Three years ago, Alex Drastal uploaded photos of himself dressed as the Grinch to social media. Mr. Drastal is covered in green fur, the look that has come to define the holiday antihero originally created by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. In one of the images, Mr. Drastal, like the Grinch, also wears a “Santy Claus hat,” though not on his head.
Depicted lounging on a red couch, with a rose between his teeth, Mr. Drastal instead has the hat right between, and just below, his hips. In another photo, he has lost the hat entirely and is balancing on his hands and knees while looking over a furry shoulder into the camera.
The Facebook post has accumulated more than 70,000 comments since it went up. “People lost their minds,” said Mr. Drastal, 32, an actor, cosplayer and massage therapist in Los Angeles. “It was everything from people propositioning me to, ‘You’ve ruined my childhood.’”
Mr. Drastal has reposted the images, which he also sells as prints, each year around the holidays. But they have taken on a life of their own as memes, appearing across the internet in various forms (including one that is captioned, “that look your weed gives you when you get home from work”).
The memes are part of a broader genre of sexualized Grinch content; it includes video after video of costumed people gyrating and pole-dancing at home, outside and onstage, and has grown from niche into a new kind of Christmastime ritual.
Indeed, just last week, Rihanna posted a series of photos of herself in a fuzzy, neon green bra-and-pants set for the new Savage x Fenty collection, with the caption “it’s cozy Grinch season.” And YassifyBot, a Twitter account that often goes viral, gave the world a dirty blond, wrinkle-free, femme version of the Christmas grump.
On Instagram, anyone can achieve a similar transformation with a “Cute Grinch” filter created by Manuel Borrero, which adds luminescent green skin, long, curly eyebrows, bright green eyes and thick black lashes to a selfie. Mr. Borrero, who lives in Los Angeles, said he debuted the filter last December, after an earlier, less glamorous Grinch filter he created never took off. “Users want to see a sexified version,” he said.
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Mr. Borrero’s “Cute Grinch” filter came on the heels of Kylie Jenner appearing dressed as “the Grinch’s wife” in a winter 2020 advertising campaign for Kylie Cosmetics, and debuted the same month as a “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which Pete Davidson, playing the Grinch, helps a couple spice up their love life.
“It doesn’t matter where Mr. Grinch slept,” the father, played by Mikey Day, tells his children when they ask why the Grinch stayed over on Christmas Eve. “What matters is that yesterday, his heart grew three sizes.” In response, Kristen Wiig, who plays the mother, deadpans: “Not the only thing that grew three sizes.”
For those who think of the Grinch as an unattractive character with a bad attitude, his turn as an object of desire may be unexpected. But for fans, the appeal is obvious.
“He’s like an anarchist, jaded sad boy,” said Meggie Gates, 27, a freelance writer and comedian in Chicago, who explored the Grinch’s sex appeal in detail in a Cosmopolitan article earlier this month. “He’s the guy who’s wearing Doc Martens, a leather jacket and a beanie at a bar.” The Grinch is a mess, Mx. Gates added, but that is part of the appeal: “There’s an innate urge to be like, ‘I can fix this man.’”
Jacob Baeza, 43, an actor in Orange County, Calif., has performed as the Grinch at private events. “He’s a bad boy,” said Mr. Baeza, who added that he plays up the Grinch’s sass during his performances and even flirts with his audience. “These guys were having a ball with me at the last one,” Mr. Baeza said. “They were saying, ‘Where’s the party?’ ‘Join us tonight.’”
Part of the Grinch’s appeal is his lack of it. “There’s something taboo about thinking he’s sexy,” said Keaghlan Ashley, 32, a prosthetic makeup artist in Anaheim, Calif., who worked with Mr. Drastal on his Grinch photo shoot. “I personally don’t find him attractive, but I’m also a queer woman. I don’t know if I would feel the same way if it was a femme Grinch.”
Since Mr. Geisel created the Grinch in the 1950s, there have been many iterations of his tale, including an animated television special in 1966, a live-action film starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch in 2000, a computer-animated film with Benedict Cumberbatch as the voice of the Grinch in 2018 and an NBC musical starring Matthew Morrison as the Grinch last year.
The film with Mr. Carrey, in particular, seems to have made the character more likable by adding a back story about bullying that explains why the Grinch hates Christmas. (Mr. Geisel’s original story, he has said, was inspired by his feeling disconnected from the holiday and a desire to rediscover the spirit of it.)
During the pandemic, Mx. Gates said, it has become even easier to connect with the character’s grumpy, over-it personality. “With everything going on with climate change and the different variants, you do feel hopeless in the face of the holiday where you’re supposed to have so much cheer,” Mx. Gates said. For people who feel like they are in a rut, the Grinch “being a little bit snarky” is relatable, Mr. Drastal said.
It’s this relatability that has perhaps been the biggest catalyst in the Grinch’s sexual evolution. People see themselves in the Grinch, and like knowing that if a character designed to be repugnant can be seen as sexy, then anyone can.
“If this can be sexy, I can be sexy,” Mr. Drastal said. “The whole idea of the Grinch is he’s sexy because of his attitude, his confidence. Who he is is attractive.”
