cori's guide to what counts as a sexyman:
they are from a property aimed at tweens and/or teens
they have some kind of tragic backstory that makes them sympathetic and offsets their current misdeeds
the gap between their perceived innocence and their potential brutality makes it very easy to make au versions of them with drastically different personalities
crucially, nothing they've done is actually that bad, because they tend to be cartoon villains
they are noticeably nonhuman/post-human
they are tall and skinny with some kind of lollypop head
they wear a suit and just generally dress like a ye olde patd music video. "dapper"
male exclusively but in that kind of vague desexed default gender way
it is very easy to either handwave the idea that they have genitals or their genitals can be depicted malleably
even in art that is obviously intended to be horny they are fully clothed
please note that not all sexymen have to have all of these traits! very few possess all of them! these are merely guidelines for identifying a phenomenon.
notable sexymen (tumblr or otherwise) through the years:
jack skellington (this, as near as I can tell, is the og sexymen. if there exists sexymen that predate him I'd love to hear about it but I think he codified this)
the warden from superjail
the onceler
bill cipher
sans undertale
the radio guy from hazbin hotel. potentially every character from hazbin hotel
spamton (this is the sexyman from deltarune, not tenna)
the teeth guy from the amazing digital circus seems to fit the bill from my limited perspective
some other potential edge cases exist in johnny the homicidal maniac and slenderman but they're just as tied in with people shipping themselves with jeff the killer so like idk we'd have to litigate where that falls in the sexyman pantheon and that's above my paygrade
