twink?

While the term twink has been in popular usage among gay men and the wider LGBTQ+ community for a long time, and has been lampooned alongside other queer descriptors like “bear” and “otter” in popular culture, it officially entered the mainstream in 2018, thanks to Nick Haramis’ New York Times article, ‘Welcome to the Age of the Twink’, and the seemingly endless discourse that followed.

Haramis presented the popularity of slender, fresh-faced young male celebrities like Timothée Chalamet, Troye Sivan and Lucas Hedges as a sign that the twink was Hollywood’s latest standard of male beauty, providing stark contrast to the jacked, superhero-style body that has become increasingly prevalent among the leading men of the 21st century.

“These twinks… aren’t just enviably lean boys or the latest unrealistic gay fantasy, but a new answer to the problem of what makes a man,” he wrote.

Of course, one could argue that categorizing youth, thinness, and frequently whiteness as the new masculine idyll is just as conducive to body image issues in guys whose bodies don’t fit that mold. Similarly, transposing language and aesthetics from a subculture onto a broader audience without examining the nuances and potential pitfalls might also be deemed a fool’s errand. Because for a seemingly innocuous, funny-sounding word, “twink” is accumulating some pretty serious baggage.

Is twink a slur?

Ironically enough, it might not be long before a term that originated within the LGBTQ+ community ends up as homophobic hate speech.

Since it went mainstream and straight people became more au fait with the term (and arguably a bit too comfortable using it), “twink” has been thrown around online in increasingly inaccurate ways, and is frequently used to describe any gay man, regardless of whether or not he fits the definition. There are even instances of “twink” being used as a belittling pejorative, and there are some who believe that this has become a stand-in for more offensive language that might otherwise get censored on social platforms.

Singer Troye Sivan put it best in September 2024, when he called out a troll for using the word in a derogatory context.

“If you say twink when you meant to say faggot, that’s still a slur,” he said. “That’s our word, I don’t think straight people should be using that.”