It is also a commonly used term in porn, where the popularity of models with this physique 'normalizes both whiteness and youth through what are ultimately racist and ageist tropes,' according to academic and former porn performer Zeb J.

'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,' he wrote in the essay Queering Pornography: Desiring Youth, Race and Fantasy in Gay Porn. 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 swole, superhero-style body that has become increasingly prevalent among the leading men of the 21st century.